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In our first talk together, we heard the Christian Apostle Paul speaking to some ancient Greek philosophers, and thus to us all, and arguing that God Almighty has so arranged our universe and our individual lives in particular, that we should, in response, seek him and feel after him, that we might find him. Many a thoughtful heart responds to that challenge still, it seems logical. If there is a God, and that God has made us, if that God has put in the universe and in the world around us abundant and overwhelming evidence of his design. And we can see that we are not creatures of chance, nor the product of blind, mindless, purposeless forces. Then, of course, it is logical that we should seek this God who has made us. But the next question that arises in such people's hearts is, by what way shall I come to God? What particular religion shall I follow? Do not all religions profess to show us the way to God? Then there are so many religions. If I am sincere and determined to find God, what religion shall I follow? As a Christian myself, I quote unashamedly the words of our Lord Jesus himself. Said Christ, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me. Me. If we ask then, as is our topic tonight, do all religions lead to God? Where does the truth lie in this question? Then the answer of Christ is unambiguous. I am the truth, says he. I am the life, the truth, and the way. No one comes unto the Father, but by me. At which point many of my friends, I cannot speak for yours, many of my friends get exceedingly irritated. That's religion for you, they say, in its narrow-minded exclusivism. People who think that only their religion can possibly be right. And then they will often point out to me that it is this exclusivism in religion that has led to such terrible wars and slaughtering in the course of the ages. And of course, as a Christian, I have to admit, and freely admit it now, that in the last two thousand years, great organizations that have gone under the name of being Christian have taken to the sword and violence to compel people to become Christian. And have led their armies to attack and destroy those who adhered to other religions. It is a very sorry blot in history. I at once, of course, plead and point out what is the undeniable fact. That when Christians do that, they are flying in the face of what Christ himself taught. He forbade his followers to promote his kingdom or even to defend his kingdom by the use of violence and the sword. You may remember that dramatic occasion when he stood before the Roman governor, the Roman prefect Pilate, on a capital charge. Are you a king? said Pilate. Said our Lord, thou sayest it. In other words, it's not the word I would use, but if you put it like that, yes. But you see, my kingdom, said he, is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would fight so that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from hence. For this cause was I born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth. And somewhat cynically, as a politician and a Roman military man, Pilate replied, and what is truth? But ladies and gentlemen, that surely is what we seek, do we not? On this vital matter, how shall I know about God, my creator? It's the truth we need. And Christ, who said, I am the truth, strictly forbade his disciples to use their swords in order to impose the truth, and it must be obvious why, mustn't it? If it's a question of truth, then people, if they are to receive it, must be convinced of the truth. You don't convince people of the truth at the point of a sword, threatening them, threatening that you will slit their throats if they don't accept what you teach. The God of heaven who gave us minds and a free will will never a- a- authorize any of his servants to compel people to believe the truth. But But then then, of course, if you say that, yes, you shouldn't use force to compel people to accept your religion, then you may well add, like my friends do, but then do not all religions have some truth about them, so that we do not need just to restrict ourselves to Christianity. Well, of course, that that does depend, ladies and gentlemen, what you mean by religion. If you think, as many people do, of religion as some rules and regulations to help you to be good, well, then, of course, many religions sincerely teach people to be good, to respect their parents, to be kind and protect the o- the elderly, to be merciful to little children, and so forth and so on. You will find those precepts in many religions. But you see, there's something deeper than that, isn't there? Well, I myself have a great deal of sympathy with a gentleman who was asked why he didn't go to church. And he said, you know, I don't think I need to pay a parson to tell me to be good. I know I ought to be good. That's not my trouble. My trouble is that knowing I ought to be good, very often I'm not good. And mere advice, however religious, be good, is self-evidently inadequate, isn't it? Because all of us in our quieter moments, and we think of God, our maker, hear the voice of our conscience within telling us that we have not been good. How then shall we find our maker and be reconciled to him? In other words, the thing that I want to test tonight in this proposition, do all religions lead to God? Is not religion in the sense of a moral code, be good. But what have the religions to say about that deeper thing that Christians call salvation? How can I be saved? What must