everybody this morning. Let's
be turning to the book of Acts chapter 11. Acts 11. Donna and I have had such a wonderful
time this week. I want to read several verses
out of Acts 11, so just bear with me. We'll begin with Acts
11 1. All right, here we go, Acts 11
and 1. And the apostles and brethren
that were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also received
the word of God. And when Peter was come up to
Jerusalem, they that were of the circumcision contended with
him, saying, You went in to men uncircumcised and did eat with
them. Peter rehearsed the matter from
the beginning and expounded it in order unto them, saying, I
was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision,
a certain vessel descended as it had been a great sheet let
down from heaven by four corners, and it came even to me. Upon
the witch, when I had fastened my eyes, I considered and saw
four-footed beasts of the earth and wild beasts and creeping
things and fowls of the air. And I heard a voice saying unto
me, arise, Peter, slay and eat. But I said, not so, Lord, for
nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.
But the voice answered me again from heaven, what God hath cleansed,
that call not thou common. And all were drawn up again into
heaven. And behold, immediately there
were three men already come unto the house where I was, sent from
Caesarea unto me. And the Spirit bade me go with
them, nothing doubting. Moreover, these six brothers
accompanied me, and we entered into the man's house. And he
showed us how he had seen an angel in his house. which stood
and said unto him, send men to Joppa and call for Simon, whose
surname is Peter, who shall tell you words whereby you and all
thy house shall be saved. And as I began to speak, the
Holy Spirit fell on them, as on us at the beginning. Then
remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John
indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the
Holy Spirit. For as much then as God gave
them the light gift as he did unto us, who believed on the
Lord Jesus Christ, what was I that I could withstand God? And when
they heard these things, they held their peace, glorified God
saying, then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance
unto life. Let's pray. Father, what a gracious thing
it is when believers can meet together. What a wonderful thing
it is that when believers meet together, your spirit meets with
us. Lord, without your spirit, we
would just be a bunch of people chatting about various ideas
of our minds and various notions that we might have created. Lord,
we pray that your Holy Spirit would preside that the very spirit
of Christ would rule in our midst, would rule in my mind, rule over
my tongue, would rule in the minds of those who hear your
word, and that you would cause us, Lord, that we may actually
hear the voice of the Lord speaking unto us today. I'm delighted,
Lord, and I'm privileged, and I'm honored beyond measure to
be able to speak from your word. But, Lord, it's all for nothing.
It matters nothing and it accomplishes nothing except the spirit of
Christ meets with us. And I would pray for every one
of your children in the house that the spirit of Christ might
visit with them and where I've not been clear and where I may
not have made things as open as they ought to be. And Lord,
please grant me that I wouldn't but if I misunderstand your word. May your spirit be the one, Lord,
who corrects us and guides us and shows us into all the truth
of Christ. Now, Lord, do bless us, I pray,
together, that we may worship and that we may study these passages
together for a few moments, and may you reveal yourself in them,
for that's what we've come for, is to see Christ. For it's in
his name we pray, amen. I fear that most folks who read
verse 18 of our text distort its meaning by reaching the conclusion
that eternal life is the result, and I'm emphasizing that word
result, the result of a sinner's act of repentance. That's pretty
much the way I think all religionists are raised. I do the repenting
and if I repent, he'll save me in return. Actually, that's a
very tragic assumption and it serves as the primary means by
which you can identify all false religions. If your religion starts
with you, and somewhere along the line God picks up and does
something, you've got a bad religion. All true religion begins with
Christ and ends with Christ and it's Christ all the way through.
And if it's not him and him alone, it's not God's religion. It's not the truth of the scriptures.
