Pathway to Victory

Speaker 1

Hey, podcast listeners, thanks for streaming today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.

Pathway to Victory is a nonprofit ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress. Our mission is to pierce the darkness with the light of God's word through the most effective media available, like this podcast.

To support Pathway to Victory, go to ptv.org/donate or follow the link in our show notes.

Now, here's today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.

Speaker 2

Hi, this is Robert Jeffress, and I'm glad to study God's word with you every day. This Bible teaching program on today's edition of Pathway to Victory.

Speaker 3

If Jesus is the only way to be saved, what about the billions of people who have never trusted in Christ? How could so many people be wrong?

I want you to turn in your Bible to Matthew, chapter seven. As we're gonna see in this passage, Jesus, in fact, predicted that the majority of people in the world are going to be wrong, not right, about the way of salvation.

Speaker 4

Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. You know, nobody likes to admit being wrong. And while sometimes our mistakes are relatively harmless, other times the stakes are much, much higher.

Well, there's nothing more important than our eternal destiny. And today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress shows us why Christianity is the only right answer.

Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message. Dr. Jeffress.

Speaker 2

Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. I can't speak for you, but in my experience, some of my very best friends are Jewish. We have a beautiful bond that ties us together. First, many of our Jewish friends deeply respect our Christian faith. And second, many of them are truly grateful that I love the land of Israel. And when I travel to their country, I never feel more welcome. It's like coming home to family.

Well, along those lines, we've decided to create a coffee table book that would inspire your love for Israel. It's a photo album with stunning photographs from key sites in the Holy Land. Through pictures and written paragraphs, the Power of the Cross tells the story of Jesus' life, from his grand entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to his glorious resurrection, Easter morning. And this book is yours when you give a generous gift to support the growing ministry of Pathway to Victory.

As you prepare to give your gift today, I'm going to challenge you to become one of our valued missionaries at Pathway to Victory as well. We call them pathway partners. By giving a monthly gift, you're casting the seed of the Gospel far and wide, just like a missionary. And right now, we're asking God to help us add at least 50 new pathway partners. When you feel his nudge, please respond to his call by going to ptv.org. I'll be sure to send you my book, a keepsake called the Power of the Cross.

More details later on, but right now let's get to the important topic at hand. I've titled today's message "Why Every Other Religion is Wrong."

Speaker 3

Several years ago, I was in Seattle, Washington, finishing up a book tour there. I'd been in four cities in three days and was very anxious to get back home. Having finished the interviews earlier, I called the airline to see if it was just possible that I could get out on an earlier flight. They said, well, there's one leaving in the morning at 7:00. If you'll get here, it's wide open; you'll have no problem. So I got up at 5 that morning, raced to the airport, went to the ticket counter, and they said, well, we're sorry, Dr. Jeffress, it was available, but another flight canceled, and they have all of the seats, and therefore you don't have a place. But if you'll wait around till 9 o'clock, there's another possibility.

I went down to another gate at 9 o'clock, and same story; it was full. They said, but there's great hope for the 11 o'clock flight. Like a lemming, I went down to the gate for the 11 o'clock flight, and it was sold out. Finally, after seven hours of waiting in the Seattle airport, I found an empty seat on a plane. It was the one I was originally booked on at 5:00 that afternoon. I walked on, plopped down in my seat, exhausted from the day of waiting. As soon as I got in my seat and pulled out the in-flight magazine, the guy next to me decided he wanted to talk. He asked me the question, "What do you do for a living?"

Now, how I answer that question depends on how much I want to talk. If I've got a briefcase filled with work and don't want to engage in conversation, I answer, "I'm a preacher." If I really don't want to talk, I say, "I'm a Southern Baptist preacher." Trust me, that is a conversation stopper every time. But as I thought about the day's activity and the fact that I had tried to get on another plane but couldn't, I thought maybe, just maybe, God has me on this flight seated next to this person for a reason. So when he asked the question, "What do you do for a living?" I said, "Well, I'm a writer." That certainly was partially true.

