Greg Laurie, Pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, gave this message at Pirate’s Cove this weekend:
You’re saying goodbye to the old you, buried with Christ in baptism so you might walk in newness of life, that’s what the Bible says, so you’re coming out saying, “I’m making this commitment” and you’re doing it publicly in front of friends and family.
Thousands responded to his call. Laurie later tweeted, “We never had a baptism like what happened yesterday. We baptized 4,500 people!”
A week earlier, at Laurie’s SoCal Harvest Crusade, nearly 7,000 were baptized in the same location, made famous during the Jesus Revolution in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and then memorialized in the film Jesus Revolution. It’s where Laurie and his wife Cathe were baptized five decades earlier.
Laurie reminisced:
People like to talk about the good old days and back during the Jesus Movement when we had the big baptisms there.
Let me just tell you, because I was there: We never had a baptism on this scale. This one is new, this is fresh. This has never happened before, and it happened where? In California!
Everybody likes to throw California under the bus. A lot of people are leaving California. I’ll probably stay here because someone has to turn the lights out.
But actually, I’m here to turn the light on. I think the people of this state want to hear the gospel. I think that people of America want to hear it as well.
One of those for whom the light went on was Bill Ellison, age 67: “With all the bad things that are happening in the world, you need to have the hope of salvation. We are all sinners, but we have the hope of Christ Who died on the cross for our sins.”
But will it stick?
When Dawson Trotman, founder of The Navigators, was trying to recruit counselors for a Billy Graham Crusade in a large metropolitan city, he made numerous phone calls to the supporting churches. He would ask them, “Could we have the names of the men and women in your congregation who know their Bibles well enough to lead someone to Christ”?
The church secretary of one of the larger churches replied, “Would you repeat the qualifications again, please?”
Trotman did.
After a long pause, the secretary said rather wistfully, “You know, we did have a man like that in church once, but he moved away.”
In his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship, German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer called easy salvation “cheap grace”:
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace….
Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices….
Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.
And what is “costly grace?” Wrote Bonhoeffer, “It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life … what cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”
That’s why pastors Bill Hull and Ben Sobels founded The Bonhoeffer Project to bring new believers from salvation to discipleship. They write, “All who are called to salvation are called to discipleship, no exceptions, no excuses.”
They are following Christ’s commandment in Matthew 28:16: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”
But according to George Barna of the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, “Although seven out of ten [Americans] consider themselves to be Christian, just 6% actually possess a Biblical worldview.”
What is Barna’s definition of a Biblical worldview? Here are the seven cornerstones:
An orthodox, biblical understanding of God;
All human beings are sinful by nature; every choice we make has moral considerations and consequences;
Knowing Jesus Christ is the only means to salvation, through our confession of sin and reliance on His forgiveness;
The entire Bible is true, reliable, and relevant, making it the best moral guide for every person, in all situations;
Absolute moral truth exists — and those truths are defined by God, described in the Bible, and are unchanging across time and cultures;
The ultimate purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul; and
Success on earth is best understood as consistent obedience to God—in thoughts, words, and actions.
It is appropriate to celebrate the ongoing Great American Revival. It is also prudent to ask, “What happens next?” Will these new believers leave Pirate’s Cove thinking that now that they have their ticket stamped to gain entry to Heaven that that is all there is to the Christian faith? Of will they, over time, draw ever closer to the Maker of the Universe, and live a new life that reflects that change?
Related article:
