You can open your Bibles to 1
Corinthians 15. I would like to add my word of
thanks to what Drew said. I'm thankful to the Lord and
to you for this time that we've had together. What a blessing. I know from the things you all
say that you believe the blessing goes in one direction. And you
think you've been so blessed to be able to hear us, and you
say thank you for that message and all. You probably have no
idea how good this is for us who go somewhere and preach,
how encouraging it is to get outside the boundaries of our
own small lives and see God's work elsewhere and fellowship
with brethren from another place. And it's been a blessing. I noticed
this morning how easy it was to measure the blessedness of
all that's gone on here, the fellowship and the food. And when I left Iowa, I could
button this jacket and take a deep breath. This morning I got the
jacket buttoned, but I thought I can't take a deep breath, I
gotta leave this loose so that I can preach. And I'm noticing
Bonnie's laugh and I realize that we'll be back to a stricter
diet once I get home. Oh, isn't the Lord good? He's good all the time, but sometimes
we see it so much more as He allows us these spiritual vacations,
these times of special refreshment from Him. And I am so grateful
that I have had the chance to be here, the opportunity. We'll
read, we'll just start in verse one. Moreover, brethren, I declare
unto you the gospel, the gospel, which I preached unto you. Now
there was a time when Paul was in Corinth, and he face-to-face
preached the gospel to them, and it's been some time since
then, now that he writes them this letter, and up to this point,
he's addressed some pretty serious problems that have been in the
church. And then he says, now as he's
about to wind it up, he said, moreover, once again, after all
of this, I am about to declare to you the very same gospel that
I preached to you when I was right there with you, the one
that you received. Paul said to the Galatians, don't
accept any other gospel than the one you first received. And
he was surprised at how quickly they could trade one for the
other. He said, well, this is the one you received, the one
wherein you stand. Another translation puts it this
way. the one on which you've taken
your stand. And every believer has taken
his stand on the gospel. And then verse two, by which
also ye are saved. That same translation I mentioned
before, the one from which I commonly preach, has divided this particular
sentence up so that chapter two begins a new sentence and he
just says, in a declarative way, by this gospel you are saved. By this gospel you are saved.
Now, this morning's subject, title of this message is very
simply this, have I been saved? Have I been saved? There is not
a more important question that you will ever consider in your
life, no question more important than that one. Have I been saved? There are a lot of important
questions we address in this life, things that we agonize
over or give a lot of study to. What career path will I follow?
Whom shall I marry or shall I even marry at all? What church shall
I attend? Should I buy this house or that
one or keep on renting? We get older. We got that important. What will I do with mom and dad?
They're getting old. These are important questions.
I wouldn't say they're unimportant. And we prove their importance
because we give a lot of attention to them, do research, and expend
a significant amount of anxiety trying to come up with the right
answer because we know the wrong answer is going to be much more
costly than the right answer would be. And yet it seems that
people give so little attention to this question. Have I been
saved? Some don't ever ask that question
because they never had any understanding or inkling that they needed saved
in the first place. And some of them, it's because
they go through their entire lives never having heard the
gospel, never having been confronted about it. And quite frankly,
people like that live sometimes, you know, happier lives. than others simply because they
never have this question laid before them. And it may look
like they're kind of blessed, and there are people who will
tell you, oh, the world would be a much better place if there's no religion
in it. And I'll admit that the world would be a better place
if a whole lot of what passes for religion wasn't in it anymore. But they seem to think the gospel
also, we'd all get along a whole lot better if they just weren't
those preachers out there telling us we need to be saved. But that's
as simply the happiness of ignorance. And ignorant happiness always
becomes great sorrow once it is no longer ignorant. Some don't ask this question
because they assume they've already been saved. The dominant religion
where we come from, little children are born into the family and
when they're just a little bit, a few months or something like
that old, they take them to the church and they take them to
the front of the church Everybody stands and reads what they call
the form there in the back of the hymnal. And then the preacher
will get a little bit of water, sprinkle it on their brow, you
know. And the parents will covenant that they're going to raise their
children according to the truth. And the whole church says that
they covenant also to help in this process. And that kid, they
start teaching it, you know, and it grows up, and it grows
up in that church. And they think once they, you
know, they've been taught everything, they've learned their catechism
and all that, and as long as they don't depart from that way,
they believe they're saved. And so they never question whether
or not they're saved. They assume it. The scriptures teach us that
in that day, there shall be many who are surprised to find out
they're not among God's favored people. And they shall say, Lord,
Lord, didn't we? And the Lord gave some things,
and it's interesting, he never denied they did them. We worked,
we preached in your name, cast out demons in your name, worked
many miracles in your name. And he didn't say, no you didn't.
He said, no, I never knew you. I didn't know you. Who are you? And we could put other things
in there. There could be those say, well, Lord, Lord, was I
not born in the church? Were my parents not Christians?
