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Is grace the only means for our salvation? Amen. Great question. Welcome to Living Influence. So, Bill, we're going to continue this conversation on grace. Yeah. I think we're in week three. You're right. We're going to start with the scripture, Titus 2.11. The grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all people. Amen. Just pause for a minute and think about that. Talk about grace. We've already talked a lot about God, full of grace.

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There's a reason for it. One of the reasons for it is to bring it to all people. Yeah. Including you and me. So as we think about that, let's be thinking about, I want to tell you about my story.

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My discovery of grace for my salvation. Right. I grew up in a family. We had no faith except for cousins and aunts and uncles dying, grandparents. Never went to church. A man named Gus Quint.

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who by God's grace later became my father-in-law, but I was only seven at the time. He invited a couple of my two older brothers to go to a boys' club. At the boys' club, they were invited to go to Bible camp that next summer. It cost $8.50 each.

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To go to Bible camp. To go to Bible camp. And our family didn't have any money. Now, I'm not going to tell you I have a prescribed way to lead people to Christ, but I want to tell you this story because it's one of my favorite family stories. They didn't have any money, so my brother Al robbed a store of $22 so they could go to Bible camp. At Bible camp, my brother Bob, for the first time, heard about Jesus.

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as the savior and learned about getting saved by grace. And he came home to tell us, honestly, if you'd have been in our home, everybody walked around for two days with this look at our faces like what happened to Bob? Cause we'd never heard it before, never heard the message. But this character Gus showed up to our home many times and he invited me to camp.

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Well, now I'm eight years old, way too young for camp, but he took me anyway. And they did something at camp. They scared the hell out of me. Yes. Because every night there was a message that if you don't accept Jesus, you're going to go to hell. Fire and brimstone. But they taught another thing. In the context of all of that, they taught this. This is what really scared me, that if you don't accept Jesus and he comes back,

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the Christians will all be gone. And if you're not gone, you know you're going to hell. Scared me because I thought, oh my gosh, I better become a Christian because otherwise I'm gonna go to hell. But if Jesus comes back, I'm not ready. I'm gonna go to hell. Honestly, I accepted Jesus.

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Oh, three or four times a day at camp, several times during the night when I'd wake up. And it's like I slept with one eye opened because I knew my consul was a Christian. And if I woke up at night and he was still there, good, I'm going to make it. It scared you that much? Oh, it really, really frightened me. Yeah. Yeah.

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By the way, that's not a healthy message. I just thought I'd mention that. But that was my introduction to it. Yeah. Now, in the process of that, I was not fully, not even nearly fully understanding what it was like to accept Jesus. I was just afraid of hell. There wasn't anything about a Savior or anything about sin. It was just, okay. And then what happens is you kind of get passive about it.

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And you hope it was true. Well, for me, we went to Sunday school and I heard the Bible stories and all of that. And I just kind of felt that my life didn't matter. It felt the same to me.

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Yeah. And then my older brothers, these two guys who robbed a store to go to Bible camp are now pastors. They invite me to work with them one summer up in Wisconsin painting houses because that's how they made their living. And they were fanatics for Jesus. Yeah. I knew they were going to embarrass the snot out of me. I knew it. But I needed a job. So I said to Al, Al.

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I'll work with you guys, but you've got to promise you're not going to preach to me every day. Yeah. I already know about Jesus. Well, he was faithful. He didn't do that. He prepared 10 other guys to do it, but he didn't do it. But all summer long, every Saturday night, my brothers would go down to Skid Row in Milwaukee and...

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They had these huge horns that my brother had gotten from an airport somewhere. And they would blast this music down the street and all the bars would open. The prostitute come out of the windows and they'd all be yelling at my brother and he'd be preaching Jesus Christ. But you know what really impressed me about that summer? Not the message, but the men. My brother and my brothers and my brother was married one brother.

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They lived a different life. There was a reality in them that I didn't know about. You saw something different. Oh, some reality that I didn't experience. That you didn't see in your family. I knew it. It was different. It was different. Yeah. And then my brother one day in August, in fact, I remember it was August 11th, 1957, 17 years old, comes around the window of the house and he says, Bill,

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comes around the corner of the house and painting a window. And he says, Bill, I just have one question for you. What are you gonna do with Jesus? Yeah. And then the message of grace became a person. For you. For me. Wow. And then I knew I needed that person.

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Isn't that interesting? It was beautiful. It was beautiful for me, Scott. And I went to my brother's home and I knelt at the couch with him. I wasn't afraid of going to hell anymore. But I really wanted to know this person. And I can honestly say that I wanted him to know me. I literally wanted to give Jesus my life.

