Wednesday night, a church group from Hawaii held a crawfish boil at the Rachel Sims Mission Center where they are staying, and invited me over. What a terrific group. This was a repeat work trip for four of the twelve members. Pastor Duane McDaniel is truly one of the finest brothers I’ve ever met. Fred and Elizabeth Luter came in to share the festivities about halfway through. Fred is preaching in David Jeremiah’s church in San Diego later this week. We’re glad to share him with the Lord’s people in other places, but I for one will be so glad when he settles down here in town. We need him around!

Ron and Janie Moskau are two of FBC Kenner’s finest. Thursday night, I bumped into them at a restaurant and Ron told me about a fellow named Eddie. “Eddie is a roofer and sheet metal worker. He’s done a lot of work at our church over the years.” Eddie lived in Chalmette and lost his house in the flooding that followed Katrina. Recently, Ron called our Freddie Arnold about sending a crew over to gut out his house and to restore it. Freddie directed a team from Arkansas that way. One day, the team leader called Ron to say they needed more sheet rock. Ron called Eddie, who stopped the job he was working on, and picked up supplies and delivered them to his house. That’s when he got into a conversation with the leader of the Arkansas group. Two hours later, Eddie had prayed to receive Christ as his Savior. Ron said, “I knew you would love to hear this.”

I do love to hear it. Furthermore, this same story has been repeated hundreds of times in our city.

We are forever grateful for godly men and women from all over this nation who put their own lives on hold to come help us rebuild and who remember to help our people in the best way possible.

The mayor is shooting from the hip again.

Mayor Ray Nagin has become famous (infamous?) for popping off without thinking, then backtracking. Just after the city was inundated by floodwaters, he went on national television announcing the way to rebuild New Orleans was to turn Canal Street downtown into a Las Vegas type boulevard with lots of casinos. No one, absolutely no one, thought that was a good idea, thank the Lord. And his comments on the chocolate city are well known. Now, he’s pulled another one.

Perhaps because he’s in a tight runoff for re-election and feels he needs to take some proactive leadership, His Honor announced earlier this week his evacuation plan for the city. I told what he said in a recent blog, saying that the devil is in the details. You may recall he said the convention center and Superdome would not be shelters, that buses and planes and Amtrak would take everyone away, that sort of thing. Now, the mayor of Baton Rouge and even Governor Blanco have called his hand on this. Where exactly are you planning on taking these evacuees? To our city? You haven’t asked us. And what right do you have announcing which state-owned buildings will be turned into shelters? The governor alone has that authority.

Our mayor always dresses immaculately and shaves his head every day and has his tiny mustache trimmed. He looks great. Except when sporting egg on his face. As he is right now.

The Baton Rouge mayor is calling for a conference of Louisiana mayors to make unified plans on hurricane preparation. Such a simple and wise thing to do. Wonder why our guy never thought of it?

Good news about a bad subject

Louis Rukeyser died this week. I remember something he of “Wall Street Week” television fame said once while appearing in Jackson, Mississippi. He was asked why books predicting stock market crashes and “coming depressions” sell so well, whereas “good news books” have a hard time finding an audience. He said it’s simple. “If hard times are coming, people think ‘I’d better get prepared.’ So they buy those books that predict worse times ahead to make plans. But if a book says nothing ahead but blue skies, the investor thinks, ‘If that’s so, I won’t be needing that book.'”

It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Want to sell a book? Predict bad times ahead. Not a very good commentary on the human situation, but certainly a window into human nature.

Those of us who present the gospel see an important lesson here. The only way for someone hearing the gospel to appreciate its good news is first to be reminded of the corresponding bad news. The bad news is that we are all sinners, we are under the judgment of God for that sin, and we have a date with judgment in the future which will have dire consequences. But the good news–the Gospel–is that this same God came to earth in the Lord Jesus Christ and paid the penalty for our sins, taking our wrongs upon Himself on the cross, then rose from the dead on that first Easter morning, and He now gives salvation and eternal life to all who come to Him in humility and trust.

The reason good news is good is because it addresses some seriously bad news.

Those who have “taken” this e-mail of mine through the years have heard this one from me before, but it’s worth dropping in here.

Some three or four years ago, the little town of Loxley, Alabama, made the national news. In the middle of a funeral, a fight had broken out and the local police were called. What happened was that the preacher had said some uncomplimentary things about the deceased in the casket. He told the mourners that everyone recognized that “old Bill” was a drunkard and a wife-beater and a liar and a thief, that sort of thing. Then he said, “And when he died last Thursday, old Bill went straight to hell.” The grieving family was stunned to hear that, but they were going to let the preacher get by with it until he repeated it, and then said it again. That’s when old Bill’s grown sons decided they’d heard enough and proceeded to drag the preacher out back and commence to, as we say in Alabama, “beat the tar out of him.” Evidently, the preacher gave as good as he got, for it became a real brawl. The police broke it up and a reporter for the local weekly covered the story.

What fascinated me with the news story was something the preacher’s wife told the reporter. She was identified as a “reverend” also, and she defended her man, which I have no problem with. In bragging on him, she said, “Well, there’s one thing about my man–he’s going to preach the gospel!”

“The Gospel”, I fear, is one of those terms that has fallen onto hard times because of overuse. We have gospel music, gospel book stores, gospel singers, and I don’t know what all. When the reverend wife said her man could be counted on to “preach the gospel” what she probably meant was that he was always going to tell the truth as he saw it. That’s fine. However.

He most definitely was not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. When you tell someone they’re going to hell, that is not good news. That’s bad news of the worst sort. The good news of Christ is that no one has to go there any more. No one has to go to hell. The door to Heaven is wide open and it’s a Man. Jesus.

That’s why the Gospel is good news: it addresses bad news with the perfect remedy.

Sometimes I counsel young preachers to bear this in mind, that if they are addressing people well acquainted with the bad news of their behavior, cut straight to the good news. However, if their audience is made up of the self-righteous who think their good works will let them bypass judgment and the Lord will be honored to have them in Heaven, they should explain the bad news of their circumstances to them first. They’ll never appreciate God’s forgiveness in Christ until they understand what a massive amount of trouble they are in.

The healthy person has no use for a cancer cure or a miracle drug. As Jesus put it, “Those who are well have no need of a physician.” (Matthew 9:12) But the sick person is delighted to find the cure.

In the Bible, Jesus spoke to harlots and thieves only in terms of God’s good news. But the religious and the self-righteous, that was another story. He opened the wound and poured in the salt. Another old expression meaning to deal bluntly and truthfully with his hearers, regardless how they liked it.

If Jesus were preaching at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola today, He would speak kindly of God’s love and Christ’s provision for them. If He were invited to address a meeting of New Orleans’ religious leaders, you might want to lock the doors and stuff cotton in your ears, because this would not be pleasant.

We preachers often get that exactly opposite, don’t we. Harsh to the sinners, easy on the respectable. Precisely wrong.

No one should ever be granted a degree from one of our seminaries until he or she can give a good answer to the question: Why is the Gospel good news?

We’re so grateful to our friends from Arkansas who know what the good news is and go out of their way to share it with our people.

Speaking of Arkansas, a big rental truck pulled in to our Baptist Center Thursday afternoon. The two drivers said, “We have 600 metal chairs for you.” They were from the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. Alberto Rivera and two friends had arrived to help unload the chairs, and I expect, to take a fair number of them to Getsemani Church down the street.

Thank you, Arkansas.