He said, "Well, that's interesting. What kind of books do you write?" I said, "Well, I write Christian books." He replied, "Well, that's very interesting because I used to be a Christian." For the next four hours, as we winged our way from Seattle to Dallas, my new friend shared with me the reasons that he abandoned Christianity. Part of his reasons included unanswered prayer in his own life, problems he had believing in the truthfulness of Scripture, and a broken marriage. But finally, we got to the heart of his objection to Christianity. He said, "Pastor, I just cannot believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to God, because if that claim is true, then it means the majority of people in the world are going to hell, and I cannot believe in a God who's that intolerant."

In just a couple of sentences, my seatmate voiced the mother of all politically incorrect statements that Christians hold. In today's world, it's the belief that Jesus himself is the only way to be saved, and therefore every other religion is wrong. What is it about this claim that Christ is the only way to heaven that causes people to reject Christianity? Why do people object to this idea of exclusivity?

Objection number one: People say you are being intolerant. If you claim that Jesus is the only way to be saved, you are being intolerant. Today, the term tolerance has undergone a radical transformation. A number of years ago, my grandmother, who is now in heaven, wrote a poem that was widely published entitled "A Plea for Tolerance." According to my grandmother and people who lived in her era, tolerance simply meant a respect for other people's right to believe what they want to believe. Certainly, none of us here today would argue with that idea of tolerance. We ought to respect people's right to believe whatever they want to believe. People have the right to be wrong, but we ought to give them that right.

By the way, our nation was founded on that principle of tolerance because it reflects the nature of God. God gives us the freedom to believe whatever we want to believe. We have the freedom to believe a lie and to be wrong if we want to. That's a freedom God affords us. But today, the word tolerance, as I said, has undergone a metamorphosis. Today, we have changed tolerance from a respect for everybody's right to believe what he wants to believe to the idea that all beliefs are equally valid.

Thomas Helmbach, the executive vice president of the National Lamb Chi Alpha fraternity, writes, "The definition of new tolerance is that every individual's beliefs, values, lifestyle, perception of truth claims are equal. There is no hierarchy of truth. Your beliefs and my beliefs are equal, and all truth is relative." Now, I want you to stay with me here. All major religions answer the question, "What must I do to be right with God?" But what our culture has done is we have taken the answer to that question and moved it from the realm of objective truth, which has a correct answer, to the realm of subjective truth, to which everybody's opinion is equally valid. Whenever we as Christians attempt to shift it back to the realm of objective truth, there is one answer, and we are called intolerant.

This leads to the second objection that people have to this idea of the exclusivity of Christ: exclusivity promotes hatred. If you claim that there is only one way to God, not only are you being intolerant, but you're actually being hateful and persecuting other people. By the way, that assumption is held widely in the academic world today—that anybody who claims to have the truth is a hateful person and will persecute others. This demonization of those who claim to have the truth has now spilled over into evangelical Christianity.

I read an amazing statistic: 88% of all evangelicals believe this book, the Bible, is the word of God. Did you know that? 88% of evangelicals believe this book is the depository of God's truth. Yet, as we saw last week, 68% of Christians say there's no such thing as absolute truth. That is, there are no truths that apply to everyone, regardless of their religion or culture. Now, how do you reconcile those two beliefs? Christians believe this book is the truth, but they don't believe this is a truth that necessarily applies to everyone. You see, Christians have bought hook, line, and sinker this assumption that exclusivity leads to persecution and hatred.

But is that contention logical? I want you to imagine for just a moment that you have a small child at home. The child has an uncontrollable cough and is running a high fever. You take your child to the doctor. The doctor looks at the child and says, "Well, your child has pneumonia." You say, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, my child doesn't have pneumonia." The doctor says, "Yes, your child has pneumonia." You respond, "Well, what makes you think your opinion's better than my opinion?" The doctor says, "Well, I've seen hundreds of cases of pneumonia. Your child has all of the symptoms, and the only way your child is going to get well is by taking a round of antibiotics."

Now, is that doctor being hateful when he says that your child is sick? Is he being hateful when he says there is only one way for your child to get well? Of course not. In fact, he's showing love toward you and your child by correctly diagnosing the problem and prescribing the only way that problem can be remedied. Ladies and gentlemen, when we say to people, "Christ is the only way to be saved," don't let people push you into believing that's being hateful. If indeed all people are lost without Christ and in danger of spending eternity in hell without Christ, the most loving thing we can do is to share the gospel with them. Obviously, this idea that exclusivity promotes hatred is seriously flawed.