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And I remember when I was in high school, there were five or six kids in my big high school who were Christians. They carried their Bibles, that's how you knew. They were Christians. And they were the saddest kids in the whole school. Nobody was more miserable than those five or six kids. And that hit me negatively in a super negative way. And I remember the very day that I accepted Jesus, I remember part of my prayer. I'll never forget that. I said these words.

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I'm inviting the eternal God into my life. It has to make a difference. What I was thinking was, it can't be that reality. There's got to be a reality. Different reality besides what you saw. It was the reality I saw in my brother Al. The reality I saw in my brother Bob. And I prayed to receive the Lord, and I cried that day. And I want to say this in a way that nobody thinks like I'm bragging. It's not a bragging statement.

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I just want to make this statement. Fortunately, because I've met lots of people, this isn't true. But fortunately for me, Scott, I have lived lots of years since then, but I've never doubted my salvation. Yeah. Yeah. I never did. This relationship with Al.

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You saw something in him. Absolutely. That was different. Absolutely. And then that led you to meet Jesus. Absolutely. Which then changed everything. For me. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about your story. So my story, I grew up part of my life not going to church, but a good portion of my early years, my mother took us to a Lutheran church. Mm-hmm.

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I never don't remember not believing that there was a God. I never don't remember not believing that there was a Jesus. But it wasn't my life. It was kind of a thing you did over here. And so then I go off to college and go to church a few times. And then I met this girl that I ended up marrying.

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And as we were courting, she was Southern Baptist. I would go to her church, and there'd be a preacher up there, and he would be having his Bible in this hand, and he'd be yelling in this hand, and he would just work himself to a frenzy. And then get really quiet to deliver the punchline. It was so stereotypical. And then they'd sing just as I am at the end of every service so that someone would go down the aisle to get saved. Right. Yeah.

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And I'm like, I can't do this. Oh, my gosh, I can't do this. And Bev would go with me to church. And we went to this traditional Missouri-centered, very conservative Lutheran church. And they had organs, an organ in the church. And they played these songs that were written in the 1400s. And you could hardly sing them and figure out where the melody was. And Bev's like, I can't do this. Then as we got serious and were meeting people,

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each other's families. I take Bev to go meet my dad. He lived in Arkansas. My dad was an alcoholic. And he had married a woman, Jean. I think it was her third marriage. She had three daughters. I had three stepsisters. But Jean really ended up with this very close relationship with Jesus.

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And so we go visit them. Their church is the weirdest thing we ever—I mean, it was like seven people. It was a tiny little church in a theater where it was bad. It was really bad. It was almost—it was embarrassing for me. But Bev and I came back, and we were affected by Gene's relationship with Jesus. Amen. It's like she talks to him.

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And he talks to her. And it affected us that we got in the Yellow Pages and go, let's see if we can find a non-denominational church. Because we didn't like the Baptist church and we didn't like the Lutheran church. And so we found one that started in the middle 70s. This is probably 1980s.

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when we found it. So it had been five years old. And we found a group of ex-hippies, I guess you would say. I'm familiar with that. And these people had so much passion for Jesus. Amen. For their faith. Amen. And it was palpable. It was like real. I mean, yeah, I remember going and the worship was intense, amazing. Yeah.

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I would be embarrassed when they danced to this one song. You know, they'd dance. In church? And somehow Bev and I found life there. We found friends there. We found relationships there. And my faith became alive. And we began to just, I mean, I remember reading the Bible in no time. Just so excited about what God was doing and everything.

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And he began to shape our lives. And so I don't have a day where I can tell you when I was saved. Right. There were lots of times I responded. Amen. But that was my journey. Amen. Thank you. Yeah. It's interesting. Both of us, because we've not shared this before, but both of us made a big point of a big point. Grace is about a person. His name is Jesus. Yeah. Tragically.

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We make salvation a message. And when we make salvation a message, we condemn people. Yeah. But when we make it a person. Right. He came and as many as received him.

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Yeah. To them. And that's an experience. Exactly. Experiencing grace because you experience a person. Right. And so it's like— And in both of our stories, we experience the human first. Yes. Yeah, my brother. My stepmom. Your stepmom. Yeah. And that's true of so many people, Scott. Yeah. It's true of so many people. Yeah. So what happens to this character—

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is that I'm now a believer in a person whose name is Jesus, and I'm experiencing grace before I even understand what I'm experiencing. My life is being transformed, my motives, my actions. I'm in Bible college now.

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And I'm in Bible college, and from those early days till way 15 years later, 20 years later, there's a single motivation in my heart, and that's to...

