Salvation is not about perfecting our doctrine while our heart is of no change. Customer service for businesses, credit card companies, and the like seem to have all their i’s dotted and t’s crossed on how to respond to customers, yet it feels pretentious. The language and response seem right. It is all about presenting your best but not putting the customer first. Doing the right thing without genuine love is manipulation. Jesus quoted the Old Testament: people say the right things, but their heart is far from mine.

I cannot teach doctrine as if it is a discipline of the world that comes to fruition through much study. Jesus is not a science that we gain information to earn a Ph.D. and a relationship. We must believe from the heart and confess from the mouth that God raised Jesus from the grave after paying the penalty for our sins on the cross. If Jesus is our Lord, it must be from a bowed heart before a bowed knee. Because of the fleshes' desire to cleanse its outside to have an appearance of salvation, I come from an abstract position that can be used to judge the hearts and attitudes of those I am speaking to.

You have your p’s and q’s, but do you? Is your mouth speaking from the heart, or is your mouth speaking from a Christian education?

What are you seeking to get out of life? What drives you to get out of bed? What are your heart's desires that you consistently bring before God? You may be mentally searching for the right scripture to respond to this question, but is it the answer of your heart, good or bad?

Let’s walk through scripture and look at what people in bible days sought.

Some people seek power. If their life was to be summed up by their thoughts and actions, it was one of seeking power. Now, I’m talking to people who have changed the trajectory of their lives to follow Christ. People who have decided to go a different direction when they met Jesus. Let me also remind you that Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, also left his life behind, took up his cross, and followed Jesus all the way short to the end. But what was Judas seeking? Was he seeking the Way, the Truth, and the Life of Jesus? Or was he seeking something else that derailed him before crossing the finish line of grace and truth?

There is much to teach from the Bible, so why am I belaboring Salvation for weeks? Because most people will be lost. Wide is the gate many will walk through to destruction, but narrow is the way, and few will find it. I don't want you or those you love to be lost. Before we start with the Gospel memes, let's look at the brief list of lost people going through the wide gate.

• The atheists who refuse to thank God and are given over to a reprobate mind.
• People who fail to love the truth to be saved.
• Other religions, ideologies, and philosophies that worship idols of their creation.
• The influencers who don't like the terms of Salvation, like the young rich ruler who walked away sorrowfully because he had too much to lay down.
• The called-out ones are no longer available but make excuses and ask to be excused from what God commands, like the servants of the wedding feast and those who wanted to follow Jesus but wanted to do something else first.
• The hearers and not-doers deceive themselves like the crowd banging on the door to be let in, but Jesus doesn't know them as His disciples.
• People who were motivated by everything but love and are nothing but a clanging cymbal.
• The ministers who have a form of holiness conformed to this world but are not transformed by the renewing of their minds to the Word of God. They, too, beat on the door to be let in, but Jesus doesn't know them as His disciples even when they forged His name to do their will and ministry.

Let's go with a summary from the past several weeks before going further. Leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea is a shadow of being born-again and water-baptized. The wilderness is renewing the mind: thoughts, emotions, and will. And entering the promised land is entering the kingdom of God, which is the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, the peace of God beyond understanding, and the joy of the Lord, which is our strength to overcome the giants of sin in our life. Heaven and eternal life are waiting for the overcomer by the blood of the lamb, our testimony in the faithfulness of God, and loving not our life unto death but losing it for Christ's sake.

Heaven will not be Heaven if the flesh goes with us. The flesh will not inherit the kingdom of God. Iniquity would take over if we could take our choice of sin into the promised land. Let's look at a few case studies from scripture that were recorded for us in the New Covenant to glean from.

The first case is where eight people were saved from the destruction of a world where every thought was fused with violence. Noah was considered a righteous preacher. However, as soon as the Ark takes dock, Noah carries out the longest premeditated sin. After giving sacrifices to God, Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk in his tent, and is naked. I'm unsure why the Bible details the nakedness, but it has something to do with Noah's son Ham. Both bring the old world into the new world.

The second case of leaving the flesh behind before entering the promised land is the story of Abraham and Lot. Abraham interceded to have Lot and his family delivered from Sodom & Gomora to restart the cities from within a cave. Lot and his two daughters escaped the destruction of four cities just to start the cities over with incest. Lot's daughters knew that God once destroyed the world with water to cleanse it for a new beginning. And Lot's daughters knew that God would destroy the world again with a more potent cleansing agent of fire. Maybe Lot's daughters thought the world was destroyed, and it was up to them to repopulate the new world. Whatever they were thinking, they birthed a new Sodom and Gomorrah. But that is what sin does to us: it causes us to think too highly of ourselves.