To many people the teachings of Jesus are some of the most neglected of all of the Scriptures. I am not sure why some people tend to not take them seriously. It could be because they consider them to be merely devotional stories, light but wonderful experiences, or perhaps a little history. Serious Bible students who want to get into what they call the meat of the Word usually go straight to Romans or Galatians.

We need to remember, however, that Romans and Galatians actually only explain the meaning of the gospel, and, of course, anybody should know that Jesus Himself is the personification of the gospel. You might even say that Jesus is the gospel.

When Adam and Eve were created they were able to talk with God face to face, but sin changed all of that. From the time Adam and Eve sinned until Jesus came, the only way the average person could have God talk to them was secondhand. By that I mean God communicated to the masses through the prophets. When man couldn't talk with God face to face anymore, he had to depend on the messages of the prophets to know what the will of God was for him.

But all of that changed when Jesus came. You know, it is almost incredible to realize that Jesus was God Himself. For a little more than thirty years God actually lived here on this planet. No longer did He speak secondhand to the people, but just like in the beginning He spoke to the people face to face again.

Of all the things written in the Bible, it would seem to me that if there were a priority, that is, if there were a part of the Bible more important than any other, which of course isn't true, it would seem to me it ought to be the part where God Himself is talking and teaching and preaching. Wouldn't you agree?

It seems to me that the portion of the Bible where God Himself is teaching and preaching is where we ought to start and then go from there. Of course, if you were a person who lived in the times before Jesus came, you wouldn't have been able to do that; but then we don't have that problem. Jesus has already been here the first time. It is a matter of history.

It seems that many people consider the talking and teaching and preaching of Jesus to be merely the devotional part of the Bible--stories and illustrations to teach the little children in Sabbath School. For other people the sermons and teachings of Jesus are seen as an ideal that every Christian ought to try to attain to someday; but then Jesus was such a kind and forgiving person, surely He will understand that it would be almost impossible to come up to the ideal. He must be understanding and forgiving because, after all, look how He treated the woman caught in adultery and how nice He was to other sinners in those days.

Friends, it is interesting that these days we seem to be emphasizing how hard Jesus was on religious people and how nice He was to sinners. Subconsciously it would almost make you think it is better to be a practicing sinner than to be religious as far as God is concerned.

It would seem that there is possibly a huge misunderstanding about how Jesus related to sinners. To hear some people talk these days, you would think that Jesus preferred practicing sinners over religious people. Actually He didn't. What He preferred were people who were sorry for their sins over those who weren't.

There are only two classes of people in the world, both then as well as now: Those who repent of their sins and those who refuse to; those who turn away from their sins and those who won't. It is very important to understand this, because a person who comes to Jesus and becomes a true follower of His is always a person who is turning away from their sins. There is no exception. A person who is not turning away from their sins is not a true follower of Jesus, no matter what it may say on their bumper sticker. Being a follower of Jesus and being truly repentant cannot be separated from each other. When we speak about being repentant, you may ask, repentant of what? Repentant of our selfishness, our pride, our lust, our bitterness and resentment, and our lack of self-control, just to name a few.

But back to the priority of the teachings of Jesus. The teaching of Jesus ought to be, it seems to me, where we begin, and, yes, where we end in our study of the Bible. All the rest is in-between somewhere.

A lot of the teaching and the preaching and even the writing these days seems to have a particular ax to grind. There is nothing wrong with that, I suppose, except that just as we need a balanced diet to stay healthy physically, so we need a balanced diet to stay healthy spiritually.

It is too easy for us to get lopsided and to specialize in one part of the Scripture or the other. I understand that God gives different people different insights. The Scriptures themselves teach us that there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors. That means that none of us has the whole picture about anything; and though this may sound far out, it would probably even be true about the people who wrote the Scriptures. That is, in fact, why only one person didn't write the Bible. Even the life and teachings of Jesus were written by four men. That was necessary because the four different men saw the life of Christ and heard about it from four different vantage points.

Although I may specialize in making apple pies, I myself had better, for the sake of my physical health, be eating something else besides apple pie. And so it is in the Christian life. Although we may be specialists in prophecy or the writings of Paul, we had better be getting the wider picture or we could get into a spiritual rut.

There is an old story about three blind men who were asked to describe an elephant. You remember how it goes. The first felt the elephant's tail and said that an elephant is like a rope. The second felt around the elephant's leg and said an elephant is like a tree. The third felt the elephant's trunk and said the elephant is like a snake. It may sound ridiculous, friends, but we must be very careful or we will do the same thing with the gospel. We all start off spiritually blind; and even when our eyes are opened, the gospel is still bigger and wider and deeper than we are able to comprehend.

We will be closer on track and will have the best view of the gospel if we will first see and understand the gospel as Jesus taught it and lived it. And when I say as Jesus taught it and lived it, I mean that there is more to the teaching of Jesus than the story of the prodigal son. A serious study and subsequent understanding of the gospel as lived and taught by Jesus will make it difficult to be a fanatic or take an extreme position on anything. That is because Jesus gives the whole story of what salvation is and how it works.

Far from being merely interesting stories and illustrations, the teachings of Jesus are in reality theologically heavy. If you have ever thought that the Ten Commandments are difficult to keep, try keeping the principles enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount! A person might be able to fake the keeping of the Ten Commandments, but no one has or every will be able to fake keeping the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.

There are some who might counter that we don't have to keep the Ten Commandments to be saved anyway. Jesus did it all. If that is true, the same reasoning would apply, then, that we don't have to do what Jesus taught us to do either. That would reduce the Sermon on the Mount to a kind of quiet vespers talk at best or to a waste of time at worst.

Let's listen to what Jesus Himself said about His teachings. Let me put that another way. Let's listen to what God Himself said about the things He told the people. He said, "Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings of Mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house on a rock. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock. And everyone that heareth these sayings of Mine and doeth them not shall be likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house and it fell, and great was the fall of it."

Living in Florida, I can identify with that. We saw what Hurricane Andrew did to South Florida. After that storm the building codes were redone to assure that anyone who builds a house these days takes all of the precautions necessary to insure that the house is hurricane resistant. They discovered in the aftermath of the storm that the houses that were put together correctly suffered much less damage from the wind than those that weren't.

So Jesus Himself has told us that being a follower of His is about doing what He says. Contrary to what some may be telling us these days, the Christian life is a call to do something. We live by faith not to do nothing but do to something. The Bible says that the people were amazed when they heard Jesus talk because they said He spoke with authority. Of course He spoke with authority, because He was calling on the people to change, to do something.

The apostle James had it right. He caught on to what the gospel was all about. He wrote, "Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only." He said that persons who just hear the Word of God and don't put it into practice are deceiving themselves.

If there is something more important for us to understand in the 21st century than anything else, it is that we are called not just to study the Word of God, or to debate the Word of God, or even to memorize the Word of God. We are called to do and to practice the Word of God in our everyday lives.

The real purpose of the Bible is not to merely tell us what we need to know but what we have got to do. I love what I read somewhere, and that was that we should never sit down to read the Bible without having the intention and the desire to do what it tells us to do. In 1 Corinthians 13 it says the same thing. It says that you might know everything there is to know about the Bible--and all the secrets, and all the prophecies--but if we are not living it, we are just nobodies.

To be a disciple of Jesus, to be a follower of Jesus, to be a Christian, is to be a person who is doing in their lives what Jesus told them to do. And Jesus made it clear that a person who is not doing that is like the person down there in South Florida who had his house flattened in Hurricane Andrew and didn't have any insurance.

We are in a crisis. We seem to have a mindset that says we want God to save us, but we resist the idea that He has the right to tell us how we must live.

I had heard since I was just a boy that a person who wasn't, as they used to say, rooted and grounded in the Word of God, the Bible, wouldn't make it in the last days. Back then I didn't understand how that could be, because, although we weren't perfect, we knew and understood that the Bible was the guidebook for our lives and that the goal of the Christian life was to put into practice what the Bible taught.

Unfortunately for many even so-called Christians, that isn't the way things seem to be turning out these days. In many places there is an attitude that we have a contract with God. When we were baptized we signed on the dotted line, and now we can have the assurance that He will save us. Don't forget, my friends, that a contract always has two parts, or even more depending on how many people are signatories to it. Everyone who signs a contract is committing themselves to play a certain part in the agreement, and the gospel is no exception. We have a part to play in the Salvation Contract just as much, in principle, as any contract that we may sign with anyone.