According to them, salvation begins with us by an act of repentance
in exchange for which God, they feel, is obligated because I
repented, he's obligated to save them from the just penalty of
their sins. In short, God supposedly gives
them eternal life whenever they decide to become sorry for their
misdeeds. I don't know about you, but I
don't believe any of us have ever been sorry enough to qualify
for God's saving grace. The problem with that theory
that almost all religionists believe, the problem with that
theory is that Sorry, I've lost my paper. I'm going to have to
get these glasses fixed, that's for sure. Let me find my place. The problem with that theory
is that repentance, according to them, repentance must come
first. For them, repentance must precede
spiritual life. God can't save you until you
do something that they call repentance. That is, a sinner spiritually
dead in trespasses and sins must perform that divine miracle. I'll tell you what, let's try
it that way. Must perform that divine miracle
of becoming truly and thoroughly and eternally sorry for their
sins. I've known a lot of people growing up in religion in Eastern
Kentucky where they sure look like they were repentant. They
laid on an altar for hours. They'd come in and cry and beg
and plead and scream and ask for God to save them. But no
matter what kind of appearance of repentance that you give,
repentance is the gift of God. It's a change of mind that he
must give. And I know from long wasted years in that delusion
that no sinner who was void of the life of God Whether he or
she is religious or otherwise, no one has ever been able to
produce true godly sorrow. No one has ever been able to
fabricate that holy regret, that real understanding of what I
am before God, or to generate that sincere devastation of soul
that divinely inspired repentance alone is capable of producing.
I've seen a lot of people cry an awful lot of crocodile tears
and turn right around and forsake what they thought was the gospel
and walk right on down the road without it. In false religion,
repentance is no more than just telling God you're sorry. I didn't
mean to. I shouldn't have done that. I'm
sorry for my past sins and vainly they promise to never do them
again. But if repentance is reduced in this manner to an insincere
apology. I'm sorry, Lord. I'm sorry, Lord,
never saved anybody. I won't do that anymore, Lord.
Never got anybody anywhere with God. No, there's nothing about
that that saves. That's just someone trying to
make sure he doesn't split hell wide open. Just want to make
sure I've got all my tickets stamped and everything's taken
care of on my end. All that is is, Lord, I'm sorry,
followed up by that hypocritical promise, Lord, I'm not gonna
do that anymore. And if that's all repentance is, then it ceases
to be a true change of mind, and it becomes instead a religious
work of the flesh, by which we suppose that by our good intentions,
we can keep ourselves in good standing with God Almighty. I
remember as a very young child, I remember how miserable I got
when I finally, thinking that I could keep up with the flow
of sins that issued forth out of my mind and out of my desires
and out of my will. And I remember just going around
saying, Lord, forgive me. Lord, forgive me. What'd you
say? Oh, nothing. I get it to where I mumbled it so much that
I'd do it in public and not even think about it. What'd you say?
Yeah, nothing. Didn't say anything, Lord forgive
me, Lord forgive me. I suppose by my good intentions
that I can keep myself in good standing with God Almighty by
saying I'm sorry again and again and again. In spite of the fact
that never let up on my sins, my sinful mind was still my sinful
mind. My anger that I exhibited quite
often was still being exhibited just as much. And all my repentance
could not keep up with that heavy flow of my sinfulness. I call
that the pay as you sin program. Oh, I did it again. Lord, forgive
me. That's not the way the Lord saves.
No, that's not what God does for his people. The word for
repent in the original text is a compound composed of the two
simple words of change and mind. And repentance is just as simple
as that. It's a change, a divinely inspired change of mind. And
since the mind encompasses not only our thoughts, but also our
desires and our will, then repentance involves a change of everything.
Repentance is not just that one sin you sinned or that one sin
you keep doing, that one that keeps coming back. It's not just
trying to put a particular sin or a group of sins or something
you've done in your past away. It's not what that is. We can't
truly repent of all the things that we've done and all the things
we do, even since we've come in here this morning. Let's talk
about that just for a brief minute. to be saved by the grace of God
does not in any way annihilate or remove or alter or improve
our old man. You know what our old man does?
