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Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the world and it is also a transnational religion meaning that we find Buddhists in every country in the world and there are a number of countries in the world that are majority Buddhist.
Most Buddhists would think of themselves as belonging to one of three schools of Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism which we find in South and Southeast Asia, Mahayana Buddhism which we find in East Asia and Vajrayana Buddhism which we find in Tibet and Mongolia.
When one encounters Buddhism for the first time, the first and most natural question really, that's a question I suspect that you've been asking for yourselves, is simply this, who was the Buddha and who was the man who set this incredibly rich and complex religious tradition in motion?
Buddhism really starts with the story of Prince Siddhartha who was born in present day Nepal 2500 years ago. When he was born, a great sage came down from the mountain and told his father, the king, that your son will either be a great emperor or a great spiritual teacher.
An unexpected guest arrived. He was the revered hermit and astrologer, Asita, whom nobody had seen for years.
As Asita looked at her son, Queen Maya saw tears come to his eyes.
Mine are only the tears of an old man who knows that he will not live long enough to learn from the teachings of your son.
Will he be a great king?
He'll be the master of the world or its redeemer.
When he grows older, Asita, he can become a teacher like you if he wants. But first of all, he must follow me and be a king.
It may be as you wish, but the gods often betray the wishes of mortal men.
You will be a king!
The king was determined that his son would become a great emperor, so he vowed to shield his son from the suffering and misery of the world and kept him inside the palace walls where he lived a life of luxury and hedonism.
Siddhartha indulged in a life of pure pleasure.
Every whim satisfied, every desire fulfilled.
I wore the most costly garments, ate the finest foods. I was surrounded by beautiful women.
During the rainy season, I stayed in my palace where I was entertained by musicians and dancing girls.
I never even thought of leaving.
When he was 16, his father, drawing him tighter into palace life, married him to his cousin.
It wasn't long before they fell in love.
And so, the stories say, he indulged himself for 29 years until the shimmering bubble of pleasure burst.
His father does everything he can to never let him leave, never let him see the suffering that life is, but one day he goes outside.
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traveling through the kingdom and he has the first of four encounters
He sees an old man, and he asks his attendant, and the attendant says, oh, that's change.
One doesn't always stay young and perfect.
Then on the next tour outside, he sees a sick man and doesn't quite understand what it is.
He asks his attendant, and the attendant says, oh, that happens to all of us.
And on his third trip outside, he meets a corpse, and he recognizes impermanence and
suffering and death as the real state of things, the world that he had been protected from,
shielded from, kept from seeing.
And he was shocked.
You know, he was shocked, and he realized, this is my fate too.
I will also become old.
I will also become ill.
I will also die.
And then the fourth trip outside, he sees a spiritual seeker, someone who has decided
to live a life completely other than his life in order to escape from impermanence, suffering,
and death.
So he has this sort of traumatic encounter with the pain and suffering of life.
Twenty-nine years old, profoundly troubled, Siddhartha was determined to comprehend the
nature of suffering.
He resolved to leave the palace.
His wife had just given birth to a baby boy.
Siddhartha called him Rahula, fetter.
He names his son fetter.
He names his son ball and chain.
This is the fetter that will keep me tethered to this life.
Siddhartha went into his wife's room.
A lamp of scented oil lit up.
His wife lay sleeping on a bed strewn with flowers, cradling their newborn son in her
arms.
He gazed from the threshold deep in thought.
If I take my wife's hand from my son's head and pick him up and hold him in my arms, it
will be painful for me to leave.
He turned away and climbed down to the palace courtyard.
His beloved horse Kantaka was waiting.
As he rode toward the city's northern wall, he leapt high into the air.
Mara, the tempter god of desire, was waiting.
You are destined, Mara told him, to rule a great empire.
Go back and worldly power will be yours.
Siddhartha refused.
He left grief and probably absolute puzzlement and dismay in the hearts of wife, in the infant
son who was innocent and yet was suddenly fatherless, and of course his own father.
Siddhartha was alone in the world for the first time.
On the bank of a nearby river, he drew his sword.
Although my father and stepmother were grieving with tears on their faces, he said, I cut
off my hair, I put on the yellow robes and went forth from home into homelessness.
I had been wounded by the enjoyment of the world and I had come out longing to obtain
peace.
Siddhartha wandered south toward the holy Ganges River.
Once a great prince, now he became a beggar, surviving on the charity of strangers.