We have been spending a lot of time these past few years trying to understand what the other books of the Bible teach about how to be saved. We should have started by studying and understanding what God Himself said about salvation. (Remember, Jesus is God Himself). God Himself said that getting saved is like buying something. Remember, we have just said that the gospel is like a contract. Jesus said that getting saved is like a man that is out digging in a field and finds a vein of gold out there. It is really a big thing. The property doesn't belong to the man, so he covers it all up and goes to the county courthouse to find out to whom the property belongs.

He finds out and contacts the owner. The person indicates that he is willing to sell. But when he says how much he wants for the land, it blows the finder's mind because he doesn't have that much money. In fact, he sits down and figures out that to raise that much money he would have to sell everything he has.

You might be wondering why he didn't go to the bank and borrow the money. Well, he probably tried, but the land was so apparently worthless they wouldn't give him a fraction of what it was worth. So he makes the big decision and sells everything he has. It is just enough to pay cash for the deal.

Actually, although the man who found the treasure had to give up everything to buy the land, the value of the treasure that is now his is beyond his wildest imagination.

Jesus told another story about how to get saved. He said that a certain man had always wanted to get into gems and precious stones. But no one would loan him any money to get into the business because he had no experience, and besides, he wasn't a member of the syndicate of jewel merchants. One day he found out that there was a pearl coming on the market. It was such an exquisite jewel that he just knew if he could own it he would be set up in the gemstone business for life. The profession would accept him as one of them.

Just like the other man that found the gold in the property that belonged to someone else, this man, too, in order to own the pearl, had to sell out all that he had in order to raise the money to buy it.

Both stories were told by Jesus and are found in Matthew 13. Though these stories are only a total of three verses long, they set the ground rules as to how a person gets into, as we would say these days, the salvation game. To get saved you can't use your home credit line, you can't use a Visa Gold Card, and neither can your family or a rich friend set you up in the salvation business.

Contrary to what someone may have told us, or what we may have thought, to get saved we have to sell out. We have to liquidate everything that we had before. The apostle Paul always said it, but then we aren't always careful when we study the writings of the apostle Paul. People back in Bible times weren't too careful either. The apostle Peter even had to warn the people of his time to be careful and to get the whole picture when they read his writings or they could get messed up. The apostle Paul said that even then some people were putting their own interpretation to his writings, and as a result they would be lost. Read it for yourself in 2 Peter 3:15-17.

The apostle Paul always said that to get saved you had to die to self. Please excuse me if I sound ridiculous for a minute, but when Paul says that we must die to self, he was not talking of legalized suicide or euthanasia. He was just saying in another way what Jesus said when He talked about selling out. The fact is that when we get saved we are not bettering our old lives or improving ourselves. Being saved is such a radical change that it has the finality of a death to the old way, or in the words of the marketplace, it is a liquidation of all of our former assets.

Jesus Himself said that to be a Christian, to be a true follower of Him, one has to die. Remember where He said that whoever would come and follow Him would have to take up their cross? He wasn't talking about something you put around your neck or on the church steeple.

People in those days knew what a cross was for. Far from something hung around the neck, it was something that they hung you from, and a person who was hung on a cross didn't come out of the experience alive. As we would say these days, you didn't do time on the cross. The cross did you in.

The hymn poet expressed the whole concept very clearly when he wrote,

Must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free?
No, there's a cross for everyone, there is a cross for me.

These days we are hearing wonderful and beautiful things about the cross of Christ. We are understanding things about the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ in a way that we never understood them before. But we must be careful that the wonderful truths we are hearing actually broaden our understanding of the gospel, and that we don't come to think that what we are learning now in some way renders null and void all that we have known before that was true.

We shouldn't be surprised at this, because learning is like that. When you go to the first grade and then to the second, you don't throw out what you learned in the first grade; rather you build on it, and so it goes.

A crazy thing we sometimes get into these days is that when we learn something new about the gospel, we seem to not only throw out the incorrect concepts preciously held, but actually throw out the correct concepts as well.

No, we must not make the mistake of throwing out the baby with the bath water. We don't need to go from one extreme to the next. What we must have is the wider picture.

The church that we belong to is now preaching the cross perhaps like it never has before. We can never preach too much about the cross. The cross of Christ in its darkness is where the light of the gospel springs forth. It was in the hate, which the cross represented, that the love of God is most clearly manifested.

