So, Lord, may you graciously
help me. I draw your prayerful attention once again to the same
text that we had this morning from Luke's Gospel, chapter 5,
and verses 31 and 32. Luke's Gospel, chapter 5, and
verses 31 and 32. And Jesus answering said unto
them, They that are whole need not a physician. but they that
are sick. I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance. We spoke this morning of the
Lord's great work that he came to do was not to save those who
had no knowledge of their sin, who thought they were righteous
in their own eyes, but he came with a purpose of love and mercy
for those who the Spirit came to show that they were lost and
ruined in the fall. And then there's these words
that, as Jesus uses the example, it's the sick people that go
and need a doctor. So it's the spiritually, the
spiritual lawbreakers, those who feel that they have broken
God's holy standard of righteousness. Those that feel that they're
under the condemnation of God. These are the ones that Jesus
came to save. I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance. Of course there are those, all
of the election of grace were at one point careless about their
eternal state. So they were all, as Paul of
Tarsus, of course, was one who was self-righteous. He would
be one that would be considered amongst the righteous in his
own eyes. But by God's Spirit and God's
work, he was brought to become spiritually sick. And therefore
he needed, and he appreciated, and he delighted in, a saviour
that came to seek and to save that which was lost. Well, this
morning we looked at this subject and we likened it to repentance
as to a tree. And we spoke of the soil in which
that tree grows as being the free grace of God, that there
is a way to be saved. And there was those two great
roots of the tree that hold the tree up is the one of conviction
of sin, We need to be convicted of our sins. We must know that
we are sinners. We must appreciate the holiness
of God. That God's standard is a great
high standard and we have fallen short of it. And He is righteously
angry with us. We need to know something of
that, as we've been singing as well. But we also need to have
some apprehension, some laying hold, some appreciation, some
comprehension of the fact that the Lord Jesus, the Son of God,
came to save sinners. That though He has this high
standard, though there is no way else to be saved, that there
is the gospel plan and this is what is so precious. And we spoke
of the vital necessity of both sides. If you just have the side
of knowing the sinfulness of sin and don't appreciate that
God is merciful, you end up like Judas Iscariot, lost, repenting to a point but not
not coming back to God. You see, when we realize our
sinfulness, there's two directions to go. We either go to God, back
to God, ask him for forgiveness, or we run as far from God as
we can. And sadly, Judas ran from God. He went away from Jesus. He went
away from the only way of salvation and hanged himself in despair.
But you see, The good news is that we don't need to do that.
We don't need to run. We need to hear and have some
apprehension of the mercy of God. Well, we then spoke of the
trunk of that tree being the fact that repentance is a change
of heart, a change of thinking, a change of carrying on. And then the branches being those
different aspects of the things that we need to change towards. And the first aspect I want to
take is the aspect of our thoughts and our appreciation of God. In unregeneracy, what is God
to us? Well, we see, we desire not the
knowledge of his ways. This one who made us, who formed
us, and in the womb, and formed us, created us in Adam. We don't want him. We want to
live our lives to ourselves. And we read in Romans chapter
3, you see, how that there is none that understandeth, there
is none that seeketh after God. This is what the apostle writes.
This is the truth, that there's none that really seeks after
God. They may seek after religion,
not after the true knowledge of God. Not really. Not in and
of themselves. They've all gone out of the way
and they've all gone in the wrong way. And we have this catalogue
of evil that results from a rejection of God. But it culminates in
verse 18 of Romans 3, there is no fear of God before their eyes. Well, if there's no fear of God
before our eyes, we don't fear God. We're not concerned with
Him. We have low thoughts of God.
He's not worthy of our attention. There's the things around us
and the glamour of this world. We go after those and we listen
to them. We listen to the fashions of
this world and what the celebrities of this world would tell us to
do with our time and our talents and everything else, but what
God requires When God says, seek ye my face, when God says, seek
ye first the kingdom of God, no, we haven't any time for him.