He sins all the time. And he's in me. I am my old man. Apart from Christ, all I am is
my old man. It's just me. And I can't stop. I can't stop thinking what I
think. Stuff just goes through my mind and I hate it. And I
look at that and I say, you're an idiot, Mark. You're just a
sinful, wretched idiot. Yes, I am. I am all the time,
all the time. So much so is that the case of
us in our flesh, that in order for God to save us, he must make
us, give us a new man. And if I'm looking at saved people,
and I believe I am, I'm looking at a bunch of people who are
two natures sitting right here before me. They have the same
person that they were born as, just as sinful and as God-hating
and as much opposed to the truth of faith in the scriptures as
we've ever been. And I believe I'm looking at
some people who, on the other hand, have a new nature, holy
nature, righteous nature, natured after the one who joined himself
with us and gave us his nature. We have the mind of Christ. That repent-as-you-go sort of understanding
of how to handle your sin, that's the kind of repentance that false
religion teaches. As long as you say you're sorry
every time you sin, according to their theory, you'll be okay.
But religious foolishness like that is nothing more or less
than the blatant abuse of grace. in the form of a salvation by
a dead sinner's promise over and over and over again to change
their ways. I want to stop doing that. Repentance
like that is an act. That kind of repentance is an
act in and of itself which ought to be repented of. We probably
ought to spend more time praying that prayer. Lord, forgive my
repentance. I'm sure it's worthless apart
from the grace of God. So here's my question. Does anyone
think that the act of saying I'm sorry or please forgive me
to God Almighty can magically undo the guilt of our sin. Boy,
there's a world full of religious meeting this morning that is
sure hoping that's true. They're sure hoping that's true.
That they've said enough I'm sorry's and that they've kept
up with all the sins and didn't miss any. That's how most people
would interpret that phrase, repentance unto life. I keep
on repenting, he keeps on giving me life. As long as I say I'm
sorry, he'll keep on forgiving me. But the truth is that's neither
true, nor is it the meaning of the passage that we've read,
much less does it even faintly resemble the gospel of God's
free grace. No son or daughter of Adam has
ever succeeded in changing God's mind about our sin by saying,
I'm sorry. The best thing God could ever
do for us when we think somehow or other we can put some sin
behind us by going to the closet and saying, Lord, I'm sorry.
The best thing God could do for us was to say, no, I'm just not
going to. That's just not enough. You know,
repentance never saved anybody, but everybody that God ever saved
sure repented. Repentance never did anything
to make us stop sinning, but when Christ joined himself to
us and made us love righteousness more than our sin, we sure changed
our mind then. No, both of those ways of either
promising to not do it again or to say I'm sorry, both of
those actually are just lies. They just constitute the sin
of lying. Not even if you wallow over an
altar for hours, crying, and I've seen that growing up, crying
until you can't produce another tear. None of that will, none
of those efforts will qualify for true repentance. If repentance
unto life means that my salvation is accomplished by my regret,
by my sorrow, or even by my personal act of faith, as people call
it, here's the problem with that. All that does is reduce God-given
repentance and faith to just another religious work of the
flesh. And God has said He will not receive those. If even the
scent, I don't know how religious you are, I don't know how good
your walk is or how nice you are or how congenial you are
and all the good human attributes you might have acquired, but
I do know this, that every time We rely on some action of our
own. Well, I repented. God's got to
forgive me, don't we, doesn't he? No, he doesn't. God forgives
for Christ's sake. He doesn't forgive for our sake.
No sinner ever, by virtue of his own brokenheartedness or
by virtue of his own good intentions, was ever received by the holy
God of heaven. We can't do that. We can't do
that. I'm happy you feel bad about
doing the bad things you do. Maybe you won't do them anymore.
It'd be good if you didn't. But it won't save you. It won't
save you. It won't make Christ love you
anymore. It won't make God love you anymore. No. Might as well
be a full-blown Pharisee, because that's exactly what they do.
And I want to just make sure that I've spoken as clearly as
I can. Let me remind you that again that the verse says, by
grace, by grace are you saved through faith, not by repentance,
not by repentance, by grace. You know what grace does? Grace
takes all of us out of the picture. I got nothing else to do. I can't
participate in that. Grace is the free gift of God.