Unfortunately, however, the cross that is sometimes being lifted up before our people these days is not the old rugged cross that we have sung about for so long. There is in some places a new cross being lifted up. It is like the old cross, but it is fundamentally different. The cross that we preach is a reflection of the lifestyle that we lead.

The old cross meant that we would have to die to the world and its sinful ways. The old cross was a sentence of death. The new cross is not opposed to the human race. Rather, it is a friendly pal, and if understood right it is the source of oceans of good clean fun and innocent enjoyment.

It lets us live without interference. The new cross that is being preached in many places does not affect our basic motivation. We are still able to live for our own pleasure, only now we take delight in singing contemporary songs and enjoy watching religious drama in church.

Instead of listening to heavy metal rock songs with dirty words, we are listening to heavy metal songs with religious words. Instead of listening to rap that threatens to kill cops, we listen to rap that talks about Jesus. The accent is still on enjoyment, though the fun is now supposedly on a higher plane.

The new cross of this generation encourages a new and entirely different approach. It does not demand a death to the old life before a new life can be received. The gospel is not being presented in contrast to the old life, but rather the emphasis is being put on the similarities. The gospel that is now being preached in many places offers the same thing that the world does only on a higher level.

Whatever this sin-mad world happens to be clamoring after at the moment, we are being told that the gospel offers the very same thing only that the religious product is better. The new cross being preached these days doesn't kill the sinner, it only redirects him. It steers him into a cleaner way of living and saves his self-respect.

To the self-assertive it says, "Come and assert yourself for Christ." To the egotist it says, "Come and do your boasting in the Lord." To the thrill-seeker it says, "Come and enjoy the thrill of Christian fellowship." The Christian message is being slanted to fit the mindset and even to be, as they say, politically correct.

The preaching of the cross by many may be sincere, but its sincerity does not save it from being false. It is false because it is blind. It completely misses the whole meaning of the cross. The old cross that we used to sing about is a symbol of death. It stands for the abrupt, violent end of a human being. The man in Roman times who took up his cross and started down the road had already said good-bye to his friends. He was not coming back. The cross made no compromise; it didn't modify anything; it didn't spare anything. The cross killed anybody who was put on it-- completely and for good. It didn't try to keep on good terms with the victim. It struck cruel and hard, and when it had finished its work, the victim was dead.

Our race, my friends, is under a death sentence. There is no reprieve and no escape. God cannot approve of sin in any form, no matter how innocent it may appear to us. God can save us only by liquidating us and then raising us again to a new life.

Any preaching that draws friendly parallels between the ways of God and the ways of man is false to the Bible and cruel to those who hear it. The faith of Christ does not appeal to the world. It clashes with it. In coming to Christ we do not bring our old life up onto a higher plane; we leave it at the cross. Jesus said that in order for a seed to grow, it has to die.

We who preach the gospel must not think of ourselves as public relations agents sent to establish good will between Christ and the world. We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports, or modern education. We are not diplomats but messengers, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.

God offers life, but not an improved old life. The life that He offers is life out of death. It stands always on the far side of the cross. Whoever would possess life must lose his own. He must repudiate himself, not build himself up as they are telling us.

What does this mean to us who are condemned to die? How can death to self be translated into life? Here is the way. We must forsake our sins--all of them. Pride, selfishness, lust, love of the world, bitterness and resentment, and the lack of self-control. All of these must die. We must repent. By the way, that is a word nobody seems to talk about these days. Repentance is out. Acceptance is in.

We must, if we would live, forsake our sins and ourselves. We must cover nothing, defend nothing, and excuse nothing. We must not seek to try to talk God out of our death sentence. We must acknowledge our guilt and admit that we are worthy only to die. Having done this, we can then, and only then, look to the cross of Jesus. We must be crucified with Him. And then from Him will come a new life--a rebirth, and cleansing, and power. The cross that put an end to the life of Jesus must also put an end to the sinner. And the power that raised Christ from the dead now raises us to a new life along with Christ.

I am thoroughly convinced that we must somehow stop weaving wildly from one side of the road to the other. We must stop throwing out the baby with the bath water. We must stop throwing out one truth when we find another. We must add line to line, precept to precept. We are to build a building of truth. It is no time to take one step forward and two steps backward.

