◑ Fourth indictment: An ignorance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I want to submit to you tonight that this country is not gospel hardened. It is gospel ignorant because most of its preachers are. And let me repeat this. The malady in this country is not liberal politicians, the root of socialism, Hollywood or anything else. It is the so called evangelical pastor of our day and preacher of our day and evangelist of our day. That is where the malady is to be found. We do not know the gospel. We have taken the glorious gospel of our blessed God and reduced it down to four spiritual laws and five things God wants you to know with a little superstitious prayer at the end and if someone repeats it after us with enough sincerity we popishly declare them to be born again.
We have traded regeneration for decisionism.
First of all I am amazed after I talk about what I am going to talk about for just a few minutes here how many godly believers of 30 and 40 years walking in the faith come up to me with tears saying, “Brother Paul, I never heard this before in my life.” And yet it is the historical doctrine of redemption, of propitiation.
You see, when you talk about the gospel, my dear friend, let’s set it up just clearly. The gospel begins with nature of God and it goes from there to the nature of man and the fallenness thereof. And it goes from there, those two great columns of the gospel come to set up for us what should be called and known as, in every believer’s mouth, the great dilemma. And what is that dilemma? If God is just he cannot forgive you.
The greatest problem in all of Scripture is this. How can God be just and at the same time the justifier of wicked men, when Scripture throughout the Bible says—especially I will draw from one text in Proverbs—“He who justifies the wicked is an abomination to God.”13 And yet all our Christian songs boast about how God justifies the wicked.
That is the greatest problem. That is the acropolis of the Christian’s faith so said Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Charles Spurgeon and anyone else who has read Romans three. You see, you have got to fit this before people. The great problem is that God is truly just and all men are truly wicked, God to be just must condemn wicked man. But then God, for his own glory, put a great love with which he loved us, sent forth his Son who walked on this earth as a perfect man. And then according to the plan, the eternal plan of God, he went to that tree. And on that tree he bore our sin and he became, standing in the law place of his people, bearing our guilt, he became a curse.
“Cursed is every man who does not abide by al the things written in the book of the law so as to perform them.”14
Christ redeemed us from the curse becoming a curse in our place.
So many people have this romantic, powerless view of the gospel that the Christ is there hanging on the tree suffering under the wounds of the Roman Empire and the Father did not have the moral fortitude to bear the suffering of his Son so he turned away.
NO!!
He turned away because his Son became sin.
And so many when he is in that garden and he cries out, “Let this cup pass from Me,”15 people speculate, “Well, what was in the cup? Oh, it is the Roman cross. It is the whip. It is the nails. It is all this and all that.”
I do not want to take away from the physical sufferings of Christ on that tree, but the cup was the cup of God the Father’s wrath that had to be poured out on the Son. Someone had to die, bearing the guilt of God’s people, forsaken of God by his justice and crushed under the wrath of God, for it pleased the Lord to crush him.16
I was in German a while back or in a Germanic seminary in Europe a while back and this book The Cross of Christ, now it wasn’t John Stott’s book, it was another. I pulled it off and began to read it and this is what it said. “The Father looked down from heaven at the suffering inflicted upon his Son by the hands of men and counted that as payment for our sin.”
That is heresy.
Now that physical suffering, that nailing to the tree, that was all part of the wrath of God. It had to be a blood sacrifice. I will take nothing away from that. But, my friend, if you stop there, you don’t have a gospel.
And let me ask you. When the gospel is preached today and when it is shared in personal evangelism today do you ever hear the things I have just said? Almost never. It is never made clear that Christ was able to redeem because he was crushed under the justice of God and having satisfied divine justice with his death God is now just and the justifier of the wicked.
Gospel reductionism. We wonder why it has no power. We wonder why... What happened? I’ll tell you. When you leave the gospel behind and there is no longer any power in your supposed gospel message, then you have got to go to all the little tricks of the trade that are so prominently used today to convert men and we all know most of them, all of them do not work.
My dear friend, let me say this. Several years ago graduating from seminary I had to make a decision whether I was going to go for my Ph.D. God, in order to save my spiritual life sent me to the middle of the jungles in Peru as far away from the academic world as I could get. And there I began to realize something.
As Spurgeon said, “Greater men with greater minds than I have approached this doctrine of the Second Coming, but to no avail. It is a great and mighty doctrine.” He said, “I will set myself to this: seeking to comprehend something of Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
Let me tell you this. This is what... It makes me so angry when men treat the glorious gospel of Christ as though it was the first step into Christianity that only takes about 10 minutes to counseling and after that you go on to greater stuff. That shows you how pathetic we are in our knowledge of the things of God.
My friend, on the day of the Second Coming you will understand absolutely everything about the Second Coming, but you will be in eternity of eternities of heaven and you will not even begin to comprehend the glory of God in Calvary. It is what everything is about.
Young man, young preacher, listen to me. Go after Him on that tree, what it means. You will need nothing to build strange fires in your oven, if you only catch a glimpse of what he did on that tree, what he did on that tree.
I love to say this. I have said it a million times. Abraham takes Isaac up that mountain, his son, his only son whom he loved. Do you suppose the Holy Spirit was trying to tell us about something future? And that son put up no struggle, but laid down and when that Father gave his will in to the will of God he brought that flint knife to pierce his own son’s heart. But his hand was stayed and it was told the old man that God had provided a ram.
