Counterfeit Christianity

Hello friends, my name is Robin Cox and I'm an evangelist and I'm here with my friend Stephen Cannop and he's going to say a few words and we are so grateful here today to promote prison evangelism and we're going to teach you in 12 sessions how you can be a refined, powerful, skillful, accomplished soul winner for the glory of God. Isn't that right Stephen? Yes, we're excited about teaching you how to share your faith and we will learn with you while we're doing this. Yes. There's a couple of resources. We are partnering Freedom in Jesus Ministries is partnering with prison evangelism to bring this to you and prison evangelism has a number of resources. How to be a child of God is the primary resource that we're going to be referring to a number of times during these 12 sessions and it is available if you'll just search for prison evangelism on your tablet. How to be a child of God is available in English and Spanish. It's also available in a video and so the video gives you a good overview. The book goes a little bit deeper and then in part of the book we're actually talking about how to win, how to tell your testimony and how to share your faith. So all that's available in How to Be a Child of God. Prison evangelism, David Howe also has Seeking God Through Prayer and Meditation. That's in English and Spanish. Books that are on your tablet, Seeking God Through Prayer and Meditation. Another book that David Howe has that's very helpful in discipleship is Fully Alive and Finally Free which is Knowing God as Father and then one final book that David Howe wrote which is really great is Breaking into Prison. How can you imagine someone would want to break into prison? But that's the name of that book and then also with Freedom in Jesus, one book that we may mention is Born Again in Christ, First Steps of Faith with Jesus that the Lord allowed me to write. So you can search for Freedom in Jesus or Born Again in Christ to find those resources.

But prison evangelism is who we're partnering with to bring you these sessions. So with that introduction, I'm excited, Robin. Well I'm excited too and this book and your book was written so simply that even I can understand it, Stephen. And it's a discipleship book, it's a witnessing book, it's a powerful book and in simplicity it communicates the gospel. And please, please read this in your Pando app or get a hard copy of Stephen's book and David Howe's book. It'll be such a powerful blessing to you. And Robin, that's in Edovo and Pando both, two different apps. Okay, cool. That's really cool. And we appreciate David so much for writing this book and it'll be an extreme blessing to you. I want to start off, Stephen, by saying that every single one of us is one heartbeat and one breath away from eternity. You are, I am, we all are. Everybody you see where you're at in the institution there, we're all one heartbeat away from eternity. It's either heaven or hell and God has given us this mandate to share with you. We don't want you to go to hell. We want you to go to heaven and spend all eternity with Jesus, okay? And Ecclesiastes 3.11 says this, that God has placed eternity in each and every single one of us and so it's inside here. We're going to live forever, it just depends where. And then we all know that evil is abounding. You can look at the TV and converse with anybody anywhere and people are going to share with you that evil is abounding and in Isaiah 5.14, the Word of God says that hell is expanding. Hell is expanding even as we're talking here. Evil is expanding and trying to take over the whole world. Well, hell is having to expand to keep up with everybody going to hell because they

reject Jesus Christ. Okay, and as I was praying about where we should start, let's just start with the Word of God, okay? And we're going to start in 2 Corinthians, no, 1 Corinthians 13, five. And the Word of God says this, that we're to test our own hearts to see if we are really saved by the blood of Jesus and a born-again Christian. And we're to test our hearts and examine our hearts to make sure we're not counterfeits and make sure we've come to the cross the biblical way and make sure we've come to the cross Christ's way and make sure it's not our way. And so we want you to know that 100%, so it wouldn't do us any good, Stephen, to teach this class and somebody in California to be watching this through Pando app and for them to think they're saved, but they're really not saved. That's right, you gotta make sure, and it is 2 Corinthians 13, five. Okay, thank you. Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Yes, and that's what the apostle Paul said. And so he wants us to be in the faith, established, strong, and we know that we're saved. And so I've been winning souls as an evangelist for probably around 40, 45 years.

And I've talked to tens of thousands of people about Jesus Christ, about their faith. I've gone through this same plan of salvation that Stephen and I are going to teach you. And it's the only one I know because it's so simple and it works because it's the word of God. It's the word of God and there's power in the word of God. Amen. And so there's about 4,300 cults worldwide and there's probably close to 4,300 different Jesus's worldwide. Maybe not quite that many, but there's so much confusion in the world today about who Jesus is and who he is not. And so we want to start tonight with 1 John 5, 13 which says this, I have written this to you so that you... I have written this to you who believe in the name of the son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life and so that you may believe in the name of the son of God. Yes. So Stephen, I've got to know so salvation, don't you? Amen. You got to know that you know that you know. Yeah. You don't have to hope so, you don't have to think so. You need to be able to know. That's right. If he died today, do you know for sure you go to heaven?