Siddhartha joined thousands of searchers like himself, renunciants, men and even a few women
who had renounced the world, embracing poverty and celibacy, living on the edge, just as
spiritual seekers still do in India today.
Now, at this time in India, there are lots of renunciants out there.
It's a flourishing renunciant tradition.
There are many different people who have given everything up and practice austerities and
meditate in order to escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.
The notion of reincarnation is something that's part of Indian culture, part of Indian civilization,
part of Indian religion that was there long before the Buddha.
And it was the, in a sense, the problem that the Buddha faced.
Suffering didn't begin at birth and finish with death.
Suffering was endless.
Unless it was possible to find a way out, become enlightened, become a Buddha.
The idea is from life to life to progress more and more toward the enlightenment and
become wiser and wiser.
It could take them, you know, a billion lifetimes if they're very stubborn, you know.
And becoming a Buddha, becoming enlightened, is the only way of getting out of the continual
cycle of death and rebirth.
With the authority of the priests worn thin and wisdom seekers like Siddhartha roaming
the countryside, holy men emerged, teaching their own spiritual disciplines.
Siddhartha apprenticed himself to one of them, a celebrated guru who taught the true knowledge
could never come from ritual practice alone.
It was necessary to look within.
You may stay here with me, the guru told him.
A wise person can soon dwell in his teacher's knowledge and experience it directly for himself.
The person who was to become the Buddha was very good at all of those practices.
He was a super student doing these practices, taking them to their limit, and no matter
what he did in these practices, he was still stuck in the pain that he set out with.
He ascends to these very rarefied states of consciousness.
But it's not permanent, and it does not bring penetrating truth into the nature of reality.
So these become a temporary escape from the problem of existence, but they don't solve
the problem.
Siddhartha apprenticed himself to another popular guru, but the results were the same.
The thought occurred to me, he said later, this practice does not lead to direct knowledge,
to deeper awareness.
Disenchanted, he left this master to.
Siddhartha continued to drift south, still searching for the answer to his questions.
Why do human beings suffer?
Is there any escape?
He's trying and trying and searching and searching, and he already experienced extreme luxuries,
and now he tries extreme deprivation.
Among the renunciants, asceticism was a common spiritual practice, punishing the body as
a way to attain serenity and wisdom.
He tortures himself, trying to destroy anything within himself that he sees as bad.
The spiritual traditions of that time said you can be liberated if you eliminate everything
that's human, you know, everything that's coarse and vulgar, every bit of anger, every
bit of desire, if you wipe that out with force of will, then you can go into some kind of
transcendental state.
And the Buddha tried all that, and he became the most anorectic of the anorectic ascetics.
He was eating one grain of rice per day, he was drinking his own urine, he was standing
on one foot, he was sleeping on nails.
He did it all to the utmost.
My body slowly became extremely emaciated, Siddhartha said.
My limbs became like the jointed segments of vine, or bamboo stems.
My spine stood out like a string of beads.
My ribs jutted out like the jutting rafters of an old abandoned building.
They were trying to master suffering by making their minds so strong they would forget about
their bodies.
Then, one day, Siddhartha heard an old musician on a passing boat speaking to his pupil.
If you tighten the string too much, it will snap, and if you leave it too slack, it won't
play.
Suddenly Siddhartha realized that these simple words held the great truth, and that in all
these years he had been following the wrong path.
If you tighten the string too much, it will snap, and if you leave it too slack, it will
not play.
A village girl offered Siddhartha her bowl of rice, and for the first time in years he
tasted proper food.
But when the ascetics saw their master bathing and eating like an ordinary person, they felt
betrayed, as if Siddhartha had given up the great search for enlightenment.
Come and eat with me.
You have betrayed your vows, Siddhartha.
You have given up the search.
We can no longer follow you.
We can no longer learn from you.
To learn is to change.
The path to enlightenment is in the middle way.
It is the line between all opposite extremes.
It was springtime.
The moon was full.
Before the sun would rise, Siddhartha's long search would be over.
He sat down under a Bodhi tree in the shelter of the natural world in all of its beauty
and fullness, and he said, I will not move from this place until I have solved my problem.
Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up together with all the flesh and blood of my body, he
said.
I welcome it.
But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom.
All at once, Mara, Lord of Desire, rose to challenge him.
With an army of demons, he attacked.
Mara is the ruler of this realm of desire.
This world that we all live in.