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introduce Jesus to as many people as I can. And even as a 17-year-old kid in Bible college, I would go down to the rescue missions in downtown Chicago to just, because I knew those people needed Jesus, because my brothers worked on Skid Row, so I know those are similar people. I didn't know everybody needed them, but I know those people did. I have a funny story to tell you. So I'm 17, and I go to this mission, and the lady who runs it is like 5 feet tall,

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And this place is just full of these men who have been out on the street. They come in, and she makes them listen to a message before she feeds them. That's the way she works it. So they're all sitting in these wooden pews, and there's maybe 80, 90 of them. And I'm up there, and I'm going to share the gospel with these guys. And, oh, my gosh. And I get up, and I'm like that Baptist preacher talking about it. You guys are all sinners. Yeah. Yeah.

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And something happened that never happened before. It was something I didn't expect to happen. Nobody told me this could happen. A guy in the second row stands up and starts swearing at me. Who are you to tell me that I'm a sinner? Remember I told you the lady was five feet tall? Yeah. This guy's 6'5". Yeah. And I'm 6'1 and a solid 150. Yeah. I'm going to die right now for the gospel.

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But as he started to walk up, I said, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop. I'm sorry. I didn't mean this. I didn't mean that to sound like I said that. I should have told you God said that.

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I should have told you God said that. I made it sound like I said that. God said that. You know, God said that, that we are all sinners. We're all sinners from God. And I started repeating my message. And this big old huge guy, he comes by the grace of God. And he sits right here on the first step right below me. And sits there the whole time I'm preaching like a little kid. And I'm going, oh, God.

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God, you just saved my life. I'm going to keep preaching. But my whole experience, Scott, was to tell as many people as I could about this Jesus who is the Savior. I was learning. We were learning together. We were all about evangelism. And we were learning. And you know what happens when Jesus is the focus of your gospel message? People get introduced to the person of God.

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Yeah. And they don't get introduced to the message that scares them that they might go to hell. Yeah. They might. Sinners go to hell. Yeah. But see, what Jesus did is that Jesus came to be a man. Yeah. To go to a place called Calvary so that I could know God. And so when I accepted Jesus that day, now I can clearly say, hey,

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I met God that day. And in my simple prayers, a 17-year-old, I wondered and pondered, it's got to make a difference. I couldn't have imagined. Yeah. I could not have imagined. Scott, when we are faithful to say that grace is the only means to salvation and his name is Jesus, nobody can comprehend that.

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what this Jesus who is God can do in a life that trusts him. Right. Nobody can do that. Yeah. At 17 years old, I could not have imagined that the faithful God, when I choose to trust him, would perform miracles of his purposes in me. Yeah.

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Now, so when we ask the question, is grace the only means to salvation? The answer is yes. Why? Because of what we talked about last week. Because he who is the only means to salvation did something. He brought something to us. He brought grace to us. Right. The gospel message, when it's about Jesus, is about a person who can meet by every need.

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And oh, by the way, who loves me. Yeah. That's my awareness that grace is the means to my salvation. Yeah. We're going to keep talking about grace for a few weeks, but I want to, for me, and we can both keep talking about it, for me, I want to just make sure we hear this. That day at 17, I was accepting a Savior. Mm-hmm.

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And since then, I've learned that that Savior was about transforming me into a saint. That's called grace. Yeah, that's amazing. For me, I was 20. Yeah. And I would have to say I didn't come out of the box as bold as you. I wasn't a...

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Evangelism wasn't my strength. It wasn't a strength of mine. I mean, I was too insecure to, I don't know. But my meeting with Jesus, it did change the course of my life. Amen. I asked, I thought you should go to Bible college. I felt like you told me, no, you need to get your degree. Okay.

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No, you need to really go for it. And then I felt like he said, you should make a priority, the people you go to church with, and they should be a priority over where your career is going to be. Trust me with your career. Make these people this priority. I like that. And so we did that. And I mean, we had so much opposition when we did that. We had family saying, you know, God's in the other cities too.

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Yeah, but the fellowship is in this city. Our friends, our support, our connections, our community. It was amazing how God worked through that for me. Amen. And has blessed you in both worlds. Yeah, yeah. Thank God for his grace. I know. And now here I'm on a podcast with you. Whoever could figure that out. It's kind of crazy. Waste by his grace. It is. It is. Amen.

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All right, well, thank you for joining us. We're going to continue this conversation about grace. Next week, we're going to talk about grace as a primary gift for me. Amen. And so we hope that you continue. Amen. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to the podcast. We're really glad that you're here. We'd love to know that you're here. And so if you could leave a comment, we would appreciate that. But more importantly, if you know someone that should listen to this or hear it, we would love for you to share it with them. Thanks again.