I mean, that's so key, right? And there's no wishful thinking to this. It's absolute statement of fact and truth from the word of God. And so we want you to examine your heart and what we're going to cover in this first session is the very bedrock and the foundation for teaching you how to be a prison evangelist now and maybe a worldwide evangelist or a street evangelist and a block evangelist. When you get out. Amen. Because we hope one of these days you're going to get out and everywhere you go, you're going to witness for the glory of God. And so we want to start by saying, by covering what salvation is not. Now, with all the 10,000s of people that I've witnessed to in my lifetime, if I told you even half of the answers that people have given me, we'd be here all night. Right. And so here's like the top 10 answers that people have given me after I've asked them the big question. So I'm very friendly. I care about everybody. That's how you earn the right to ask a big question. So I asked a big question, Stephen.

What's the big question? If you were to die right now and stand before God in judgment, just you and God with Jesus at his right hand and they're examining your heart and they were to say to you, why should I let you come into my heaven? What would your answer to them be? To him, to God, to Jesus? What would your answer be? And when I ask that question, I wait for them to give a response and let everybody give a response. And here's some of the answers that I've gotten that unfortunately are not the right answers. We want to cover those first. So a while ago when you said there was like 4,300 different versions of Jesus, one for every cult, then these are among some of many answers that people give why they think that they're allowed to go to heaven. You know, when I first heard that, Stephen, I said, that can't be true. There aren't 4,300 cults, and most of them have their own Jesus Christ, and so let's just say there's 2,000. Okay? However many there are. Let's say there's 2,000, and there's 2,000 different Jesuses out there. I can't even comprehend that, and so you've got to know that you know that what you know

is biblical and correct. Yes. So the number one answer that people give me that is a wrong answer is I'm a faithful church member. I know I'm going to heaven because I'm a faithful church member. Well, I'm glad you're a faithful church member, but that's not what you should trust to get you and to give you eternal life in heaven, because being a faithful church member is not being saved by the blood of Jesus. Number two, well, I'm a good person. I can't tell you how many thousands of times people have said, well, if I were to weigh my good works against my bad works, my good works would far outweigh my bad works, and I know I'm going to heaven because I'm just a plain old good person. That's the wrong answer. Amen. How about this? I do good works and I help others all the time. Well, that's not a good answer either. I have a friend of mine and I, and for 10 years, him and I went witnessing every week in Roswell, New Mexico. I'm from Roswell, New Mexico, and as people would give us those answers, his name was Stan Lair. He's in heaven with Jesus right now, but Stan used to always tell these people that we were witnessing to, well, if you can get to heaven by good works, then we don't need Jesus Christ. We don't need the cross. We don't need the blood, and really, we don't even need the Bible because good works will get you to heaven, and so that answer is absolutely not true. I won't spend much time on this because we'll probably talk about it again later, but I was baptized when I was a baby, or I've been baptized in the church, and I know I'm going to heaven because I'm baptized. Well, that's the wrong answer.

How about this one? Jesus of the mind. Oh, man, this is so prevalent. Jesus of the mind. What do you mean about that? People, mental assent to who Jesus Christ is to them, and they become a person who will profess, and that brings on the next one. They will profess Jesus Christ, and I call that Jesus of the lips. They will profess without possessing. Without really possessing an intimate relationship. There you go. A true relationship. Without really knowing him. Yes, sir. They know about him, maybe, but they don't know him. That's it. Yeah. I know who he is, but I don't know him personally. Now, should you think that I don't know what I'm talking about. My wife was this way for 45 years, and she was raised in church, and her mom and dad used to go to church all the time, and I tease her because my wife had a real bad drug problem. Real bad drug problem, and her parents drug her to church on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and all day Sunday. She had a bad drug problem and grew up resenting church. Being drugged to church. Yeah. She was just drugged to church all of her life, and she could never comprehend or get it in her spirit. Like you said, Stephen, I love that so much. Stephen wrote a book on intimacy, by the way, and I love that book, but she never could

articulate and find Jesus in a genuine encounter with intimacy with Christ where she knew where she was saved until we went to the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola, Florida, and my wife got saved in Pensacola, Florida. After us being married 25 years and me being a preacher 25 years, and so Jesus of the mind So being the wife of a preacher won't get you into heaven. No. Necessarily. You've just added one more to the list. Necessarily. That's good. No, it won't get you to heaven. Being the wife of the preacher won't get you in. Being the preacher won't get you in. It's an intimacy of relationship with Jesus. My wife and I were, man, we had a lot of conflict because of this, but we were fighting one day, and yes, preachers and their wives do fight occasionally, okay? But anyway, she said, when Jesus worked for you, he hasn't worked for me. So, I'm just going to go to hell and you can go to heaven. And we were like two bulls that butted heads against each other the whole way for 25 years. And we caused each other a lot of pain. And finally she said, she gave up. I'm going to die and go to hell. You can die and go to heaven. It just doesn't work for me. And so she had Jesus of the mind. So she was trying to get there in her own mind, in her own way, or in her own works. And it just became impossible because we can never be good enough to get to heaven.