Salvation is by faith alone. Of that there is no doubt. Salvation by faith alone simply means that we cannot save ourselves but must submit ourselves to a process by which it is God who works in us, both to will and to do His good pleasure. But we must never forget that there was an enormous price paid for our salvation. It cost the humiliation and life of God Himself; and if we think for a moment that the fact that salvation is free means it is not gong to cost us anything, then we are 100 percent out of phase with the whole idea.

Our salvation that cost God His very life requires the same price from us, and that is our very life. We must sell out to the old life. We must be crucified. The new life in Christ is not a remodeling of the old. It is not new words to an old tune.

It is complicated to get building permits in some places these days. They tell me that more and more they are leaving the foundations and certain bearing walls from the old buildings as part of the construction of the new. That way when they go to get a building permit they do not have to get a permit for a new building but simply for remodeling. I heard that someone built a million-dollar house around a mobile home.

That trick may work in the construction game but not in the salvation game. The Christian life is not a remodeling; it is something completely new. Old things must pass away and all things must become new. The Christian life does not redirect selfishness, it kills it; it does not condone pride, it condemns it; it does not excuse bitterness and resentment, it heals them. It does not take away a bad vice and give us a socially acceptable one; rather it means that in Christ we are restored to self-control.

Someone may have told you otherwise, but the Christian life is an obedient life. Just as a sinner can't help but be disobedient, a person who has salvation wants with all his heart to be obedient. They may have told you otherwise, but a person who has salvation has a different lifestyle from a person who doesn't. But I shouldn't have to tell you all of this, because no matter what some people have been telling us in recent years, deep down inside we knew that something was wrong. It just doesn't make sense.

We should have known that something was wrong, because if Jesus is really our Savior, would we have to continue to be dominated by selfishness, pride, anger and all of our obsessive compulsive behavior? Is our condition really as hopeless, as far as sin is concerned, as some would have us to believe? No, no, I think not. The promise is that sin shall not continue to have dominion over us. They may not have discovered a cure yet for AIDS, but thank God though Jesus Christ that He has provided a cure for sexual perversion. They may not have found a cure for cirrhosis of the liver, but thank God that in Jesus Christ there is a cure for the alcoholic. They may not have found a cure for cancer of the lungs, but thank God in Jesus Christ He will help a person break the nicotine addiction.

You may not be able to live your life all over again, with all of the suffering that you have caused to others and to yourself because of your evil temper, or sexual promiscuousness, or greed that resulted in bankruptcy. But I have good news for you and for all of us. And that news is, believe it or not, in Jesus Christ--if we will just die with Christ, sell out, liquidate--we can have a new start. And I don't mean when Jesus comes; I mean right now.

The title of the sermons you are about to hear is "Doers of the Word--The Call to Godliness." As already mentioned, God--Jesus Himself--has called on those who call themselves His followers to be not just hearers of the Word but doers of the Word.

In recent years there has been so much debate here and there, and from time to time we have tended to be caught up in the arguments. Somehow, many of us these days have lost sight of the fact that the purpose of the Scriptures is not just to make us students of the Word but doers of the Word.

I am sure you have heard it said, "Higher than the highest human thought can reach is God's ideal for His children. Godliness, god-likeness, is the goal to be reached." There are any number of texts of Scripture that also call us to godliness.

Listen to some:

• 1 Timothy 6:11: "But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness."
• 2 Peter 3:11 says, "Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness."
• In 2 Peter 1:6 it says, ". . .and to knowledge, temperance and to temperance, patience and to patience, godliness." Earlier in that chapter it had said, "According as His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory and virtue."
• In 2 Timothy 3:12 it speaks of those who have a form of godliness but who deny the power thereof. It says to turn away from this kind of people.
• Another text speaks to women. It speaks to those who profess godliness and tells them to be careful of how they dress (1 Timothy 2:10).
• There is another text that tells us we must refuse profane and old wives fables, and rather exercise ourselves unto godliness (1 Timothy 4:7).

Godliness in its practical applications is about the way we live. They tell us that there are over a billion people in the world who say they are Christians. Of course, you and I know that a person who is a Christian is a person who is a follower of Jesus Christ. In fact, the dictionary says that being a Christian is:

• Professing belief in Jesus as Christ or following the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus.
• Manifesting the qualities or spirit of Jesus; Christ-like.
• One who professes belief in Jesus as Christ or follows the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus.
• One who lives according to the teachings of Jesus.