You see, this is our thoughts of God. and this affects our
actions. We desire not the knowledge of
his ways. And like the protocol that we
mentioned this morning, we want to run from our father's house.
We want to leave it, his laws. We don't want that regulation
in our lives. We don't desire him. We don't see him as an object
of beauty and of desire. And this is the fundamental problem. We don't see that God is beautiful. We see him as, if we believe
he's there at all, we see him as somebody who's there to stop
our fun, to stop enjoying life. But you see, we need to have
a change of heart. This is true repentance, is to
turn around our thinking so that no longer we think the way that
we did think. But we think different thoughts
of God. Instead of thinking low thoughts.
And therefore our will is against God. We don't desire Him. We
don't want Him. But you see, true repentance
is when we turn. and see things in a very different
light. And we read that in the first
epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians in chapter 1. It was put in verse
9 in this way, for they themselves show of us what manner of entering
in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God. This idea of repentance
is a turning. So you were going in this direction.
You were not really loving God. You were not really serving God.
You did not really honour Him. You heard that the seraphs and
the cherubim in glory and the angels were praising God continually,
but you weren't going to praise Him. You didn't think that He
needed your praise. Yes, the things of this world,
you would praise those, but not God. No, you don't want that.
You see, that's us by nature. This is this wrong way. But you see, with true repentance,
with true turn, there's a turn, there's a change in our thoughts
towards God. And ye turned to God, God the
Father, the creator, the sustainer of life. and you turned to him
from idols. And you see, one of our hymn
writers puts it like this, and it was quite precious to me many
years ago, for its succinctness, all we can boast till Christ
we know is vanity and toil. Pretty short, but pretty accurate
about everything here below. or toil. Emptiness or we can
boast of we've done this much work and that much achievement.
Vanity or toil. But that's all we can speak of.
That's our environment. But you see The child of God
in conversion comes to have a new appreciation of God, that now
we're turning to God rather than running from God. From all the
idols, instead of serving them and their dictates and their
thoughts, Now we have a new object, we have a new desire, we love
God, we love his law, we love his ways, we see that he has
made a way whereby we can go back to God through the red sea
of his own blood. And we now delight in his law,
we realise that he is our father, we realise that he is doing all
things for our good. And you see there's a loving
change. And you see, it makes the law
has such a different view, you see. The law which was just those
standards which we would kick against and we didn't like it,
we wanted to go our own way. But you see, when we love God,
the law has a different aspect. We want to do it, we love to
do it, we delight in it. You see, Jesus said to his father,
I delight to do thy will, oh my God. So I could use this illustration,
some of you perhaps have heard it, but it was of a slave girl
that was being sold in a slave market many years ago when there
was a gold rush. And an English man who was a
respectable man had gone to make some money at these gold mines,
and he was on his way traveling back. And he came to this slave
market where they were auctioning off this young girl who was particularly
pretty. And these two people were bidding
against one another to purchase this slave girl. And as they
were auctioning against each other, bidding against each other
to try and get the girl for themselves, they were laughing and muttering
about the immoral things that they would do with her once they
were in their possession. You see, and this English man,
he saw it and he was disgusted with it. And he
then said, well, I'll double what they pay for that girl.
And so they said, well, you don't normally pay that much for a
slave. But he did pay that much and he bought this slave girl.
And when this slave girl, he took her down the road and she
was not polite to him. She thought that he only had
bought her to do what these others would want to do to her. She
didn't think he had any good thoughts towards her. So she
spat in his face as he was walking along. And as he went, you see,
down the road to get all her papers sorted out so that he
could release her from slavery. And as time went on, she suddenly
became aware and started to grasp that this man had paid double
the price to do nothing other than set her free from slavery.
And she said, you mean to say that you've paid all this money
just to set me free? And he said, yes, that's right.