And what he's afraid Siddhartha is going to do when he attains enlightenment and becomes
the Buddha is conquer that world.
That is, he's going to do away with desire.
He's going to wreck the whole game.
Mara did not give up.
He sent his three daughters to seduce him.
Siddhartha remained still.
Siddhartha resisted every temptation Mara could devise.
The Lord of Desire had one final test.
He demanded to know who would testify that Siddhartha was worthy of attaining ultimate
wisdom, and his demon army rose up to support him.
He reached down and touched the ground.
The Buddha reaches down and with his finger touches the earth.
He says, the earth is my witness.
He said, Mara, you are not the earth.
The earth is right here.
Siddhartha meditated throughout the night.
And all his former lives passed before him.
He remembers all his previous life, infinite numbers of previous lives, female and male
and every other race and every other being in the vast ocean of life forms.
And he remembered that all viscerally, so that means his awareness expanded to be all,
so that all the moments of the past were completely present to him.
He gains the power to see the process of birth, death and rebirth that all creatures go through.
He's given this sort of cosmic vision of the workings of the entire universe.
As the morning star appeared, he roared like a lion.
My mind, he said, is at peace.
The heaven shook and the Bodhi tree rained down flowers.
He had become the awakened one, the Buddha.
Buddhism is different than the other major world religious traditions because it is not
oriented around God but oriented around man.
And what Buddha taught is that we create our own suffering and the path out of suffering lies with us.
We can alleviate suffering by changing our perception of ourselves and our world.
Buddha taught that we suffer because we crave, because we're focused on ego
and because we assume things are permanent when they're actually impermanent.
And for Buddha, the way not to suffer is to recognize that everything is impermanent,
to live in ourselves and to recognize the transitory nature of all things.
And once we do that, then we can achieve nirvana.
Buddhists believe that we're already enlightened Buddhas and we just have to realize that ourselves.
And for Buddhists, because the focus isn't on God, we can transform ourselves to become enlightened.
We can understand the world in a particular way where we see the truth of our own natures.
And in that respect, Buddhism is a self-empowering religion that many people gravitate towards
because it doesn't necessitate that they worship any particular deity
or engage in any other type of ritual other than meditation, contemplation and introspection.
The Buddha didn't accept the existence of a single God who created the world.
And that's why we turn to Romans 1 to start with here
because I feel that this passage describes Buddhism very well.
It says in verse number 18,
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,
who hold the truth in unrighteousness,
because that which may be known of God is manifest in them.
For God has showed it unto them,
for the invincible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even its eternal power and Godhead,
so that they are without excuse,
because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God.
Neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations,
and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.
And the Bible often uses the word fool or foolish about the person who does not believe that there is a Creator God.
Now, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, Psalm 14, 1, says,
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
But notice picking up there in verse 22 of Romans 1, it says,
And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible men,
and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts,
to dishonor their own bodies between themselves,
who changed the truth of God into a lie,
and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who was blessed forever. Amen.
So what do we see here?
A denial of the Creator, the fool saying in his heart that there is no God,
this is what the 500 million followers of Buddhism represent.
Now, not only that, but it talks about the fact that they then would make an image of man as a replacement for God,
or even an image of animals, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.
This is what we would know as idolatry.
See, idolatry is a major feature of Buddhism.
They don't just deny that God exists and deny the Creator,
but they also have a lot of idolatry in their religion.
The most famous idolatry associated with Buddhism would be the image of Buddha himself.
And you often see those statues that are usually made out of metal, a molten image,
where you have Buddha sitting cross-legged, lotus-style,
and he's got a big smile on his face, or a very stoic look on his face,
or all the different styles of Buddhas that you'll see.
Often, you'll see Asian people that will wear a jade Buddha around their neck at the end of a necklace as well.
So, this is a huge feature of Buddhism.
You go to restaurants that are owned by those who are Buddhists, you go into the homes of Buddhist people,
you'll see all manner of idolatry.
Molten images, graven images, this is a big part of the religion.
How does God feel about idolatry?
Look what the Bible says in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 4.
This is one of the Ten Commandments, the Second Commandment.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them, for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.
Now, is it interesting that those who make graven images and molten images are associated with those who hate God?
Why? Because of the fact that people don't want to acknowledge God,
they don't want to believe in the true God of the Bible, so they form and fashion their own God.
And that's why those two things are associated there in Exodus, chapter 20.