Objection number three: People object to exclusivity by asking, "How could so many people be wrong?" If Jesus is the only way to be saved, what about the billions of people who have never trusted in Christ? How could so many people be wrong? I want you to turn in your Bible to Matthew, chapter 7. Let's see how Jesus weighed in on this. Matthew 7:13-14. As we're going to see in this passage, Jesus, in fact, predicted that the majority of people in the world are going to be wrong, not right, about the way of salvation.

Matthew 7:13-14 says, "Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. But the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it." Do you hear what the Lord is saying? The highway that leads to hell is a wide road, and most people in the world are on that road. The road that leads to heaven is a very narrow road, and few are those who ever even find that road. Jesus predicted that the majority of people will spend eternity in hell, not in heaven.

But as jarring as such a thought is, even more jolting is the idea that many of those who are in hell will be religious people. Notice what he says again in verse 21. He says, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. For many will say to me on that day, the judgment day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?' Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.'" Many people who will be consigned to an eternity in hell will be religious people who miss the way of salvation.

Now hear me on this. When people raise this point, when they say, "Don't you realize that if what you're saying is true, the majority of people in the world, billions and billions, are going to be in hell forever?" they expect us to kind of hang our head down and say, "Oh gee, I never thought of that before. You must be right." Obviously, such a thought is too terrible to ever comprehend. You win the argument. But what I want to suggest to you this morning is that the fact that the majority of people are going to miss the way to heaven doesn't negate the truth of exclusivity; it proves it because Jesus predicted it.

And hear me on this: if Jesus Christ was right in his prediction of the number of people who will be in hell, isn't it logical that Jesus Christ is also right in his prescription of how to escape hell through faith in him? No, the fact that the majority of people will miss heaven undergirds, it doesn't negate, the truth of exclusivity.

A fourth objection that many people make to this idea of Jesus being the only way to be saved is that all religions teach basically the same thing. So why do you have to say your religion is the only right religion? By the way, this is a good point to perhaps answer the question: where did all these world religions come from? Have you ever wondered that? How did all of these religions come into being? The liberal will say to you, "Well, it's sincere people in their own culture formulating their own way to God. But all paths are leading to the same God. It's the result of sincere people seeking after God." The word of God says absolutely not. The fact that there are so many religions in the world is not evidence of the sincerity of man, but of the sinfulness of man.

Turn over to Romans chapter 1 for just a moment, where Paul talks about this, how there are so many false religions in the world. In Romans 1:22-23, the apostle says, "Professing to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the image in the form of a corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures." In other words, these people who have constructed these miniature idols and representations of animals and so forth, they don't really believe that's God. Instead, what they did is they took the truth of the true God, rejected that truth, and replaced it with a God of their own liking.

The same thing is true of every man-made religion today. Religions in the world today are, first of all, the result of man-made invention. People have rejected the truth of God that Paul says is even available through nature. They have rejected that truth and replaced it with a truth of their own creation. As somebody once said, "In the beginning, God created man in his own image. And ever since that time, man has been trying to return the favor." The fact that there are so many religions in the world today is a testimony to the sinfulness of man and his rejection of the truth.

But there's a second explanation for the world religions today: not only man's invention but Satan's deception. We don't have time to look at the passage, but jot down Psalm 106:36-37. The Psalmist says that the gods that Israel was sacrificing to, the false gods, were not in fact gods. Behind every one of those false gods was a demon—a demon used to deceive Israel from following after the true God. Now, I know this is not going to be popular to say, but it's God's truth: behind every major religion in the world—Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam—behind every one of those religions is a demon that Satan has sent in order to deceive people and lead them from the truth.

Just because that religion has a respectable name attached to it, even though it has some nice thoughts associated with it, remember the Bible says Satan appears as an angel of light to deceive some. The way you deceive people is by mixing a lot of error with just a little bit of truth. That's how Satan works in the world's religions today. No, the number of religions in the world is not a testimony of man's sincere looking for God; it is a testimony of his sinfulness.

But Pastor, even if there are all of these religions, don't they all teach the same thing, basically? Listen to me: only Christianity says that the way to God is not through what we do for God, but through what God has done for us. It's not our works for God; it's God's work for us in sending Christ to die for us. Ladies and gentlemen, all the religions of the world are not the same.