I do to be saved? Or if you don't like that term, to be acceptable to my creator, so that when I am called to face him, he may accept me. And if we ask that, of course, it is the plain fact that not all religions teach the same thing. Now, I am a Christian, and therefore you will see I am biased. I admit that. I believe Christ when he says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes unto the Father but by me. But tonight, as I examine the proposition before us, do all religions lead to God? I must perforce comment on a number of religions, because the notion so widespread nowadays that all religions really teach the same thing isn't true. They do not teach the same thing. Many argue, do they not, my Japanese friends argue that way. Doesn't matter which religion you follow. It's like people climbing a mountain. This lot come up on the north side, this lot come up on the south side. The people on the west say their way is the best way. The people on the east say nonsense, our way is the best way. But as they climb the mountain, they eventually find they all arrive at the same point. That's very good with mountains. That won't do on the way to God. For if you look at the major religions, you will find they all disagree, not merely about the path thither, they disagree about God himself. So that I wish to examine some of them, I shall try to do it respectfully. I apologize in advance if I say anything unduly offensive against any other religion, and I stand to be corrected. But tonight we are concerned with the truth, as all true religion should be. And truth is truth. And we should not compromise it, should we? What about God? Do all religions lead to God? Well, let's take strict Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism taught by the Buddha himself. What is not often realized, that Buddha taught there is no God, or if there is, he wasn't interested. Strict Buddhism is not a religion. Buddha taught a way of, let's call it for the time being, psychological manip- manipulation, that we might find freedom from distress and peace of mind. He was not interested in God. His was not religion, but philosophy. Take Hinduism along with popular Buddhism. Hinduism has at its heart a contradiction. It teaches that the one, the ultimate, whatever it is, is just one. And yet at the same time, it bids you worship your pick of forty two thousand gods and goddesses with their temples galore. It seems to the outsider, to start with, to contradict itself when it talks about God. But obviously, with its forty two thousand gods, it's not talking the same thing about God as, say, Judaism is, whose basic tenet is the Lord, our Lord, is one Lord, and there is no other. Islam likewise teaches strict monotheism, and Christians likewise. There is one God, says Holy Scripture, one mediator between God and men, who gave himself a ransom for all. Ladies and gentlemen, I shall sound too harsh if I say it, but it is sheer ignorance of the facts that makes people say that all religions lead to God. Christianity will say more. For Christ claims to be God incarnate. When it comes to that, that lies at the very heart of Christianity and the gospel it preaches, then both Judaism and Islam reject Christianity. And seeing the deity of our Lord Jesus, that he is not mere man, though truly man, but is God in flesh. Seeing that lies at the very heart of our gospel. God so loved the world that he gave his only, his one and only son. That whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. And it is clear that even Judaism and Islam, though monotheistic, do not say the same as Christianity on this absolutely fundamental matter. Or take, if you like, the whole question of what is wrong with us. I take it, ladies and gentlemen, that most of us are old enough to have realized that there is something wrong with us. I freely join the Apostle Paul, who bewails his situation. He says, you know, the good that I would do, that I don't do, and the evil that I don't want to do, that I go and do. I suspect every one of us has had that experience in life. We've made our New Year's resolutions and promptly broken them. We tell ourselves that we're going to take a grip of ourselves, and we're no longer going to do this, that, or the other. And often before next Thursday comes round, we've done this or that or the other. There's something wrong with us, isn't there? What is there wrong with us? If we can't agree on what's wrong with us, how should we find the right answer to put it right? What does Hinduism say? Hinduism is a form of pantheism. Hinduism says that everything is God. The moon is God, the sun is God, the earth is God, stones are God, granite is God. Animals are God. Everybody's God. Everything is God. Technical term, pantheism. Well, then at once you see that that scarce makes sense, because if, if I'm God and you're God and bad people are God and good people are God, then there doesn't appear to be a lot of difference between good and bad, isn't that so? And if this bad man over here is in fact God, a bit of God, then God must be disagreeing with God. And the difficulty with all such pantheistic religions in the end is this, that they have to confess to you that evil and good are ultimately the same. What person with a conscience could possibly agree? Hinduism also, and many other religions, and the Greek philosophers, many of them. If you ask them what's wrong with us, they will blame it on our bodies. They say that the one true God is so pure and holy, he never would