You don't have to turn there, but in Isaiah, chapter 30, if you would, you turn to 1 Corinthians 10.
You go to 1 Corinthians 10. In Isaiah 30, verse 22, God uses very strong language in his condemnation of idolatry,
graven images, molten images. Listen to how God speaks about idolatry.
He says in Isaiah 30, verse 20,
Ye shall defile also the coverings of the graven images of silver, and the ornament of thy molten images of gold.
Thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth. Thou shalt say unto it, Get thee hence.
I mean, that's pretty strong language condemning idolatry in the book of Isaiah.
He says in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 14 in the New Testament,
Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.
Jump down to verse 19.
What say I then, that the idol is anything, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is anything?
But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God.
And I would not that you should have fellowship with devils.
You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils.
You cannot be partakers of the Lord's table and of the table of devils.
So even though Buddhism denies, the first point is that they deny the existence of the creator.
All types of Buddhists, all denominations of Buddhism deny a creator God, non-theistic religion.
But although they do deny the creator, they do believe in various deities or basically demons that they will worship and things like that.
Although they don't believe that any of them is really God or the creator.
These are advanced practitioners, you might say, of the Bodhisattva path.
Who have reached the 8th or the 9th or the 10th stages in the 10 stages of the Bodhisattva path.
And they've achieved extraordinary superhuman powers.
These powers make it possible for celestial Bodhisattvas to reside in the heavens.
Hence the name celestial.
They're up there in the heavens.
And it makes it possible, these powers make it possible for them to function as the Buddhist equivalent of the Hindu gods.
Because we're still operating here within the world view and the religious system of traditional India.
Buddhists insist though that these great Bodhisattvas have gone so far beyond the Hindu gods in their power and in their understanding of reality.
That it's really not appropriate to think of them as being even gods at all.
So what we do technically when we speak about the celestial Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana is to call them I suppose Buddhist deities.
Or call them simply celestial Bodhisattvas in order to distinguish them from the Hindu gods.
This leads us in an interesting way I think into the heart of the Mahayana.
I sometimes think that the most basic form of religious practice especially in a theistic religious tradition although it also applies here in the Mahayana.
Is simply to call on the name of the deity and expect the deity in some way to respond.
Or at least to meditate in some way on the presence of the deity and the deities concern for you.
And so they worship these devils. That's what the Bible says about idolatry in 1 Corinthians 10.
That idolatry is the worship of devils. It is the worship of demons.
So Buddhism is a kind of bait and switch. They appeal to people by saying there's no god.
You don't have to take anything on faith. It's all verified by your own experience.
But then the next thing you know you're bowing down to a bunch of carved images and chanting the names of Hindu gods.
Literally praying to demons. But you're told that these aren't really gods. They're just deities.
You know they're just these ascended masters or celestial Buddhas celestial Bodhisattvas that you're going to pray to and get your prayers answered.
But that's not what they start out telling people. They start out with oh there's no creator God.
And that's how they suck in people who don't want to believe in God.
And by the way that's why Buddhism is becoming so popular in the United States today.
That's why amongst a lot of those who live an ungodly and wicked life, Buddhism is appealing to them.
They don't want anything to do with the God of the Bible. And as our country becomes more and more atheistic.
And as children are being brought up in school with atheism and agnosticism.
Well Buddhism is a perfect fit. Hey you can be spiritual but without God.
Without believing in God. Without acknowledging the God of the Bible. Or really without believing in any God. No creator.
This is why Buddhism is on the rise in the West in the last century. And especially in the last few years.
But secondly this about Buddhism. The goal of Buddhism is to achieve what's called Nirvana.
Which literally means extinguishment. That's what it means the original language. The word Nirvana.
Now basically the goal of Buddhism. You're not even going to believe this. The goal of Buddhism is to die.
And never come back. Just to be dead. Just to be gone. That's the goal.
Now a lot of people misunderstand this. They think oh Nirvana that's heaven or that's this wonderful place or a wonderful state that you get to and it's so great.
No no no. It's just to die and never come back. That's the goal.
Now I don't know about you but that's not really aiming very high. The goal is just to die. It's just to be gone.
And you say well why in the world would somebody have that as their goal. Just to die and be gone and cease to exist.
Well because Buddhism teaches that all of life is suffering. All of human life is suffering.
Everything about our law. Everything that we do. Everything that we experience is all suffering.
And this is about as deep as you can go into the Buddhist concept of suffering.