And she said, well, I make one request of you. And he said,
what's that request? She said, I want to be your slave
for the rest of my life. She wanted to serve a master
that wanted her good and didn't want to abuse her. And you see,
the Lord Jesus Christ is like that when we realise that He
is our friend, that He has died. He didn't just pay double the
price for a slave. He laid down His life for His
church. He loved the church and gave
Himself for it, that He might present it a glorious church,
having neither spot nor wrinkle. It was, you see, He loved the
church. He wanted to do the church's
good. And what's the response? The response of the slave girl
was, I want to serve that sort of master. Not a master that's
going to milk me and abuse me and use me, but a master that's
going to do me good and that's going to look after me and going
to take care of me and help me. And you see this is the difference
between the conversion. We have different views of God.
He is no longer a cruel tyrant that has given out these laws.
He is now a God that is merciful, and though he has a righteous
standard, and if we work for somebody we'd like those people
to have a righteous standard, and yet he is merciful and has
done us real good. then this one of the branches
of the trees is this different attitude to God, a different
attitude to God. But then we have also another
branch is a thing that we have a very different attitude to,
is a different attitude to sin. You see sin Moses described it, we read in
Hebrews 11, it's said of Moses that he esteemed the reproach
of Christ, greater riches than the treasures in Egypt. But he
said before that, that he chose rather to suffer, He didn't want to enjoy the pleasures
of sin for a season, but desired to be a child of God, you see,
rather than be enjoying those pleasures. And you see, what
I ask you tonight, you see, by nature, sin is, there's something
pleasant in it to our fallen nature. Pride is sweet. It's sweet to us. We love pride
by nature. We think it's great when everybody
thinks we're great. We think it's really, really
nice. Not nice for the other people,
but we think it's nice for us. You see, and lust and all those
things, there's something delightful in it. And you see, we don't
see by nature this sinfulness of sin. We think that it's just
something that's enjoyable, the pleasures of sin for a season.
as Moses describes it, and that's how we see sin. Yes, we see it
has some negative side effects and we take precautions to try
and minimize the negative effects of sin, so that we don't get
caught out and we don't get found out, and therefore we can minimize
that. We also, the natural way of looking
at sin is provided you can get away with it, it's acceptable.
And you see, that's what they said in Psalm 73. The psalmist
said, these people, they mock God all their lives, and they
still prosper. How does God know? And is their
knowledge in the most high? This is how they think of sin,
that it's not that bad. And God doesn't seem to be judging
them for it. And therefore, perhaps he's overlooked
it. Perhaps he doesn't really mind it too much. But you see,
when the righteous standard of God comes into our hearts, it
puts a very big change on our view of sin. In Romans 6 verse
16 we have this, Romans 6 verse 16, Know ye not that to whom
ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are
to whom ye obey? In other words, when we Do those
things which are ungodly. We are giving our bodies and
our minds and our times and our affections. We're giving them
to the service of sin. We're giving them to serve the
things that Satan wants us to do. And remember the sort of
master that Satan is. Satan's a master that's cruel,
absolutely cruel. His only desire is that you can
be with him in hell forever. That's his thank you for serving
him all your life. It's no thank you at all. But
you see, the Lord Jesus Christ, he draws his people to himself
that they may be with him in glory forever. What a vast contrast. Which one should we be serving? But by nature, you see, we love
the short-term gain, the pleasures of sin for a season. You see,
we can put off the, we know it's not right, perhaps, but we can
put that side off because we just want today to have our pleasures. We want today to enjoy these
things. But you see, the child of God,
with true conversion, He sees that, no, we must serve the Lord.