Was I not raised in the doctrine of sovereign grace and did I
not hold to it and defend it and argue it and stand firm in
it throughout my life? And he shall say unto such people,
depart from me, I never knew you. In that day, in that day, the
most tragic word that will ever be spoken by those who are surprised
to find themselves on the wrath side of the equation is the word,
I. Because that's the word that's
tripped them up throughout all their lives and they stand before
God and say, I. I. Maybe that's some of you. It might be, I don't know your
heart. I'll be honest, sometimes I wonder if it isn't me. Did
I not preach, Lord? why I was in Rock Valley for
30, 40 years, whatever it turns out to be. And did not people
come to believe your gospel through my preaching? Oh my. I hope I don't say that
in that day. Lord, Lord. I hope this message does a couple
of things. First of all, that I hope it
wakes up, sobers up, even alarms those who live in the complacent
belief or assumption that all is well, for after all, they
believed this all their lives. Believed this. Remember, Paul
did not say, I know what I've believed. He said, I know whom
I believe. It's good for us to be sobered
up and to be made to consider things that we have taken for
granted. It doesn't mean that we're lost. It just means that
we need to make sure, just check it out. Ask again, have I really
been saved or am I just going with the flow here? I want to bring some comfort.
to fearful believers, troubled believers, unsure of their standing
with God. You say, well, how can you be
believing and unsure? Well, I've got an answer. I don't
know if it's the right one, but the answer is not the issue.
Rather, let us hear what the Lord said to his disciples, O
ye of little faith, Okay, he said it was little faith, but
he said, they're men of faith. He claimed they were men of faith,
they believed. But he said, oh ye of little faith, why did you
doubt? So obviously, true saving faith and doubt can exist in
the same person. And I hope by this message, to
at least for a time, give you some relief from your anxious
doubts. This morning as we were Having some coffee out on the
back porch, Drew told a beautiful little story. He said that when
early in his marriage, he set up an account with a florist.
And from time to time, he would send his wife a single rose there
at the place where she worked. And he said, and it did some
double good, he says, because not only did she receive the
message from me, he said, as that delivery man would come
in, everybody else, who's that for? Who's that for? Well, I
hope by this preaching that your heavenly husband would call his heavenly florist
the Holy Spirit and send you a token of his love. And do so in the presence of
the enemies of your soul. Because he does that. We're taken up with our lives,
aren't we? I mean, you know, we don't have
a choice. We can't quit working and the scriptures never advise
us to. We got to go to our jobs. We've got our troubles like our
brother so blessedly spoke of. In the midst of these, it is
so very easy for the enemy of our soul to
come and put a big question mark. over whether we are loved by
God, whether the Savior has ever saved
us. Would that through this preaching, he would speak to your hearts
and confirm to you his love for you, even in the presence of
your enemies. And I would also like to give
some strong encouragement to those who have been made aware
of their need of salvation and are trying to figure it out. They want to know. Want to know
how a man is saved. Want to know how you'll know
if you're saved. You see, there is a God dishonoring
and soul damning doctrine It pops up here and there, now and
then. And it's the teaching that to
be confident of one's salvation is somehow a shameful presumption. That it's just not right for
us ever to be certain that we belong to the Lord. I've sometimes asked the folks
in our area, you know, talking to some of them, Well, have you
been saved? Well, I'd like to hope so. I
hope that in the end I shall be saved. And I asked a man one
time, I said, do you believe the gospel? Well, I'd like to
think that sometimes I do. And the Lord didn't give it to
me at the time, but later on I thought I should have said,
well, the rest of the time, is God a liar? If only sometimes you
believe, is God a liar the rest of the time? Oh, how Satan can
come in and try to make virtues out of our vices. He comes into
the hearts of many of those who are seeking and tries to tell
them, well, you know, your confusion and your doubtfulness and your
hesitation, these are humble virtues. See how humble you are
that you would think God would never save you. Really now. Now if you think that there's
a reason in you for God to save you, well that's just, that's
pride. But you know something? To believe
that God would save you for the sake of Christ is not presumption,
it's called faith. It's called believing the promises. That's all it is. Satan is always distracting us.