When they say that all is suffering they mean of course that some things are painful.
They mean also that some things are impermanent. That all things are impermanent and pass away.
But what they mean in the most fundamental sense is that there is no permanent reality that gives anything any identity that endures from one moment to the next.
It's the great Buddhist doctrine of no self. To recognize that there is no self in the end is not to lose anything important.
It's simply to let go of the frustration and the attachment that brings suffering to this world.
And in that sense this extraordinary claim all is suffering becomes a claim about freedom, about buoyancy, about lightness and about in the end nirvana.
Now we face here with the concept of nirvana a dilemma that's fairly similar to the dilemma we faced earlier with the concept of suffering.
Nirvana is spoken of in the Buddhist tradition as being extremely desirable. Something that we would really like to seek.
And yet we have to confront it I think initially as being a rather harsh concept.
A concept that has to do with the extinction of things that for many of us at least are pretty desirable, pretty positive in our normal understanding of human life.
So we have to ask ourselves this basic question, you know, why do Buddhists treat this as being such a desirable goal?
What's so great about this? Why would you ever want to seek nirvana if it involves the extinction of all of these things that to many of us are really quite desirable?
The first answer to this question I think really has to be one in which we look very carefully again at the Indian assumption about the nature of reincarnation.
I think the concept of nirvana forces us really to take quite seriously the negative aspect, the negative evaluation of the concept of reincarnation in this Indian tradition.
If reincarnation is something you don't want, if you really don't want to come back again and again in some future life, then really what you want to do, what you seek is the stopping of that.
And the Buddha found how to do that. That was the great thing that he discovered.
This is what Buddhism teaches. They teach that the goal is to never come back, to stop this endless cycle of reincarnation, which by the way doesn't even exist.
We know where Buddha is really at. He's burning in hell. He's burning in hell right now. Oh yeah, with Buddha you don't have to take anything on faith.
Well how do we know that he achieved nirvana? How do we know he's not roasting in hell right now? In fact that's where he's at.
This is the place where the Buddha came from.
Welcome to Ner Grace Corp.
This is the place where the Buddha came from.
This is where the Buddha came from.
A man has a man with a called Satsang.
very beautiful.
The fire was on fire and it came to the house.
And I saw the fire.
I thought I was a bad man.
I thought that I was a bad man.
But, I was still on fire.
The fire was on fire and the fire was on fire.
I am very happy to be able to be a part of this community.
I am very happy to be able to be part of this community.
Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors.
For whoso findeth me, findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord.
But he that sinneth against me, wrongeth his own soul.
All they that hate me love death.
Now, like I said, the word nirvana in the original language literally means extinguishment.
And what they mean by that is that, you know, all desire is extinguished.
Basically, you don t care about anything.
Because they claim that the reason why you keep getting reincarnated and coming back is because you want to come back.
You know, you have all this desire that s unfulfilled.
So you got to get to where you just don t care.
Well, I think we have to say, using the language of the Indian tradition, that he was exquisitely free.
First of all, he was free from desire. He was free from ignorance.
And there was nothing in that sense that troubled him or disturbed his heart.
Nirvana can be translated as freedom.
Freedom from views.
And in Buddhism, all views are wrong views.
When you get in touch with reality, you no longer have views.
You have wisdom. You have a direct encounter with reality.
And that is no longer called views.
Now, what is the relationship between Buddhism and suicide?
Well, let me give you a quote from a very popular Buddhist.
This is a Vietnamese Buddhist. He s very famous.
Thich Nhat Hanh. He s 88 years old, vegan.
Buddy of Martin Luther King Jr. Author of 100 books, etc.
And he s referring to all these Vietnamese Buddhists who were committing suicide by throwing themselves into the fire.
To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction, but to perform an act of construction.
See, it s very constructive to throw yourself in the fire. Let s finish this quote here.
This is to suffer and to die for the sake of one s people.
No, somebody already did that. His name is Jesus.
You don t need to throw yourself in the fire. That s not going to help your people at all.
And why don t you throw yourself in the fire, buddy? You re 88 years old, eating a bunch of vegan food.
You haven t thrown yourself in the fire yet, but you like it when other people do it.
Here s what he said. This is not suicide.
Suicide is an act of self-destruction.
This self-destruction is considered by Buddhism as one of the most serious crimes.
The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope, nor does he desire non-existence.