have created matter. Matter is a very sorry thing, unworthy thing, so that the great supreme God never created matter. Matter is bad, really, unworthy, certainly. But this main God is supposed to have created other little gods, demi-semi-quavers, so to speak, and they all had creatorial powers, and one of them, a little way down the list, went stupidly and created human beings who are made, their bodies are made of matter, and that was a very sad thing. And if you want to be saved, they say, you have to try to keep as far away from the body as you can, and so improve yourself that eventually your soul will go to heaven when you die. Christianity says that's not only untrue, but positively dangerous. Our bodies are not to be despised. According to the Bible, our bodies are made by God. In and of themselves, they are good. And marriage is good, and not to be despised or run away from. It is an insult to God the Creator to call matter in itself bad. And in the Christian truth, you may see the wonder of the human body. That God's Son, the Word, who in the beginning was with God and was God and is God, and all things were made by him. The blessed Son of God took a human form and became human. And the gospel tells us that he shall remain human forever. And if you like to think of going to heaven in the Bible sense, then all the saved and the redeemed shall not only go to heaven, but they shall have glorified human bodies for all eternity. That's very different from Hinduism, isn't it? You see, to say then that all religions lead to God is just simply contrary to the sheer simple facts. Well, if there's something wrong with us, what does the Bible say it is? Well, to put it simply, it's not the fault of our bodies as such. Here's what the Bible says. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. Being creatures of God, made for God's pleasure and to do his will. We have used our free will to go against God, to break his law, to ignore him. Even, says the Bible, in the great, great exposition of the Christian gospel in what is called the Epistle to the Romans, one of the basic faults of humanity is that knowing God, they did not like to retain him in their knowledge. And then it adds, and did not give thanks. The sin of ingratitude to our maker is cardinal. If we would be direct and simple, even the child knows it didn't make itself, did it? And ought to be grateful to someone for its very existence. And we adults know it, if we think a long while about it, we didn't make ourselves either, did we? And if it is the fact that we are made by our creator to do his pleasure, then one of the chief things should be that we should be grateful to God. But all we like sheep, says the Bible, have gone astray, turned everyone to his own way. That's what's wrong with us. The human spirit has become alienated from the Father of spirits. The Bible calls it that people unreconciled to God are dead in trespasses and in sins. Not physically dead. It's like, madam, when you try to ring somebody up and you love him or her, but when you lift the phone and try to speak, there's no answer, and the phone goes dead. That is the picture of humanity, dead, alienated in their minds from God. Or to use a parable that our Lord spoke, it's like the father who had a son that proved a prodigal. And said he to his father one day, Father, what I want you to do is divide up the inheritance and give me the portion that falls to me. Now they can see the wrong of that, even we Westerners, but to an Eastern mind, that was a hideous sin. For in the Eastern mind, there was never any hope of inheriting anything from your father until your father died. And for a son to come to his father and say, divide the inheritance now and give me my bit, you might as well have said to the father, you're living too long, old boy, get out and give me my inheritance. And in the parable, the father gave the son and said, here you are, my boy. And he took it and went off into a far country. His father commented later on, this my son was dead. That's our trouble. Our self-will. Our irritation at God. We sense to be some controller not letting us be free. Has led so many people, hasn't it, to break his bands from them. Seek to live a life their own, not murdering everybody they meet, but just going their own way, and I do it my way, as the famous American singer had it. That's what's wrong with us. And not all the doing of good works in the world will heal that breach. Well, the fundamental thing is that we need to be reconciled to God. Hmm. What's the cure then? How do we put it right? Well, here once more you will find that all religions don't teach the same thing, and they don't all lead to God. What does Buddhism say? The way to come to peace and to put right what's wrong, classical Theravada Buddhism teaches that the trouble is our desires. We desire so many things and try to get them, and our desires churn us up inside, and we don't have any peace. The way to get peace is to overcome, eliminate your desires. That's the cure. Some people say it works. It has an inherent logical contradiction. Get rid of all desires? Well, what about the desire to have peace? The way to get peace is to get rid of your desires. But isn't the desire to have peace a desire then? The thing is logically contradictory. But that brings me to another point that I ought to mention. It concerns both what's wrong with us and the way to put it right. In much of Buddhism, Jhana Buddhism, as in Hinduism. If a little child is born defective or