Transcript of an excerpt of a message by Voddie Baucham given at the 2022, Shepherd’s Conference:

I want to tell you a story. This story doesn’t originate with me. It’s a story that’s been used to sort of illustrate postmodernism, and I think if you’ll bear with me you’ll see how it relates to what we’re dealing with here tonight.

The story goes something like this: There’s a man and he’s walking with his son through a strawberry patch. He takes a strawberry, eats a strawberry, gives a strawberry to his son. The strawberry is good, beautiful, perfect, sweet. But something happens to strawberries over time. Eventually strawberries are chopped up and used in other foods. They’re put on top of cereal. Literally, strawberries are made into strawberry preserves and into strawberry jam. Eventually strawberries get messed with, processed, and put inside of things like Pop-Tarts.

Eventually you get into a laboratory where you have the essence of strawberry without strawberries. Eventually men don’t take their sons to strawberry patches anymore to give them strawberries. They go and get them strawberry slushes that don’t actually have any strawberry in them whatsoever. It’s just a combination of chemicals and colors and high fructose this and that. Then the kid loves the strawberry slush and he gets used to the strawberry slush.

One day the kid, who’s grown to love the strawberry slush that has no strawberries in it, is walking through a strawberry patch. He picks up an actual strawberry, eats it, and doesn’t like it because it doesn’t taste like the slush.

Brothers, I think that’s what we’ve seen happen to the gospel.