The monk believes he s practicing the doctrine of highest compassion by sacrificing himself in order to call attention of and to seek help from the people of the world.
So this is actually a wonderful thing. It s not suicide. You just don t understand Buddhism.
Lighting yourself on fire is constructive. It takes great courage.
Okay, look what the Bible says in Matthew 17, 14.
And when they would come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man kneeling down to him and saying,
Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is lunatic and sore vexed, for oft times he falleth into the fire and oft into the water, and I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.
Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring a mither to me.
And Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him, and the child was cured from that very hour.
You see, the Bible associates throwing yourself in the fire with being demon possessed.
That s what we see here. It s a death worship. It s a love and pursuit of death.
And they can call it whatever they want. That s what I m calling it. That is what it really comes down to.
But in regard to that, the Buddhists literally worship Buddha s dead corpse. Literally.
You see, when Buddha died, or as they would say, he reached pare nirvana, complete nirvana.
When Buddha died, they actually cremated his body, and they made sure to divide it up into as many small pieces,
because they wanted to put it in all these different shrines where his dead corpse could be worshipped in as many places and by as many people as possible,
so that they could literally bow down and worship the dead corpse of Buddha.
The Buddha died at the age of 84. His body was cremated, but his bones remained unburned.
They were distributed amongst the various tribes, rulers and kingdoms who are now starting to follow the Buddhist way,
and who honoured its founder by building monuments, or stupas, over his remains.
In Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, stands the Bodhanath stupa.
It was first built in the 5th or early 6th centuries AD, then rebuilt and restored a number of times.
Finally, as this giant enclosed tomb in the 14th century.
It is the largest in the Indian subcontinent, a sacred place for thousands of Buddhists throughout the world.
Buddhism consists, as far as Buddhists are concerned, in three things which they call the Three Jewels,
and those three things are closely connected. The first is the Buddha, the founder of their religion.
The second is called the Sangha, and that is the community of monks and nuns.
The third is called the Dharma. The Dharma refers to the preaching, the teaching of the Buddha.
In other words, it's what the Buddha discovered, and it's also the truth.
As you walk around the Bodhanath here, you always have this sense that you're being watched,
and that's because the Buddha's all-seeing eyes are always staring down at you.
Something you won't find represented up there are the Buddha's ears, and there is a particular reason for that.
They're told that the Buddha said he never wanted to hear that he was being worshipped.
Thank God for the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. I serve a risen Savior. He's in the world today.
I know that he is living whatever man may say.
He lives, he lives, Christ Jesus lives today. He walks with me and talks with me. A long life snare away.
He lives, he lives, salvation to impart. You ask me how I know. Sing it!
He lives, he lives within my heart. Okay, or you can worship the dead corpse of Buddha.
If we go around and ask people, do you know for sure if you died today, you'd go to heaven?
A lot of them would say, yes, because I'm a good person, or yes, because I keep the commandments, or yes, I live a good life.
But that's not what the Bible says. The Bible actually says that we're not saved by our good deeds or our good life.
It says that we're saved by the gospel, which is the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.
Now, the reason why it's important to understand that we're not saved by how good we are,
the Bible says in Romans chapter 3 verse 10, as it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one.
So none of us is righteous. I'm not righteous. You're not righteous.
And the Bible says for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
Every single one of us has sinned before, and because of that sin, we come short of the glory of God.
Well, the Bible says there's a punishment for our sin. It says for the wages of sin is death.
But not only are we going to die physically one day, the Bible talks about a second death.
It says, and death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
Now, what would we normally call that lake of fire? What would we refer to that as?
Right. And the Bible actually has a list of people that are going to hell.
It says, but the fearful and unbelieving and the abominable and murderers and sorcerers and whoremongers and idolaters
and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
Now, this doesn't really look like a room full of murderers to me. I don't see a lot of murderers in here.
Probably not a lot of sorcerers. Anybody in here into black magic and witchcraft? Probably not.
So you may not be a sorcerer or a murderer or anything like that, but you know what the Bible does say, and all liars.
And I know I've lied before. Who here has lied before? Yeah, every single person.
The Bible says, yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.
Unfortunately, we've all committed that sin. We've all lied before.
But the Bible said all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
So according to the Bible, that's where we all deserve to go, to the second death, to the lake of fire.
Because we've all sinned. We've all lied. And let's be honest, we've done other sins too.
There are times when we've disobeyed our parents, which is a sin.