Grace is him doing what he's pleased to do. I got no say in
that. He said, what'd he say? I'll
be gracious to whom I will be gracious. But what about me? I'll be gracious to whom I will
be gracious. You know, isn't that a wonderful
thing? No one would ever come to Christ who felt that they
could be repentant enough to merit God's grace. I'll be gracious
to whom I will. Lord, would you be gracious to
me? You know, I thought the good thing about that is you won't
find it in the scriptures, and you won't find it working its
way out in life, but every one that God says, I'll be gracious
to whom I will be gracious, and they fall on their face and say,
Lord, could I get in on that? Could I possibly be one of those?
And you'll find no record of him ever turning any of them
away. I'd already decided to be gracious to you. I already had you on my list.
It's called the election of grace. He saves him, he will. And every
last one of them come and say, Lord, I don't know why you would.
I don't know why you would want anything to do with me. I don't
know why you would have any mercy on me. But could I be on that
list? You've been on the list since
before the foundation of the world. What a wonderful God that
we have. Now, we're saved by grace, not by
repentance. Not by repentance. We're saved
by grace through faith. And that, that faith is not of
you. Even that is the gift of God.
What part did you play in salvation? The dead sinner. the dead sinner,
depending entirely on God to save me by his own will. If our
faith is of our own making, merely a mental and emotional attempt
to set things right with God, it's nothing but an ungodly counterfeit. If you're in it, it ain't right.
A perverted religious chant, Lord forgive me, Lord forgive
me, which neither procures forgiveness nor changes God's wrath against
our sin, and it leaves us as guilty before God as if we'd
never sought His mercy. Just some utterance that came
out of our mouth that went nowhere. Man-made faith and man-made repentance
are as sinful as the man who makes them, and are absolutely
worthless as a means by which we may obtain the grace of God.
Again, I say, If you are in the equation of your supposed salvation,
if anywhere along that line of how God takes a sinner from being
absolutely, eternally lost to absolutely, unlosably saved,
if you're in that equation, it'll go wrong every time. It cannot
be. No. We're the ones who need to
be saved, and we can do nothing about it either way. What commonly
passes these days for repentance is merely a band-aid, just a
band-aid for the conscience of lost religionists. I remember
a man I knew in the past who was a very devout religionist,
and I remember from time to time he would break off from a conversation
or he would break off from what we were doing. He'd say, I've
got to go make some things right with God. He'd actually make
that statement. Pardon me just a minute. I've
got to go make some things right with God. And it sounded so pious. And the first time I heard that,
I thought, man, that guy's, he's serious about this stuff. I've got to go make some things
right with God. I've got to go, and I heard one
time, I've got to put some things under the blood. Can you do that?
Can you do that? I've got to go put some things
under the blood. How do you do that? Stinking sinners that we
are, I'm going to put some things under the blood? I don't think
so. So if the phrase repentance unto
life, if it's not teaching that we can receive eternal life in
exchange for being sorry for our sins, then what does repentance
unto life mean? As we saw earlier, the word in
the original text for repentance is a compound word composed of
change and mind. Repentance then in its very essence
is a true and complete change in the way we think about God,
the way we think about all of his divine operations. It's a
total reversal of our natural assumptions regarding all things
spiritual, and the absolute denial of all that's false in our religious
minds, and all of that unto the blessed discovery of all that's
true, of all that's gracious, and all that's merciful in the
Lord Jesus Christ. Turn with me if you would, let's
take a, let me find my place there again. Let's go back there to Acts 11,
where we were in Acts 11, 1 through 18. In that passage, grammatically
there are two possible interpretations. The one that most all religion
is clinging to is the one that interprets repentance as being
sorry for their sins. having some sense of remorse
or regret. You hear that all the time. Boy,
I've never seen anybody so brokenhearted over sin in all my life. They
talk about things like that. But all that does is render God's
saving grace dependent on an emotional work of the flesh.
I've actually heard people when I was back in religion talk about,
I don't believe that guy's sincere enough. I don't think his repentance
is real. I've heard him talk about that.
I'm thinking, how can you tell? I'm not so sure about your repentance.