Yes. Yes, that's right. That's right. When we went to Pensacola, Florida, Stephen Hill was the evangelist there. And Stephen Hill was the evangelist. And he was preaching, I mean, like fire one night. I had to check the time. Yeah, we want to time these to about 20 minutes. And he was preaching about repentance. And when Stephen and I were talking about doing these 12 sessions, Stephen said, I'm a big, big fan and fanatic about biblical repentance, doing it God's way. True repentance. True repentance. And I said, well, I am too. And when we get to that session, we're going to explain that so simply where everybody can understand it. And so the next one is just the religious Jesus, just a blank religious Jesus. Well, what are you talking about, Robin? And I want to say this to you, that all over the world, there's this universalism that's going around. And it says this, there are many paths to the top of the mountain. You just need to be on one of them. And as long as you're sincere, you're going to go to heaven. So what that means, Stephen, is it's

a form of universalism. It is universalism that takes Jesus out of the picture. But there's only one path to heaven. And his name is Jesus Christ. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And no one comes to the Father except through me. Yes, that's right. Another thing that I encounter so often is Jesus my way. Jesus my way. I was witnessing to a guy from work one day. And we're going to show you how to do that with this little testament. But anyway, I handed him the testament. We went through all the scriptures. We went to Romans chapter 10. And the very last verse we read was, whosoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And I said, Tony, do you want to be saved right now? Can I help you get saved right now? And he goes, no, I don't want to get saved right now. And I said, why don't you want to get saved right now? He said, well, I don't want to be saved your way, but I really believe I'm saved my way. And so he was like he was an agnostic, atheist, wannabe Christian. And I've had people tell me that before, that I'm an agnostic Christian atheist. And that's just a total contradiction of terms. You can't do that.

You can't be that way. How about this one? We're getting ready to wrap up the first session, Stephen. That's right. Okay, but how about this one? Jesus plus something else. And if you think you're saved with Jesus plus, I'm here to tell you that you're not. Because Jesus himself encountered a group of people and he said, many will say to me in that day, this is Matthew 21, no, Matthew 7, 21 through 23. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name. We've done many mighty, wonderful miracles in your name. And we've cast out demons in your name. And Jesus said, I will say this unto you. Depart from me, you workers of iniquity, because I never knew you. Well, what was their iniquity, Stephen? They were trying to add some type of performance to salvation, which you can't. cannot do to be saved, so it wasn't Jesus plus casting out devils or Jesus plus doing good works or Jesus plus being a good person. It's Jesus Christ in your heart and in your life and it's not the prosperity Jesus. It's not the bucket list Jesus. Oh, I just wanted to do that, see what it was like and now I've left him and gone on to something else. But you've got to know that you know, that you know, according to 2 Corinthians 13, 5, test yourself and try your own self to see if you are of the household of the faith. And John 14 says this, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to me except through the Father. Acts 4, 12 says this, neither is there salvation in any other because there is no other name given among men whereby you must be saved. So you can't be saved

Jesus plus good works, Jesus plus anything else. It has to be Jesus. We want to help you do that right now. And so, um, the way I pray and I tell people, I told people in the prison, uh, Sunday, don't pray this if you don't mean it because it will not help you at all. It will hurt you. And so, but if you want Jesus Christ to live in the sacred chamber of your innermost being in the depths of your heart where he lives on the throne of your life and you yield your life to him, you ask him to forgive you, save you. You receive biblical salvation. You make him the Lord of your life and your master, savior and Lord. We want to help you do that. And if you do that, there's a place for you to communicate to us and check the box and say that you've done it. So I'm, I'm going to lead you in that prayer. I'm going to go slow. And if you've never done that, or there's a possibility you may have done it your way instead of his way, because he's the only way. Um, pray this with me, Lord Jesus Christ in the sacred chamber of my heart, the innermost sacred chamber. I ask you to come in and be the Lord of my life. I ask you to save me. I ask you to give me biblical salvation. I trust you and you alone. I receive biblical salvation. I receive eternal life in heaven. I'm not trusting in anything else. Please Lord with, by the blood of the lamb that was shed on the cross, cleanse me from every sin that I've ever committed and give me eternal life in heaven. And from this point forward, fill me with your Holy spirit and change me. And I want to be a true follower of yours according to the word of God in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.