There are times when we may have stolen something.
Or even the Bible says just the thought of foolishness is sin.
Even just thinking a stupid thought is a sin.
And we have thousands of thoughts every day. I'm sure many of them are foolish. I'm sure many of them are stupid.
So we've all sinned, but the good news is that God loves us.
And if God loves us, of course he does not want us to go to hell.
But was he just kidding when he said that the lake of fire is where we're going if we've lied?
No. That's no joke.
But that's why Jesus Christ came to this earth to save us.
The Bible says, but God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
And Jesus Christ was God in the form of a human being.
Right? Because there's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.
And so God himself came down to this earth in the form of a human being.
He was born as a little baby, born of a virgin.
And he was just a little baby, and he grew up.
And he lived a perfect life. He never sinned one time.
He was tempted in all points like as we are yet without sin.
Now Jesus performed a lot of miracles, didn't he?
Does anybody remember some of the miracles that Jesus performed?
Anybody remember one?
Your hand popped up. Who's got one?
Yes, there was a deaf man that he healed. What else did he do?
Healed a blind man?
He turned water into wine. Great. Anybody else got one?
He raised Lazarus from the dead. Did she take yours?
Anybody else got one?
What about when he fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes? You remember that?
He did a lot of miracles. What about when Peter, remember his disciple Peter,
actually whipped out a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane?
And Peter swung a sword and chopped off one of the servants of the high priest's ear.
And Jesus picked up the guy's ear and put it back on and healed it, right? You remember that story?
So Jesus performed a lot of miracles, but he also preached the Word of God.
He also preached the truth.
And a lot of people are offended by the truth.
They get angry when they hear about the truth.
When they hear the Bible preached, it offends people. It angers people sometimes.
And so Jesus had a lot of enemies.
So eventually Jesus got arrested.
And they arrested Jesus at night.
And they took him down at night.
And they actually put him on trial.
And then they beat him. They spit on him.
They hit him in the head with a stick.
And they also whipped him.
And after that they nailed him onto the cross.
And the Bible says that when Jesus was nailed to that cross, that he himself bare our sins in his own body on the tree.
That means that every sin that you've ever done, and every sin that I've ever done, it was as if Jesus had done it.
He was basically being punished for our sins.
And then after Jesus died on the cross, they buried his body in a tomb of a rich man named Joseph of Arimathea.
They put him in that tomb and put a big giant stone over the door of where his body was laid.
And his soul went down into hell for three days and three nights.
And then three days later, what happened?
He rose again from the dead, right?
And when Jesus rose again from the dead, he showed the disciples the holes in his hands and the hole in his side just to prove that it was really him.
Now Jesus died for everybody in this whole world.
But everybody's not automatically going to go to heaven.
Because the Bible's teaching that there's one thing that we must do to be saved.
And it asked that question one time.
It said, what must I do to be saved?
And they said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.
And that's it.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.
So it does not say that you have to join my church to be saved.
It doesn't say join your church to be saved.
It doesn't say to join any church to be saved.
Church is important.
Church is good.
But when it comes to being saved, the one thing that we must do to be saved is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ in order to be saved.
Now, there are lots of things that we should do, right?
What are some things that we should do?
I mean, we should read our Bibles.
We should pray.
We should go to church.
We should keep the commandments.
We should be a good student in school.
We should obey our parents, obey the teacher.
Those are all good things that we should do.
But when it comes to what we must do, what we must do to be saved, it's one thing.
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.
See, John 3.16 says, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever, whoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
So notice it doesn't say whoever is good enough.
It doesn't say whoever stops sinning.
It says whoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
The Bible says, For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it's the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.
So salvation is the gift of God.
Let me ask you this.
If I were to give you a gift today, would you have to give me money for that if I'm giving you a gift?
You're going like this, but now you're going like this.
All right.
Yeah.
If somebody gives you a gift, it's free, right?
So if I said, hey, what's your name?
Hakeem.
Hakeem?
If I said, hey, I'm going to give you this Bible as a gift, Hakeem, but you've got to give me $5,000.
Is that a gift?
What if I said, okay, Hakeem, I've got this Bible for you.
It's a free gift, but my car is outside.
I need you to clean it out and wash it, and then I'll give it to you.
Is that a gift?
No.
Okay.
What if I said, hey, Hakeem, I'm going to give you this Bible as a gift, but you're going to be my servant for the rest of your life.