deformed in some way, or if a man turns out to be an exceedingly bad character, their doctrine will tell you why that is. You see, they will say they sinned in a previous incarnation. They teach the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. That, uh, people are born into this world, live, and when they die, they go back where they came from, and then eventually are recycled, and they have to be reborn. And the reason is they have to be reborn, that in this world, when they do something wrong, their soul is stained. And the only way to get rid of that stain is to suffer. Your sin loads you with what they call karma, your responsibility. The only way to get rid of it is to suffer. But if you don't manage to suffer enough in this life, then after you die, you'll have to come back again and be born into this world once more and do some more suffering. Nor will you get free of being reborn until all the suffering has been accomplished and your karma has been, uh, removed. You know, I know some friends in my part of the world who, who think that's much superior to Christianity, and they tell me why they think so, because they say, I haven't made much of this life, but if, if it's true that we are reincarnated and come back again, that gives me a second hope. Ladies and gentlemen, that is false. There is no second hope beyond the grave. Why would you want a second hope? When God in Christ, this very moment, is offering you salvation, reconciliation, forgiveness of sins, the gift of eternal life, the absolute certainty and assurance of heaven. Why do you want a second hope after death? Why not take God's salvation? No. But then you know this doctrine of, uh, reincarnation. Every now and again on the radio or television or some, uh, substandard novel, you will see people playing around with the idea, and this particular person is supposed to have realized she was here before, and when she was here before, she was a grasshopper or a snake or was a queen or something, and oh, how it titillates the imagination and the novels sell, uh, sixteen to the dozen. But it's the cruelest doctrine that man ever invented. Take this child that's born semi-paralyzed. And the doctrine says what? Why is this child born deformed? Because it did a sin in a previous incarnation. Oh, what sin? Oh, we can't tell you. Oh, I see. How many incarnations ago? Because the world's been going on a long while, hasn't it? And so if this child had previous incarnations and has still not suffered enough and has to come back to suffer some more. You can't tell me what original sin it was it did. But obviously, in all the incarnations so far, it's piled up a lot more sin and still hasn't paid for it and suffered enough for it, and the dear child, perhaps in this life, will do some more sin. Can you guarantee it will ever be free of suffering? And the answer come back, no, of course you can't. It is the cruelest doctrine that ever was invented. I'm reminded of our Lord when he was faced with a blind man, and the apostle said, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? And he said, neither. It's not the child's fault that it should be deformed, born deformed. Why is it cruel? Why in those religions there is no such thing as forgiveness? I remember years ago, there came to my door in the university a girl from Thailand, a postdoctoral student in chemistry. She had heard that I was a Christian, and she came asking, would I mind if she asked me some questions about Christianity? She told me straight away she wasn't intending to get converted. She was a Buddhist and intended to stay one, you'll see. But what did we Christians preach? I said, my dear good girl, we preach a savior, God's own son, who died for us at Calvary on a cross to bear our sin and pay the penalty of sin, so that God can grant us forgiveness here and now. And not only grant us forgiveness, but let us know we have forgiveness and put our hearts at rest for life and for eternity. I said to her, you know, surely, ma'am, you got a little girl. Yes, she had. I said, if your girl did something bad and you had to scold her, and then the girl said sorry, you would forgive her, wouldn't you? And you'd not only forgive her, but you'd make sure the child understood that you had forgiven her. No, she said, I wouldn't. Who am I to forgive? There is no forgiveness. The child has done wrong. It must suffer for it. No one can forgive anybody else. The only way to get forgiveness is to suffer. Ladies and gentlemen, to say that all religions lead to God is to bury your head in the sand. All religions do not lead to God. And Christians at that point will want to get up on their two hind legs and say, to this man, Jesus Christ, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and all who believe on him are justified from all things, from which you could not possibly be justified by the law of Moses. Yes. But how do we get this forgiveness? Here we come to the very central thing of Christianity. The gospel is this, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried. He rose again the third day, according to the scriptures. Behold, said John the Baptist, as he pointed to the Lord Jesus, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. The great Old Testament prophet Isaiah, prophesying the coming of God's son into our world, says, he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement that brought us peace was upon him, and by his stripe we were healed. We have forgiveness through his blood, that is through his