How can you tell whether mine is sincere or not? As though
the sincerity of my repentance is what makes it work. These
folks believe that God wants to save them, that he died, that
Christ died to save them, that the Holy Spirit's pleading with
them to let him save them. But unless that sinner gives
the okay, God Almighty remains in their mind, he remains powerless
to intervene without the approval of that spiritually dead sinner,
which raises this question. How can? How can a sinner hear
the gospel? How can a sinner repent of his
sins? How can a sinner believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ? Repentance. Repentance cannot
precede spiritual life any more than our five physical senses
can precede the birth of a living, breathing baby. You can't turn
that around that way. Even so, a spiritually dead sinner
cannot believe on Christ. A dead sinner's a dead sinner.
Who was that one time? Someone back there, about all
they can do is stink. They're dead. A dead sinner cannot
believe on Christ. I'll be saved when I decide to
be. I've heard that a lot of times
through my life. I'll get right when I'm ready. Not if you're
dead. Not if you're dead. If you're
dead, you'll never get ready. You'll just be fit for hell,
fit for eternal death because you're dead. No life there. Believing on Christ isn't a matter
of a choice to be made by an unbelieving religionist who can't
see his need to be born again of God. That's not salvation. Here's the simple spiritual reality
that keeps sinners from changing their minds, running to Christ
for refuge. Spiritually dead sinners simply
can't believe. They don't believe and they won't
believe. How could they? Believing is
the first breath of spiritual life. The first fresh breath
of heaven's air that you'll ever breathe is when God causes you
to believe. Lord, I believe. And you're so
close to that deadness that the stench is still in your nostrils.
Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. I still smell
like a dead man. Spiritual life is the creative
act, then, of the sovereign grace of God alone. We don't deal with
people like they do in most of these churches. They'll get them
all down at the altar, or they'll corral them under some room to
one side or the other, and they deal with them, they say. I'm
dealing with you. Oh, no. Jeremiah 13, 23 provides
a clear illustration of man's inability to repent. It asks
these two questions. Can the Ethiopian change his
color? Can he change his skin? No, he can't do that. He was
born that way. That's what he was when he came
into this world. Can the leopard change his spots? I think I'd
like to get rid of these spots and just be one single color.
I'd just like to be a nice tan. No, he can't fix that. Then may
you also, what a statement God made, if they can change, The
Ethiopian can change his color and the leper can change his
spots. If they can do that, then you also can do good. You are accustomed to do evil.
What a statement. We cannot. We cannot. Can you
decide to be born again? Could any of your children have
decided they wanted to be born? No, God determined that. No,
we can't make those decisions. The point is that repentance
unto life is as far beyond our natural abilities as flying.
Might as well fly to heaven as to actually try to make yourself
repent. So the phrase repentance unto
life must have a meaning other than God gave me spiritual life
because I was sorry for my sins. And that's not what it means.
Here's how the elders of the church in Antioch said it when
they rejoiced in verse 18. They said, then has God also
to the Gentiles, and what a wonderful word, granted. Then has God also
to these lousy Gentiles granted repentance unto life. Now in the meaning of these three
words, repentance unto life, lies the very essence of the
saving grace of God in Christ. Let's take a look at that. As
I pointed out earlier in the text, the word repentance literally
means a change of mind. It's those two Greek words backed
up together, change and mind. But the wording of the text disallows
any possibility that the sons and daughters of Adam who inhabit
this world have any natural ability to repent, to change their mind,
because it says repentance must be granted, not produced, not
come up with, but granted. God the Holy Spirit is the only
one with the power to do the granting. I trust that there's
not a soul in the house today that somehow figured out how
to repent all by yourself. I trust that everyone that the
Lord's ever saved here realizes that you've got to that point
because something was granted to you. A genuine repentance,
a genuine change of mind about how God saves sinners and understanding
of the grace of God in Christ, repentance must be granted. By
nature we're convinced that whether we're religious or whether we're
atheists, everyone believes they can change themselves. We can
turn our lives around. I've heard that so many times
I'm tired of hearing it. He turned his life around. We'll see how
long that lasts. We'll see if it works out. Turned
his life around. They like to talk about that
all the time. Maybe there is Maybe there are some who get
off drugs, and I'm happy for them. Maybe there are some who
sober up and get off the bottle. I'm happy for them. Maybe there
are those who patch up their broken marriages. I'm happy for
those people. Maybe they do alter their bad
habits and stop smoking or whatever. They've turned their lives around.