So many Christians think, “Oh, what a beautiful end to that story.” It is not the end. It is the intermission. Thousands of years later God the Father laid his hand upon the brow of his Son, his only Son whom he loved and took the flint knife out of the hand of Abraham and slaughtered his only begotten Son under the full force of wrath.
Now do you know why that little gospel you preach has no power? Because it is no gospel. Get to the gospel. Spend your life on your knees. Get away from men. Study the cross.
◑The fourth indictment: An ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration, an ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration.
My dear friends, and I am going to say this bluntly, I know that there are Calvinists here and I know that there are Arminians here and I know that there are all sorts of strange animals in between, but I want you to know this. Although I am leaning more toward—I guess I call myself a five point Spurgeonist—I want you to know this. Calvinism is not the issue. No, I am going to get in a lot of trouble when this goes on the internet. Calvinism is not the issue. I’ll tell you what the issue is. Regeneration. And that is why I can have fellowship with Wesley and Ravenhill and Tozer and all the rest because regardless of where they stood on the other issues they believed that salvation could not be manipulated by the preacher, that it was a magnificent work of the power of almighty God. And with them, therefore, I stand, that I was a work of God.
There is a greater manifestation of the power of God in the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit than in the creation of the world, of the universe, because he created the world ex nihilo out of nothing. But he recreates a man out of a corrupt man.
It is paralleled with the very resurrection of our Savior from the dead. If you are a preacher I understand that in preaching there is teachers and preachers and expositors and this and that and all of them are very necessary for the health of the Church. But you must understand this. As old G. Campbell Morgan, I have heard of him that when he would go up that majestic tower to preach he would quote to himself, “As a lamb led to the slaughter, as a sheep before his shearers.”17 He knew that apart from a magnificent manifestation of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, everything he said would be dead. It is the Spirit that gives life and in that sense every one of us that proclaims must proclaim as a prophet.
What do I mean by that? We are always, we are always Ezekiel standing in that valley of dry bones and they are very dry. And we walk out there and what do we do? We prophesy. We say, “Hear the Word of the Lord.” And we know that the wind of God must blow on these slain or they will not rise again. And when you have fully grasped that in the innermost part of your being, you will no longer give yourself to the manipulation that is so often carried out in the name of evangelism in this country. You will proclaim the Word of God. You will proclaim it.
The doctrine of regeneration. Look at the Wesleys. Look what they had to face for a moment and my dear Whitefield. What was he? Everybody believed they were Christian, thoroughly Christian. Why? Well, they were baptized as infants, brought into the covenant. They were confirmed. They lived like devils. Regeneration was traded for a type of credalism that was given authority by the religious leaders of the day.
And then here comes the Wesleys. No. It is not right with your soul. You are not born again. There is no evidence of spiritual life. Examine yourself. Test yourself to see if you are in the faith. Make your calling and election sure.18 “Ye must be born again.”19
Here in America because of the last several years, several decades of evangelism the idea of born again is totally lost. It only means that at one time in a crusade you made a decision and you think you were sincere. But there is no evidence of a supernatural recreated work of the Holy Spirit in your life. If any man, not if some men, if any man be in Christ he is a new creature. 20
And now it is the same today. What do we face? I will tell you what we face. It is not a sort of infant baptism necessarily most of the time. It is not a high church confirmation by an ecclesiastical authority. What we face is the sinners’ prayer. And I am here to tell you, if there is anything I have declared war on it is that.
You say. “Brother Paul...”
Yes, in the same way that infant baptism, in my opinion, was the golden calf of the Reformation, for the Baptists and the Evangelicals and everyone else who has followed them today, I will tell you, that sinners’ prayer has sent more people to hell than anything on the face of the earth.
You say, “How can you say such a thing?”
Go with me to Scripture and show me, please. I would love you to stand up and tell me where anyone evangelized that way. The Scripture does not say that Jesus Christ came to the nation of Israel and said that “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, now who would like to ask me into their hearts? I see that hand.”
That is not what it says. He said, “Repent and believe the gospel.”21
Now men today are trusting in the fact that at least one time in their life they prayed a prayer and someone told them they were saved because they were sincere enough. And so in their salvation if you ask them, “Are you saved?” they do not say, “Yes, I am
because I am looking unto Jesus and there is mighty evidence giving me assurance of being born again.”
No. They say, “One time in my life I prayed a prayer.”
And they live like devils. But they prayed a prayer. And some of them... I heard of one evangelist who was coaxing a man to do that thing. Finally the man felt so uncomfortable the evangelist said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I will pray to God for you and if it is what you want to say to God, squeeze my hands. Behold the power of God.”
Decisionism, the idolatry of decisionism. Men think they are going to heaven because they have judged the sincerity of their own decision.
When Paul came to the Church in Corinth he did not say to them, “Look, you are not living like Christians so let’s go back to that one moment in your life when you prayed that prayer and let’s see if you were sincere.”
No, he said this, “Test yourselves, examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith.”
Because I want you to know, my friends, salvation is by faith alone. It is a work of God. It is a grace upon grace upon grace. But the evidence of conversion is not just your examination of your sincerity at the moment of your conversion. It is the on going fruit in your life. It is the ongoing fruit in your life.
Oh, my dear friends, look what we have done. Isn’t a tree known by its fruit? What 60%, 70% of America thinks it is converted, born again. We kill how many thousands of babies a day? We are hated around the world for our immorality. Yet we are Christian.
And I lay this squarely, the blame, at the feet of the preacher.
Fifth indictment: An unbiblical gospel invitation.
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