This is what we should be doing. We must do those things that
are right. In Romans 7, you see, Paul comes
to a very different view of the sinfulness of sin. Before, he
was one that kept the laws, he thought. And he thought that
sin was quite easy to avoid. He thought that he could keep
himself from sin. But in Romans 7 verse 13 we read,
was then that which is good made death for me? God forbid. But
sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me in that which
is good, that sin by the commandment, by the law, by God's standard
of righteousness, might become exceeding sinful. So in other
words, the conversion makes sin exceeding sinful. And you see
when you see sin, it's a... I mean, it's like that, isn't
it, in our society? Things like adultery and that
are so glamorized by the media and they just focus on the nights out and the things which
are pleasant, it seems, to our sinful hearts, but they don't
see the wreckage of the family and the ruin and the heartache
and the pain and the sadness of the children and all that
goes with breakup of family marriage. No, they focus on the things
that seem attractive to our fallen nature and all the selfishness
that goes with it and the unkindness to the children and the lack
of stability that they have as a result of it. All that wreckage
and all that hurt and all that horrible nature of things. We put that to one side and you
see But when we see sin in all its effects and all its ramifications,
and then we see it coming out in our children and then being
manifest again and being replayed, then we come to the conclusion
of what Paul says, that sin became exceedingly sinful. We started
to realise it wasn't a sweet morsel. It was very, very sinful. And if we think of that with
Adam and Eve, Eve saw the fruit, that it was a pleasant to the
pleasant to the eyes and seemed to be desirable. You see, there
was something attractive in it. It was to Eve. And she took and
she ate. She broke God's law. She didn't
think much of it. But oh, what a curse. What has
taken place in our land? All the sin that we see today
all stems from that first sin. What is the nature of sin? Sin
is exceeding sinfulness. Repentance gives us a new view
on the sinfulness of sin. We stop saying it doesn't matter.
We stop saying sin isn't too bad. If eating a forbidden fruit
got Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, how can we say any sin
is small? No, sin is a tremendous affront
to God. God has said, thou shalt not,
and we say we shall. We go against his word, and it
is an affront to his majesty, and it is exceeding sinful thing. But we see, you see, that the
Lord Jesus was willing to take that exceeding sinfulness and
bear it himself, so that his people who were lost and ruined
in the fall should have a way of salvation. You see, this is
how the love of the heart of the Church of God goes out in
love to the Saviour. This one who had a righteous
standard, yet was one that was merciful. And you see, that is
the gospel. It's the mercy of God. These
two roots that I spoke of this morning, it affects each one
of the points that I'm making this evening. The fact of the
conviction of sin and the apprehension, the comprehension of the mercy
of God. in the Lord Jesus Christ, that
there is a way, and he's made a way which cost him everything.
It cost him his beloved son. It cost him, see the Prince of
Glory dying, hear him grieving, see him sighing, hear his burdened
body heave. You see the awful state of a
picture of Gethsemane and what it cost the Saviour. And then
we realize something, O thou hideous monster, sin. It all comes from there, you
see, no sin. There would be no need for all
that Christ did, but sin and it entered into the world and
death by sin. But now there's been this way
of salvation. God so loved the world that he
made, gave his only begotten son. But you see, There's also
another branch of the tree, and that's to do with ourselves. Ourselves. We need to see ourselves
differently than we did before. In Corinthians 5 and verse 15,
we have these words. or in verse 14 I'll start reading,
2 Corinthians 5 verse 14, For the love of Christ constraineth
us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were
all dead. And that he died for all, that
they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves. So here we have the old way of
living. intrinsically self-centered. Yes, you can have people that
are very philanthropic and very kind. But ultimately, if you
dig down deep enough, it comes back to themselves. It comes
back to pride and seeking to be great themselves. They are
not doing it, if they're not true Christians, whatever kindness
they do, they are not doing it motivatedly for the glory of
God. And anything that we do in this
life which has not the motive and the aim and the desire and
the end for the glory of God, is sin. It may be very helpful
to our fellow creatures, but it's ultimately against God. You see, we are to do all, we
read, to the glory of God. And if we do things, though they
be acts of kindness, they be acts of neighborliness, they
may be honorable in a way, but if they're not done to God's
glory, then they're not truly good. And you see, henceforth,
we should not live unto ourselves. And this is a great thing to
grasp, you see, because we think that if something's doing something
good, that's good. Surely it is. I know, I thought
that. But you see, when we put it against
the standard of doing everything for the glory of God, It's a