That leads to perhaps the most prevalent objection to exclusivity, and I bet you've heard it before: it is unfair for God to send people to hell just because they haven't believed in Jesus. Haven't you heard that before? It's unfair for God to send people to hell just because they haven't believed in Jesus. After all, Acts 17:26 tells us that God is the one who determines where we live our lives. He sets the boundaries, whether we're born in America, India, or Africa. Acts 17:26 says God determined that. Now, if God has placed somebody in an area where the Gospel has never been preached, how in the world could God be justified in sentencing someone to hell just because they've never believed in Jesus?

As Clark Pennock said in his objection to this idea of exclusivity, he added, "To think here are people in a third world country who have spent all their life suffering, and now we're saying they're going to spend all eternity suffering just because they haven't had an opportunity to believe." But adding insult to injury, Christians who believe the Bible are not only saying that those who have never trusted in Christ are going to spend eternity separated from God; we're also saying that a person who lives a wicked, godless, immoral life all of his life and at the very last moment trusts in Christ as Savior is going to spend eternity in heaven.

How could that be? Bill Donahue again succinctly expresses how ludicrous it seems with this following question to a Jewish Christian: "So you're telling me if a Nazi killed a Jew, a good Jew, a practicing Jew, the Jew goes to hell, but the Nazi still has a chance to get to heaven? That would be the consequence of your position." Now, admittedly, such a position does seem preposterous. How can we say that with a straight face that somebody who has led a godless life and at the last minute trusts in Christ is going to heaven, while a sincere practicing follower of another religion who loves his family, who keeps the commands as best he can, is going to spend eternity in hell? How can we say that?

Well, next time, we're going to look at four answers—four things you can say to those who deny that there's only one way.

Speaker 2

Well, I hope your curiosity has been piqued in such a way that you'll join us again. Next time I want you to hear my upcoming message on what to say to those who deny there's only one way. In addition to my message, you're invited to request an exclusive resource I've written and prepared for you. I'm referring to the colorful coffee table book called the Power of the Cross. It's a travel guide of sorts that walks you through seven days of Jesus' life from his triumphal entry to his glorious resurrection. So before the day's out, please call or go online to ptv.org and request my book, the Power of the Cross. It's yours when you include a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory.

Now, this week we're making a concerted effort to add 50 more friends to our family of monthly supporters. We call them Pathway Partners. A Pathway Partner is someone who agrees to give a generous gift each month of his or her own generation. In doing so, you become one of our missionaries who sends the light and message of Christ into communities around the world. The need has never been greater. Would you be among the 50 new Pathway Partners to join with us this week?

Without belaboring the point, I can tell you that sometimes the financial burdens we carry at Pathway to Victory are heavy, but we are lifted up and encouraged by friends like you. Friends who give generously. We couldn't do this ministry without you.

David, thanks.

Dr. Jeffress.

Speaker 4

To sign up to become a Pathway Partner, simply follow the very easy steps online at ptv.org. When you give your first gift as a Pathway Partner or when you give a one-time generous gift, we'll say thanks by sending you the Power of The Cross, a 96-page coffee table style book filled with stunning pictures, beautiful illustrations, and Bible-based teaching from Dr. Robert Jeffress.

Request the Power of the Cross when you call 866-999-2965 or go online to ptv.org. As you give $75 or more, you'll also receive an eight-message teaching series titled Live from Israel. Dr. Jeffress preached these messages on location in Israel in the very places where Biblical history unfolded, and they come on both DVD and MP3 format audio disc.

Again, call 866-999-2965 or visit our website at ptv.org. If you'd prefer to send a letter by mail, write to P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas 75222. That's P.O. Box 223, 609, Dallas, Texas 75222.

I'm David J. Mullins. Jesus Christ claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Him. But some people are now complaining that Jesus made the path to heaven too narrow. Find out what to say to those who deny there is one way. Join us Thursday for Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress.

Speaker 1

Comes from the pulpit of the First.

Speaker 4

Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas.

Speaker 1

You made it to the end of today's podcast From Pathway to Victory. And we're so glad you're here.

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