So you have to obey everything, whatever I tell you.
Is that a gift?
No.
No way.
Okay.
What if I said, here, Hakeem, I'm going to give you this Bible as a gift.
It's yours for free.
And then I came back two weeks later, and I come into the class, and I say, hey, Hakeem, I need that back.
Is that a gift?
No.
Because the thing about a gift is that a gift is free, and once you receive it, it's yours forever.
You get to keep it, right?
So let me ask you this.
If God gives us the gift of eternal life, is he going to come back and take it away from us?
Is he going to break his promise and take it away?
The Bible says this is the promise that he has promised us, even eternal life.
So if God promises us eternal life, is he going to break that promise and take it away from us?
So once he gives you that gift, it's yours.
Now, that's why the gospel is called good news, because that's good news.
The good news is it's easy to go to heaven.
Do you think a loving God would want to make it hard to go to heaven or easy to go to heaven?
If he loves us, right?
It's easy.
He wants us to be saved.
He did the hard part when he died for us.
That was the hard part, being crucified, being buried, rising again.
All we have to do is believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
It's that easy to be saved, okay?
And then once we receive that free gift of eternal life, there's nothing we could ever do to lose that,
because Jesus promised us, I will never leave you nor forsake you.
Jesus said, I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.
Once we're saved, we have eternal life.
We're God's children.
He'll never leave us nor forsake us.
Now, if we go out and break the commandments after we're saved, we're still saved, but he will punish us on this earth.
You know, you will reap what you sow.
What goes around comes around.
And just as your parents will discipline you when you disobey, they'll punish you,
but they're not going to throw you out of the family, are they?
I mean, if you break a rule at your house, tell me a rule that's at your house.
What's one of the rules at your house?
There's no running in the hallway.
Okay, and what's your name?
Kelly?
Kellyanne?
So let's say Kellyanne goes home today and just starts running through the hallway.
Just running through the hallway, just running up and down the house, right?
Do you think your parents are going to say, you know, Kellyanne, you can't be our daughter anymore.
You must leave.
You must leave home.
We cannot have a daughter like you in our house.
We're sending you away.
Do you think that would happen?
Okay, but do you think that they're just going to smile and say it's okay?
Just keep on running, Kellyanne.
Do you think they're just going to be like a pit crew, like giving her water and Gatorade and telling her to keep running?
No, they're going to make her stop, right?
And they're going to discipline her and say, hey, you break the rules, you're going to be punished.
But they're not going to throw her out of the family.
Well, here, it's the same thing with God.
If we break God's rules, he'll punish us on this earth, but he's not going to kick us out of the family, okay?
Now, if she commits, if she breaks it, that's probably a small rule.
There's probably other bigger rules where she'd get a bigger punishment, okay?
So let's say she breaks a huge rule, she's going to get a huge punishment.
If she breaks a little rule, she's going to get a little punishment.
But no matter what she does, she's still going to be their daughter.
They're still going to love her, right?
They're still going to give her food and a place to sleep.
It's the same way with God.
Once we believe on Jesus Christ, we're his children.
He'll never leave us, he'll never forsake us.
If we break the rules, he'll discipline us, but he's not going to throw us out of the family.
Does everybody understand what I'm saying today?
Who believes what I'm saying today?
You believe that Jesus died for your sins and rose again and that you're saved by believing in Christ.
Who believes that?
Okay, well listen, I want to pray with you real quick before I go, okay?
I'm just about done.
I just want to pray with you and help you tell God that that's what you believe right now and just confess that to God right now.
So let's bow our heads and pray.
You can just repeat this after me and just say this to God.
Dear Jesus, I know that I'm a sinner.
I know I deserve hell, but thank you for dying on the cross for me and rising again from the dead.
Please save me right now and give me the gift of eternal life.
I'm only trusting you, Jesus.
Your death, your burial, and your resurrection.
Amen.
Now who just prayed that prayer right now and you meant it?
Put up your hand if you meant that.
Yeah.
So here's the thing.
Here's what the Bible said.
It said that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shall believe in thine heart that God has raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
He didn't say you might be saved.
He said you shall be saved.
Isn't that great news?
So you already know the last chapter in your life.
You already know that you're going to heaven when you die.
But the question is how are you going to live your life in between, right?
Do you want to just keep getting disciplined like if Kellyanne just ran through the hall every day?
Do you want to keep getting disciplined or do you want God to bless you and please?