different standard if you're not doing it for the glory of
God. You're not doing it for His glory. You don't see Him
as being the object. You don't see Him as being the
ultimate purpose of your life. You're missing the mark. You're
not doing what you were created to do. What is the chief end
of man? To glorify God. And if our lives,
our kindnesses, our shopping trips, everything that we do
for other people is not done for the glory of God, we are
not doing it rightly. It does not mean that we stop
helping people at all, but we are to do as God gives us grace
to do these things, to these acts of kindness and love and
mercy, we're to do them all, but we're to do them with this
object that God is glorified. We're to do it to his honor,
to his glory, and this is a complete change around. I can use an illustration in
my life. is related to people here. When I was younger I used to
help Russell with his car and I thought it was very kind of
myself to help him with his car. Many years ago when his first
car, a Renault 5 it was, And he went to a group holiday once
and got talking to some other people and they told him that
he had to do this, this and the other to make his car work better. And when he told me on the phone,
I felt, what's it got to do with them? I look after his car. I
didn't say that, but I thought it. And I was really reproved. It showed me my best is stained
and died with sin. My best, it was not for the glory
of God. It was for the glory of Paul
Hayden. We which live should not henceforth
live unto ourselves. There's got to be a change. We're
no longer living for our wretched selves. We're living for somebody
who's worthy of our eternal praise. and we've got to change. That
does not mean we stop doing kindnesses. Please don't misunderstand me.
But we do them and we realise that we do them for God's glory
and we're not doing them for our praise and for our mention
and for our glory. We're doing them because we're
doing it out of love for what he has first done for us. like
that slave girl who wanted to serve her master for the rest
of her life because he'd freed her. He'd freed her from bondage.
He'd freed her from slavery. He'd saved her life from these
men that were just going to abuse her and use her, not for her
good at all. They which live should not henceforth
live unto themselves, but unto him that died for them and rose
again. You see this is a change of heart.
It's a change. Now we're not living for ourselves,
we're not doing things for our own glory and you see this is
something that's With these points I'm making about repentance,
this is not a one-off thing. Suddenly at one point in your
life you know repentance and you turn from all these things
and then you're done with repentance for the rest of your life. No,
repentance is an ongoing work as we see fresh sins arising
in our hearts, fresh pride, fresh selfishness. You see, you have
sins that you don't know about. when you're younger. When you
come into different situations, you can sin in the pulpit, you
can sin in preaching, you can preach for your glory, not God's
glory. You can do things for your end
and not His. And you see, we need to realize
that. I think James Taylor in his recent
testimony regarding his call to Guilford mentioned this, he
realised that he was nothing and whether he baptised a person
or not ultimately didn't matter. It was God and he was just a
servant of the living God and his intention was to glorify
God and that is where he was. Like John the Baptist said, he
must increase but I must decrease. This was what James felt in his
testimony and this is so true. It's repentance, you see. And
it's something, it's not that I'm telling you to repent and
I don't need to do it. I need to do it very, very much.
It's an ongoing work and it needs to be constantly done. We need
to check our motives, check our ambitions, check everything.
That ye should not henceforth live unto ourselves. So if we're
not living to ourselves, what will our life be like? won't
be self-centered, won't be what our ambitions are, what our ego
trips want to do. It will be like the Apostle Paul
on the Damascus Road, Lord, what will thou have me to do? That will be it, and we have
to keep coming back there, because we keep on getting in the wrong
way and in the wrong thoughts. But you see, this is what we
have. In Mark's Gospel, chapter 8 and
verse 34, And when he had called the people
unto him, and his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever
will come after me, let him deny himself. This was necessary. He had to deny himself. He had
to say no to his own way. Deny his self. Not himself, you
see, and you say, well, we're to follow the master, aren't
we? Well, he denied himself. He came not to do his own will. the will of him that sent him.
And you see we are to follow him. He was despised and rejected,
but he willingly denied himself. He humbled himself, became obedient
under death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God hath
highly exhorted him, and giving him a name which is above every
name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every
tongue should confess. Whosoever will come after me,
let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." This
is true repentance. It's a turnaround. It's not doing
what I want to do. It's not looking up and saying,
well, if I take these options, these are going to be easier
than those options. It's, Lord, what will thou have me to do?