But we're talking about a change of our fundamental nature. We're
talking about not being what I am by nature, but what I am
by new birth. We're talking about something
we can't do. Turn your life around? Yeah, he went to church and turned
his life around. No, he just went to church. That's what happened.
He just went to church. He might have picked up a few
new slogans and a few new sayings and a few new beliefs, but he
didn't change anything. He's just sitting in a church
house now instead of down at the bar or wherever he was. No one
has ever succeeded in changing their true self. We can't do
that. You know, these days, boys have their bodies surgically
altered to appear to be girls, and girls have themselves modified
to appear to be boys. But their fundamental nature
are the same as they were before they were born. They may look
different, but they're still the same sinners they were before
that supposed improvement was made. But when God Almighty freely
grants dead sinners, eternal life through union with Christ
Jesus, they become a new creation, one in which all things are made
new. What an amazing thing we are
here today. Have you ever thought about that?
Everything I was born with, every sinful tendency, Every sinful
ability that I came into this world with, I still have. And
I look forward to the day when I won't have that anymore. I
don't want to be this man. And yet at the same time, by
the sheer grace of God, he took this man who's nothing but sin,
and he implanted in this man a new nature, one that has nothing
whatsoever in common with my old man. Nothing, there's not,
in no way can they connect. In no way can my new man and
my old man get together and collaborate. They just can't. They're as opposites
as they can be. He made me a new creation. One
in which all things in that part of me are made new. The old man
of the flesh obviously still remains. You don't have to be
around me long to figure that out. It remains as thoroughly
dead in trespasses and sins as it ever was. But in this new
creation, There is nothing of my old man of sin. This is what
the verse means when it says we've been granted repentance. And that divine grant guarantees
God Almighty's order of things. Every version of false Christianity
I know of sets the order of salvation like this. Well, whenever I decide
to repent of my sins and believe on Christ, then I'll ask God
to save me. There's only two things. There's
only two things bad wrong with that thinking. God is the one
who makes all the decisions in his universe. It seems like we
do, doesn't it? It appears that we make the decisions
of our lives. I decided to marry Donna. I'm
thinking God decided that before I got that far. You know, we
decided we'd have some children. And we got this one and another
one, and they're the most wonderful things we ever had. I had nothing
to do with that. God decided those things for
me. And in his universe, he makes all the decisions, especially
about who is saved, when they're saved, where they're saved, under
what circumstances they're saved. And the other thing I want to
talk about this about his design is that the Word of God defines
repentance as a grant, a gift to a spiritually dead sinner
who has absolutely no ability to change their mind regarding
their sinful nature or their sinful actions. Therefore, repentance
is not. Repentance is not, as most people
believe, that moment when we change our minds and agreed to
let God do something for us that he's been wanting and waiting
to do for a long time but couldn't do because we wouldn't let him.
That's the falseness of religion. God does what he will, when he
will, whenever he will, with whomever he will. But the spiritual
reality is that no sinner has ever come to Christ of his own
accord. Every sinner saved since Adam fell, and whose names were
written in the Lamb's Book of Life from the foundation of the
world, all of those who remain to be saved, I can guarantee
you this, every one of them will. Every one of them will be saved,
and as Brother Scott says, against their will and with their full
consent, such is the grace of our Almighty God. Repentance
is always and only granted, granted by the eternal decree of the
King of Glory. Dead sinners never ask for the
gracious gifts of repentance and faith and pardon. We only
plead for mercy after we've been granted repentance. So repentance
is clearly the divine gift of a new mind. That changed mind
of a sinner who suddenly finds himself so dead and trespasses
and sins that there's nothing he can do to improve his lost
condition. What a wonderful gift. What a
magnificent change of mind and heart and will. Everything has
changed. A sinner who just moments before
was attempting the impossible, trying to negotiate his salvation
with God Almighty, now finds himself writhing in the guilt
of his sins. before his maker, who has every
right to save him or pass him by, he has nothing to say about
the outcome. Thank God. Thank God that in
his infinite mercy, he grants repentance to lost sinners. And you know and I know that
we would have never sought it for ourselves. Oh, we've sought
religion. I'd say most everybody in the
room has sought religion. But we never sought God. We didn't
want a God like that. We didn't want a God that could
say no. He could save me or pass me by,
whether I laid on the altar for a week in a revival and begged
and begged and begged, or whether he just slapped me up the side
of the head going down the road and said, I'll have that one.
