Yesterday I opened social media and watched the most amazing things happening — and none of it was real. All AI generated. It is not just video now. It is voices. It is audio. Seeing and hearing are no longer believing.
It is getting hard to know what is actually real.
We opened the service with a montage of preachers. God wants you healthy — I'm talking about your money. Name it and claim it. And then the people who did exactly that, asking what am I doing wrong, God.
That is a lot of static.
Some of you are old enough to remember a radio with a dial. You turned it and got static, turned it more and got more static, and then a station locked in clean.
Two thousand years ago, in a world just as loud as ours, one message came through clear. Christ is Lord. It has not needed retuning since.
Not religion. Relationship.
Paul opens 2 Corinthians 4 with therefore, and any time you see a therefore you should ask what it is there for. Here it is all of chapter 3, and two covenants.
A contract is fifty-fifty — somebody breaks their end and the deal is off. A covenant is different. God promises knowing full well his people will break it, and it stands anyway, because he is faithful.
The old covenant was carved in stone, and Moses came down that mountain with his face shining. Then it faded, and he wore a veil so nobody would watch it fade. That was the point. Temporary. Pointing forward — to a law written on hearts instead of tablets, and a new heart to keep it. At the last supper Jesus lifted the cup and said, this is the new covenant in my blood.
Watch Paul's bookend. Chapter 3: Moses' face, fading. Chapter 4: the face of Jesus Christ, and that light never fades.
If you are new to all of this, here is the whole thing in one line. It is not about religion, it is about relationship. It is not about what you can do, it is about what Christ has done.
Counterfeits
Then Paul names the temptations, and they are ours too.
The first is to water the message down — give people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. There is a spiritual hunger in this generation we have not seen in decades, and whenever that happens, people show up wanting in on the racket. Same in Paul's day.
The second is the veil. People cannot see the glory standing right in front of them. Jesus said the light came into the world and people loved the darkness.
And verse 4 names who holds the veil. The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers. All the static. Half-truths and distractions, pulling people off the one thing that could set them free. He is real, and he is not remotely a match for the gospel.
So here is what we preach instead. Verse 5. Christ as Lord.
Understand what that cost. In Rome, Caesar was lord — a god, or near enough, honored with the proper ritual. Christians would not bend the knee, because they had seen the risen one. And Lord was not a compliment. In the Greek Old Testament everyone around them read, that word stood in for the name of God himself.
So their allegiance moved. Their citizenship moved. They knelt to Christ and nothing else, and some of them died rather than say otherwise.
A seven-year prayer
I first heard this message at twelve, a kid looking for adventure in all the wrong places. My sister came home with honor roll. I came home with detention. I heard the gospel, knew I needed forgiveness, and believed it.
It made no difference in my life whatsoever.
So when people ask how I came to faith, I tell them I prayed a seven-year prayer of salvation. Because at nineteen I was pledging a fraternity for all the wrong reasons, and they assigned me a big brother who turned out to be the chapter chaplain. I was crushed. The chaplain? Please.
He pulled me aside and asked if I actually believed this. I said I did. I never doubted God existed. He asked again. Same answer. He said: then you are a hypocrite.
I did not appreciate that.
He handed me a book called Absolute Surrender, and it went straight through me. I got on my knees and said, God, I am sorry, forgive me, take control, make me the man you want me to be. Amen.
I had read that a dove came down for Jesus. I was hoping for a crow. A bat. A mosquito. Nothing.
But I meant it. Two nights later I was at a party and for the first time I had a new desire and the strength to walk a different direction. It cost me friendships. I ate a lot of lonely lunches that year.
Seven years between hearing it and meaning it.
The light gets out
I put my family through a lot growing up. When I came to faith and went to the mission field, their reaction was, let's see if this sticks. Year after year, it did not rub off.
Years later my father was dying of pancreatic cancer. On one of our last walks he looked at me and said: son, I want you to know I love you, and I am so proud of you. It was not always that way.
When light comes into darkness it changes a man for good.
That light does not stop with you. This week I was at my son's middle school football game and the varsity team walked up, and I — a grown man — was intimidated by high schoolers. So I tried to hand my calling to my kid. He is the quarterback. Isaiah, go invite your teammates to youth group. He looked at me and said, Dad, they don't want to go to church.
I could not shake it. Then one of them walked over on his own, and I got to hear his questions. He asked whether God would accept him. I told him God will not only accept you, he will change you from the inside out. Cordell gave his life to Christ right there on the sideline. He came that night. He brought friends the next morning.
Somebody asked me how we are going to fill a sanctuary this size. Here is the whole strategy. We preach Christ as Lord, and he changes people, like he always has.
So through all the static — who is actually your Lord?