And give me grace to do it. And that's the end of it. And
if you listen to James's testimony, that's what sums up to going
to Guildford. He wants to do it for the glory of God. He wants
to do it because he feels that's what God wants him to do. And
through many difficulties and trials, he presses on. And you
see, this is what it is, to deny himself. This is a vital branch
in this tree of true repentance. It has the roots of conviction
of sin. It has the roots of the apprehension
of the mercy of God in Christ. Just like that slave girl saw
a kindness and a love and a friendship in that English man and she loved
him. She loved him for his kindness.
She loved him for his ability and willingness to free her.
So we see that there is a mercy in Christ. He saw them ruined
in the fall, yet loved them, notwithstanding all. You see,
this is the gospel. But when we have that Gospel
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the repentance is going to change
us, and it's going to change us forever. But we're going to
keep on having to change. We're going to have to keep on
denying ourselves. He must increase, I must decrease,
constantly, constantly, so that we never... get to that stage
where we say, well now we're free from sin. Not this side
of the grave. There will be a time coming for the people of God
that they will be able to stop repenting. They'll be able to
need to repent no longer because they'll be free from sin. They'll
be able to see that their sins are washed and there'll be no
fresh rebellion against their God, no fresh clash between His
will and theirs, no fresh departures from the law of God. But here
below, we're in the church militant, and we're fighting the good fight
of faith, we're laying hold upon eternal life. Deny himself, take
up his cross, and follow me. Well, a change of heart then
to God, what we think of God, a change of heart to what we
think of sin. Do we love it or do we now hate
it? And do we hate the fact that
we find something in us that still loves it? We should mortify,
therefore, the deeds of the body. We put it to death. But yet,
of course, mortification does not mean that we live perfectly,
sadly. But our endeavor is to live to
God's glory. But the last branch that I want
to speak of is our change of heart towards righteousness. How can
we be right with God? You see, by nature, perhaps there's
two real approaches about being right with God. Many people just
don't care. They're not bothered about whether
they're right with God or not. They're worried about what their
peers think at school, at college, at university, at their workplace.
Yes, they're very worried about what they think of them, whether
they think they've got the right gear on and whether they've got
the right things and the right attitudes. They're very worried
about them, but what God thinks, They're unconcerned. Unconcerned. What the ultimate judge of all
the earth who's going to stand at that last great day and judge
them. They're unconcerned about what
he thinks. They're unconcerned. But there
is another group of people like the scribes and the Pharisees
who are concerned in that sense of what God thinks of them. But
they've got completely the wrong idea of what pleases God. And this was true of the scribes
and the Pharisees as they were speaking to Jesus and said that,
criticising him for mixing with the publicans and sinners. They
thought that the law, those Ten Commandments, would be that those,
that God would congratulate them on their holiness. that God would
look at them and say, just like the Pharisee did when he was
in the temple, he was praying and he said, God, I thank thee
that I'm not like other men. He said, look at the law of God
and look at me and congratulate me, because I've kept the law. I've done everything right, I've
given this and I've done that, and I'm really an honourable
person. Not like that person over there, who's a tax collector. Not like him, he's broken the
law. He's subject to your curse and your anger. But I'm pleasing
to God, and this is us by nature. Either we don't care about God,
or we think we can gain God's favour by our own works. Both
ways are ultimately flawed. And you see, true conversion
is an about turn when it comes to the way of righteousness.
We realize that our righteousness, our right standing with God,
is not to do with the works of our own righteousness. It's not
to do with what we have done. It's not to do with the number
of people we've helped and we've given to and we've had mercy
on. It's to do with the sovereign
act of God's mercy towards us in sending His beloved Son and
saying, this is my beloved Son, hear ye Him. And believing on
the Lord Jesus Christ and truly coming with repentance and realising
that God can cleanse us and put that robe of righteousness round
us. So that now we are accepted to God, not in our own righteousness,
not because we're better than others, but because we've obtained
mercy. And this was what the Apostle
Paul gloried in so much. God forbid that I should glory
save in the cross of Christ. This was everything to him. The
cross of Christ. and what Christ had accomplished
at Calvary, that Christ had gone to the end of the law. He'd satisfied
it. He died in his place. And this,
you see, brought a righteousness to the Apostle Paul, which was
so utterly and completely different than the righteousness that he
had as a Pharisee. I thought verily that I did God's
service. He thought that he pleased God.