We had no choice in that matter. No, we would have never sought
it otherwise. Now, even though literally the biblical word for
repentance translates into a change of mind, This is not to be taken
merely to suggest that repentance is the simple act of arriving
at a different conclusion about how God saves sinners. Oh, I
see, he saves this way and not that way. No, that's not what
it means. No, this grace isn't merely a new piece of spiritual
equipment that God gave you or a new bit of theological information
that he gives us. This is the gracious result of
having, I love this part of the scriptures, we have the mind
of Christ. That's what was off my scale.
I know I'm an idiot. I know the extent of foolishness
and stupidity that I can go. I've already proved that. And
yet, with that foolish mind of mine, religious, heaped up with
religiousness upon religiousness, and one day he joined himself
to me. The Lord Jesus joined himself to me and gave me a new
mind. I thought thoughts I'd never
thought before. I saw truth I'd never seen before and I got my
degree in the Bible and didn't know none of that stuff. Goodness
sakes alive, he gave me the mind of Christ. Now don't go off crazy
and start a cult or nothing like that. You're not the only one
in the world that knows these things and therefore don't start
another religion. But isn't it a joyous truth?
As simple as we are, as foolish as we are, as little as we know,
yet in one way of speaking we know everything. We have the
mind of Christ. And isn't it wonderful how that
even though we don't study near enough, we don't understand the
scriptures near like we ought to, And we don't think about
them nearly as much as we should. And yet, as we walk through this
world and things appear to us and come up to us by which we
could be deceived, by which we could get in a lot of trouble
and relationships that we shouldn't. And yet, stupid as we are, we
have the mind of Christ and he guides us through that mind.
And we end up right back where we're supposed to. right back
in the fold where Christ has put us. Just one of his sheep.
Dumb, yeah. Foolish, yeah. But we know who
our shepherd is. We know what he's done. We know
what he's accomplished. And we know that when the one
comes around that says that he's made it possible for people to
be saved, he's made it possible for you to go on and do great
things, we say, don't know that one. Don't know that one. I'm
running back to that one. That's my savior. Who knew the
mind of the Lord? The Apostle Paul asked. Who will
instruct him? But we, even us, we have the
mind of Christ. I think most of you know me.
I went through four years of Bible college at an Armenian
institution, and I left that after four years without a clue,
not a single clue of the truth that is the mind of Christ. I
set out for Africa to save the heathen. But God met me there,
and I learned very quickly that I was the heathen. I knew nothing
of the grace of God in Christ, just a religionist trying to
save sinners, and I wouldn't even save myself. And I'd still
be that same lost religionist today had God not given me a
complete change of mind about God, who He is, what He's doing
in the world, how He makes new creations out of spiritually
dead religionists. My prayer is that God would bless
us today with that divine change of mind, the very mind of Christ
that turns dead, impenitent, unbelieving, foolish religionists
into true believers, alive with the mind of Christ. May the Lord
do our thinking for us always. That's my prayer. Let's pray
this morning. Lord, we confess our ignorance.
Our old mind is still with us. And Lord, it still does some
thinking. And Lord, we do recognize that we are often confused and
led astray by our own sinful minds. We would pray, Lord, I
pray for every one of your children here this morning, that you would
be our mind, override our old mind. Grant us to think the new
thoughts of that new mind, which is Christ's own. And Lord, now
I pray in this world where everybody's trying to teach us something,
and everybody's trying to get us going, looking in another
direction. Lord, may we just be content
to rest in the mind of Christ and think His thoughts, rejoice
in His wisdom, and thank You, Lord, for the fact that You've
not left us without Him. For it's in Christ's name we
pray. Amen.