death. We have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins. And you say, how could the death of Jesus bring us forgiveness of sins? Because Jesus, though truly man, was also verily God incarnate. Heart of the Christian gospel is this, that the Son of God, as Paul puts it, loved me and gave himself for me. Reconciled to God by the death of his son. While we were yet sinners, God commendeth his love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. The central message of the gospel, salvation, forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation with God through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross. Do all religions lead to God? Islam, as you may know, ladies and gentlemen, denies outright and with great indignation, denies that Jesus died on the cross. Islam believes that Jesus was a prophet. Islam teaches, because the Quran teaches it, that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. Islam denies that Jesus died on the cross. They say that at that moment, God removed him from the cross and took him to heaven and put somebody else in his place, perhaps Barabbas or somebody else, and they don't know who it was. And in doing that, deny the very fundamental of salvation. We have redemption through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ as our sin bearer upon the cross. All religions lead to God. Judaism, the older faith, believes there is just one God. They deny the deity of the Lord Jesus. Therefore, they deny the value of his death, deny it was a sacrifice, deny that he was the Lamb of God, given of God to take away the sin of the world. And how do they get forgiveness? Well, ladies and gentlemen, to be blunt, they have no way of forgiveness. I remember once upon a time giving some lectures to Christian students in the University of Cambridge. They'd asked me to comment and lecture on the significance of the first and second book of Kings in the Old Testament, you see, and I did my best. And after one of the lectures, a student came up to me and said, can I speak to you? I said, yes, of course. He said, I hope you don't mind my saying, but I do admire the way you as a Christian are expounding our Old Testament books. I said, well, thank you very much. I said, but don't your rabbis expound them? No, said he, they don't preach them in the synagogue. I said, what a pity. We could do with a few more Jewish rabbis getting up and denouncing the modern world's idolatry, like Isaiah the prophet denounced idolatry in his day. Why don't they do it, I said? Aren't they concerned for me as a Gentile to save me? Well, he had no answer to that, but we became friends, and he came to dinner once or twice, and we talked about things, and we talked about, um, uh, of course, Christ and salvation. And I said to the young man, I said, you know, I'm a Gentile. I can't help that. That's how I was born. Eh, but I said, I do admire your law in the Old Testament. No fooling about, no fudging of the issues. Law with the authority of the Almighty God behind it, laying down his standards. So I admire that in our modern permissive world. I said, I'll tell you something else I admire in your Old Testament, that when, uh, you broke the law, as sometimes you Jews did, you're not a lot better than us Gentiles, really. You broke the law, didn't you? What did God say about that? Oh, it doesn't matter. I forgive you. Don't worry about that. Let's brush it under the carpet. No, he didn't. Of course, there are a lot of people talk like that. They're all God is so loving, they said he'd never punish anybody. That's a lot of sen- sentimental nonsense. We shall find that out in another of these lectures. I said, when you Jews in the Old Testament days broke God's law, God didn't say it didn't matter, did he? You know what you had to do? You had to bring an animal as a sin offering, didn't you? It could have been a lamb, say, and the sinner had to put his hands on the head of the lamb and confess his sin before God and admit that he deserved to die as a sinner. And then, by God's mercy, the lamb was slain in the place of the sinner, that the sinner might find forgiveness. Well, yes, yes, yes, he said, a little reluctantly. That's what happened. I said, tell me, what about those lambs and bullocks that you used to kill in the Old Testament days, uh, to get forgiveness? I said, did they do any good, really? I mean, did you think that the blood of a lamb would wash out the guilt of your human sin? Well, no, he said, no, no, no, of course not. I said, I thought, I thought that, you see, because what do cows know about sin, for instance? One thing about cows, they don't go to bed with a di- with a bad conscience, you know. That's we humans that get bad consciences. We know the guilt of sin. Conscience can disturb us uncomfortably in the middle of the night, can't it, and on other times. We know what the feeling of real guilt, not psychological guilt, real guilt is. The sacrifice of animals that don't understand sin or guilt nor nothing. What could that do to put away sin? Well, he agreed heartily with me. I said, well, if they did no good and God ordered these things, what was the point of them? Were they symbols of something, do you think? Yes, he said, they were. Oh. I said, what symbols of what? No, he said, don't press me, don't press me. I don't want to spoil our friendship. I said, all right, I won't. But I said, I will allow myself to make this remark. That when our Lord Jesus came and died on the cross for the sins of the world, the Lamb of God, as the Jewish prophet, uh, uh, uh, uh, described him, come to take away the sins of the world. And Israel, uh, officially rejected him. Forty years later, God allowed the Romans to destroy your temple, didn't he? And ever since then, your animal sacrifices had to cease, didn't they? Because the temple was the only place where you could offer them. And now, when you sin, you have nothing that can pay the price of sin. All gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, it's not true that all religions lead to God. When I hear our Lord Jesus saying, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes unto the Father but by me. Hail his coming. That's what I need. I was in Kiev some um ten years ago. Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, you know. And the old walls had not quite come down in the Ukraine at that time, but I was there. And I was invited by the headmistress of a state school in communist Ukraine to go along to her school and to address this whole school on Christianity. I grabbed the opportunity with both fists, you see. So the school assembled, it was a very pleasant school it was, and a, a very gracious and smart and dapper school mistress, do you see, and she introduced me, you see. And, uh, I held forth as best I could. I must confess the students looked a bit bamboozled. And when I finished, the headmistress explained to them, you know, in the past this wasn't allowed. You couldn't have religion in the schools. But, said she, the government has had different insights now. Now they're going to allow a religion in the schools, and I'm going to have religion in the schools, not just Christianity, all religions, says she. So. And then the deputy headmistress came up to me, very gracious senior lady. She said, may I ask you a question? I said, yes, ma'am. She said, I, I, I, I can't tell you really, ma'am, because we haven't had any our way. You, you see? And those that people have claimed to see, the government tells us they're not genuine. But I said, I believe you had a lot in your country. Yes, she said, we've had a lot of UFOs. And the last UFO that came, the people inside it, when they got out, she said, she was perfectly serious, told the locals that Buddhism was the true religion and not Christianity. What do you think of that, she said. I said I thought it was remarkable. I said, madam, hmm, I tell you what I do think of myself about Buddhism. I find it very difficult, you see, ma'am, because there is no forgiveness in Buddhism, at least in most forms of Buddhism. Oh, isn't there, she said? No, I said, there isn't. I told her the story I told you about the s- the student that came to my room from Thailand, told me there is no forgiveness in Buddhism. And I said, you see, ma'am, I'll tell you why I personally am attracted to Christ. You see, ma'am, I said, I don't need anybody real- really to tell me to be good. I know I should be good. That is not my trouble. My trouble is that I haven't been good. And my question is this, how do I find forgiveness without destroying my own standards, let alone God's standards? Suppose I deliberately get drunk and I drive my car and I kill your daughter. Will you as mothers say it doesn't matter? Well, it's happened now, so just forget it and brush it under the carpet. We forgive you. What, and it never did matter. Is there no justice? How can God forgive me for killing your daughter if he loves your daughter and just say, oh, I'm so loving, oh, forget it, it doesn't matter, now she's dead. That's my problem. How can I find forgiveness of my sin in a way that upholds the value of God's righteousness and my own sense of values too? I said, man, that's what attracts me to Christ. For in Christ, God tells us that sin must be punished. But in Christ, God tells us that the God who made us, though he must uphold his law and punish sin, has provided a way that we might be forgiven, and forgiven justly. That's why he sent Christ, his son, to take my place and bear the penalty of sin for me. When I accept him, in true repentance and faith, God assures me that the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses me from all sin, and I have peace with God. Madam, I said, talking to the assistant headmistress, you know, I'm not only attracted by Christ, but I noticed this. There's no one else in on in the market, you know, that talks like it. It's true, ladies and gentlemen. You have never heard, and you never will hear someone to talk to you as Jesus Christ talks to you. He will come alongside you in the quiet and say, I am God, your creator. You are my idea. I made you. You've gone astray, haven't you? You have sinned. But God who made you loves you and will be loyal to you. But God cannot say your sin didn't matter. It must be punished. And I, the Son of God, because I love you, came to die for you. And pay the penalty for your sin. No one will ever tell you that. Except Jesus Christ. And ladies and gentlemen, to end with my own personal statement, because after all, these things come down to our personal decision, don't they? I find Jesus Christ to be true. The only one who, being sinless himself, came not just to tell me to be good, though he did tell me that, but came on purpose to die and give his life a ransom for mine. Let me repeat to you his claim. For all religions do not lead to God, says Jesus Christ in our ears at this moment. Come to me, and I will give you rest. For I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes unto the Father, but by me.