He looked at the law and he said, yes, God is going to be so impressed
with me. But then when the Lord showed
him his own heart, that his heart was covetous, that he came short
of the glory of God, then his own righteousness vanished. Conviction of sin, it all comes
back to those two roots. And if you think of a tree, the
nature of the roots are affecting the branches, don't they? The
nature of the roots affect the branches. How it works out in
the life of a true Christian. Well, you see, this is the true
church of God. They know what it is to repent,
to repent of the Lord, of all their sins, and to come and seek
the Savior and come and find him to be precious. We're coming
back to our motto text. And Jesus answered and said unto
them, they that are whole need not a physician, but they that
are sick. And I ask you honestly before
God tonight, do you know true repentance? Do you know what
it is to have true conviction of sin? Conviction that makes
now sin obnoxious, that makes you realise that you cannot please
God by the works of your own righteousness, by helping people,
by being helpful, by doing good things, by giving to charity,
by running a charity, by doing everything that is honourable
in itself. But if it's not to the glory of God, we cannot gain
salvation with any of those things. We need that they are lovely
fruits of being saved, that we give ourselves, that zealous
of good works we read. No, I'm not at all talking about
anything against manifesting our love to Christ in practical
ways. Do good to all men, especially
to those that are of the household of faith. Oh, there's so much
encouragement to good works, but not for our own righteousness. Not to be acceptable to God.
Have we come to that point where all our righteousnesses are as
filthy rags? Jesus answering said unto them,
they that are whole need not a physician, but they that are
sick. Have you come to realize that
you are sick? That you cannot keep God's standards?
that you're a breaker of the law, not a keeper. You can look
at your neighbours that carry on, perhaps, much more ungodly
than you do in some ways, and yet you say, yes, they break
the law, but I break it too. Perhaps not in so many outward
ways, and I hope you don't, but then on the other hand, we're
internal breakers. We're internal breakers and we
need to come. Hear us, Emmanuel. Here we are,
waiting to feel thy touch. Deep wounded souls. Are you a
deep wounded soul? Wounded by the effects of sin.
Wounded by the effects of your pride. Wounded by contemplation
of your own selfishness and self-centeredness. They that are whole need not
a physician, but they that are sick. Remember, Satan would love
to destroy you on both counts. Firstly, he doesn't want to bring
you in true conviction. He wants to stop you being convicted
of your sins. And if you do become convicted
of your sins, he wants to stop you going to that fountain which
is open for sin and for uncleanness. How horrible he is. A fountain's
been opened for the foulest of sinners, and Satan wants to stop
it. You'd say one that stops somebody,
an ill person, going to a doctor, you'd say what a horrible person
they were. If the ambulance was taking this sick person to the
hospital and they only had seconds to get there, otherwise the person
would be dead. If you went and interrupted the
course of that ambulance, you'd say what a horrible person you
were. That's what Satan is doing. He's trying to stop people coming
to God. But you see, the gospel is this.
I came not to call the righteous sinners to repentance. Jesus
said, come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest. I came to this earth. I came
not to call the righteous. I did not come to call those
who were righteous in their own eyes. But I came to seek and
to save that which is lost. And may we come then with true
repentance, and may this have an effect in our lives, a turnaround,
not just a turnaround in part of our life, but in the whole
of our lives, that it may affect our thoughts of God, it may affect
our thoughts of sin, that it may affect our thoughts of ourselves,
that we are not our own anymore, and that it may affect our thoughts
of righteousness, how to be right with God. May the Lord add his
blessing. Amen.