Some people these days get hung up on the word "believe". They say that to be saved all we have to do is believe. Jesus has done it all. To believe in Jesus, to really believe in Jesus, is not just voting for Jesus. It involves buying into all that He represents. The fact that Jesus has done it all doesn't put us out of the game; rather it puts us into it. Let me explain:

You remember the story of the Last Supper. Jesus was washing the feet of the disciples. Now for us to wash someone's feet is probably not a big thing. But for the people in those days, it was a social taboo.

The foot is still highly symbolic in many countries. I recall when I went to Thailand the first time, I was given a list of things I needed to watch out for in that culture. One had to do with the foot. They told me that when we sat on the platform in church we needed to be careful that our feet weren't pointing toward anybody in particular, because that was an insult.

I read in the paper a few years ago that in Los Angeles in a nightclub one night there was a singer from Southeast Asia. As the man sang, he noticed that one of the patrons at the club that night who was listening to him had his feet on the table and the man's feet were pointed toward the singer as he sang. When the singer finished singing that night, he waited until the patron went outside, then the singer shot him dead. No, when Jesus washed the disciple's feet that night around the table, it was not the politically correct thing to do; in fact, it clashed with all the cultural norms that existed at the time.

But Jesus said to the men, "You call me Lord and Master and I am. If I, who am your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one anther's feet." The point is, yes, Jesus has done it all. But that doesn't put those who claim to be followers of His out of the loop, but rather into it. He said, "I have given you an example that you should do as I have done."

In some places they seem to be saying that if we love Jesus we don't have to keep His commandments. But Jesus said just the opposite. He said that those who love Him, without exception, will keep the commandments.

I guess I have almost become hysterical about this in the past few years. It drives me crazy to hear someone say that we don't have to do anything to be saved. That statement can be 100 percent true and at the same time 100 percent false.

Please listen to me now. Let's get this clear so we can get on with our spiritual lives. Many of us are bogged down in this and as a result our spiritual lives aren't going anywhere but backwards. Suppose that I want to go to Cleveland, Ohio. I happen to live in Orlando, Florida. I plan to take a plane. To get to Cleveland by plane you don't have to know how to fly a plane, but you definitely need to be on board. I don't mean on board mentally, intellectually, or spiritually. You have got to be on board physically, bodily. When I talk about needing to go to Cleveland, I mean that I need to get my body to Cleveland.

Can't we see it then? Being saved is about the way we live. It is about the way we think. That is why Jesus said, Don't be just listening to people talking about My words--don't just be talking about spiritual things--get into living them. That is why the call of Scripture is the call to godly living. A person who is not into living godly in Christ Jesus doesn't happen to be on the plane that is going to heaven.

I don't know why anybody would have a problem with this. But then, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Oh, my friends, what would happen if all the people who said they were Christians were to get serious about becoming doers of the Word! Oh, my friends, what would happen if all the people who said they were Christians were to get serious about living godly lives!

The fact is it is going to happen; it has got to happen. In the end there are going to be only two kinds of people in the world. There will always be many races and many languages and cultures. There will always be many different countries, but at the end there will be only two kinds of people when Jesus comes. Those will be the people who are living out in their lives the teachings of Jesus--those who are living godly lives and those who aren't. Now, a person can believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that what He has told us to do is true. But this same person may not be living a godly life.

This is the reason why the greatest need of a person who says they are a Christian or a person who says they believe in Christ is that that person makes a commitment to Christ. The greatest need of the members of the church of God in the 21st century is commitment--a commitment to Christ. A person who has made a heart commitment to Jesus Christ doesn't argue about whether or not they have to live a godly life or be a doer of the Word. A person who has made a heart commitment to Jesus Christ is not trying to see how few of the commandments they need to keep or how little of the will of God they need to do.

A person who hasn't made a commitment to Jesus argues about what is holiness and godliness. A person who hasn't made a commitment tries to get out of obeying God and being a doer of the Word.

A person who has made a commitment is just the opposite. A person who has made a heart commitment to Jesus Christ and who truly believes on Him says with the Psalmist, "I delight to do Your will, O my God, You are writing Your law in my heart."