The taking of the cross daily is not just to provide personal sanctification.  Pick up that individual cross and die to myself and my own ambitions and my own selfishness so that I would begin to love the lost, the unlovely, just like I was loved when I was lost and so unlovely.  While we were sinners, Jesus died for us.  Can you say, “Praise God!”?

I want to talk about redemption a little bit, what it cost God.  We’ll all respond immediately in our minds and go, “Oh yeah.  What it cost God.”  It cost Him the very blood of Jesus; amen?  We can look at that a number of different ways.  Sometimes, it can move us emotionally if we’ll spend some time and think about that.  I know it moves me.  I know there are so many times, just meditating on this and just sitting there in the presence of God, tears begin to flow when we remember our wickedness, our worthlessness.  God’s justice would be to send me to a devil’s hell.  Jesus stepped in and was made sin with my sin and made me righteous with His righteousness and then admonishes every one of us to love as we’ve been loved.  Why do we find it so difficult?  

You know all of the talk that’s going on today about the attempted assassination?  We’ll dialog about those things and I won’t go into anything to do with it.  Look for every opportunity to inject the gospel into these different conversations; amen?  How about just injecting, “Well, you know what?  I’m glad the Secret Service isn’t watching over me.  I’ve got an angel, praise God!”  Amen?  He’s watching me lest I dash my foot against a stone.  The one thing that we learned in this attempted assassination was God’s in charge; amen?  The providential hand of God is obvious.  Nobody can even pretend to know why or what’s going to come out of what God chose to do to spare that man.  I’ll tell you one thing.  It was God.  If it wasn’t God, it’s fate and I don’t believe in fate because the Scripture doesn’t teach it.  It teaches the fact that God is aware of every hair that falls from our heads.  The Lord might have just plucked one of his hairs at that moment and turned his head.  I don’t know.

What's the point being made?  The gospel can be injected into every situation, every conversation.  Are we that aware of it?  It’s almost like we’ve taken this great commandment to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature and to make disciples as something that we can take under advisement.  Don’t sit here comfortably and not be doing the commandments of God, because when we know to do it and we don’t, it’s sin.  It has nothing to do with your natural makeup.  It has to do with our obedience.