We often refer to him as the deceiver, and sometimes his way
of deception is simply by distraction, by introducing useless questions,
and have us chasing off, trying to answer questions, the answer
to which we do not need to know. You went to a doctor, and he
diagnoses you with some illness. You say, okay, what should I
do? He scribbles some things down. He said, take this to the
pharmacist and the instructions will be on the bottle. And so
you go and you get your prescription. And you set it down. He said,
you know, I don't know how that stuff works. I mean, is it a
chemical thing? Why is it? You know, I best not
take that until I understand how it works. Brethren, you don't
have to be a pharmacist to take medicine. You just got to believe
and then do what you were told. If a pharmacist took that medicine,
it would have the exact same effect on him as it will on you
who has no clue what chemicals are involved or why they work. And brethren, faith does not
come about by answering all the puzzling questions that the devil
may put in your mind. It doesn't even come about by
being able to untangle all the tangled theology that men like
to put out there. It comes from seeing that you
are a sinner in need of a savior, and Jesus Christ is the savior
you need. And you call on his name. Now,
don't ever let it get more complicated than that. I'm not saying that
there's anything wrong with learning more. I mean, after all, you
take your medicine, there's nothing wrong if you want to look up
on the internet and find out how that medicine works or even
go to pharmacy school, fine. But don't think you have to understand
it in order to take it. One of the churches in our area,
the church from which most of our membership came, or the charter
membership, said, you know, you must know how great your sins
and miseries are. And so they believe that a person
cannot possibly be saved unless there be about 20 or so years
of sheer misery of trying to think about how sinful they are. I guess they never read the part
about the dying thief who rejoiced to see that fountain in his day. What if he had said, when you
come into your kingdom, Lord, remember me, that too bad you've
only got about two or three hours left, and you're gonna need about
20 years of mourning over your sins before you can, my friend,
how sick do you have to be to go to the doctor, or how sick
do you have to be to get better, just sick enough to go to the
doctor? That's all it takes. This idea of having to go through
so much or learn so much and all of this, it's not an honor
to God. It's no honor to God to put a
question mark on his gospel and whether or not you have been
saved by it if you've called upon his name. Rather, it insults
the clarity and sincerity of God's promises. Has God been
unclear? about the need for salvation
and the way of salvation? He said to those Jews through
the prophet Isaiah, and therefore says to us in our day, look unto
me and be ye saved, for I am God and there is no other. Look
unto me, all the earth. How simple can it be? Are you
on the earth? Well, then that word's to you.
Okay. Well, look unto me. Is that hard
to do? I mean, is there something mysterious about that? Be ye saved. That's not very complex, is it? Why should I look to him? What
gives me a warrant? Well, God says, look unto me,
for I am God and there is no other. Well, do you believe he's
God? Do you believe he's the only
one? Do you understand that? Well then brethren, this one
and only God has called on you to look unto him and be saved. What more do you need to know?
There are preachers that love to complicate things. They love
to set forth the gospel as though it's some intricate maze. And
make sure you don't step over this, and you don't do this,
and oh, you said it this way. You used this word and not this
word, so you don't really believe. You're not a gospel preacher.
You're not a gospel believer. And you're going to go to hell
when you die. They love these complicated systems. I'll tell
you exactly why they love them. They love them because they got
through them. And they can glory that they found the way through
the maze, and you didn't. Where I come from. And maybe
around here, they have these corn mazes every fall. When it
gets near time to harvest the corn, they'll go through. And they'll actually cut a maze
into that. And I've lived there 31 years. I've
never been through one. This fall, I'm going to find
one and go through. But anyway, but I see them advertised,
you know, so many dollars. You can go through there, try
to find your way through. And well, one time I saw. It
was on Facebook, and somebody put this poster up. And it said,
corn maze for blondes. And there's this corn field with
one stalk up in the middle of it. That's it, you know? Well,
brethren, that's the gospel. Maybe we ought to preach the
gospel for blondes, you know? We are all spiritual blondes.
I apologize to anyone with blonde hair, but you know the jokes. God designed a gospel for spiritually
stupid people. He designed a gospel for sheep
that are prone to get lost. It doesn't say that the shepherd
went out and there were ninety and nine and one got to wandering
around so he stuck him in a maze. He went out and got him and brought
him home. Don't let anybody complicate
this thing for you. It's not. Is God's promise insincere? The Bible says he swore an oath
in making promise to Abraham that by two things in which it
is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to Christ for
refuge might have an anchor for the soul. treat God like he's one of those
genies, you know. Those stories about the genies,
you know, you rub the lamp and it's always the person who rubs
the lamp makes his wish and somehow or another the genie always turns
his wish into something other than what he wanted. The old
joke is, you know, a guy was out walking through the desert
and he's getting pretty hungry and he found a genie lamp. And
he rubbed the lamp and out comes his genie and he's looking pretty
old, worn out. He said, look, I only got one wish left in me.
So what is it? And the guy said, oh man. Make
me a ham sandwich. And the genie says, OK, you're
a ham sandwich. And they treat it as though God's
that way, as though he's really trying to make this difficult
for you. And even if you sincerely seek
for something, he's going to try to twist it into something
else so that in the end, you're lost. Brethren, God made promise. And he was so intent. that we understand the sincerity
of his promise that God who cannot lie and should never have to
swear to what he said. Why do people, why do they make
them swear when they give testimony? Because we're liars. And if they
don't make us swear by something greater than ourselves, we're
liable to tell a lie. God condescended to speak in
the language of liars that we liars might believe what he said.
He swore an oath. And what did he swear by? Well,
since there's nothing greater than himself, he swore by himself,
which is to say, God says, if my promise does not hold true,
I will cease to be God. I will abdicate my throne. Brethren,
what more do you need from God to assure you of the sincerity
and trustworthiness of his promise? And he did not say that he swore
that oath so that you and I, who have learned all our doctrine
and got it all straight and crossed all our T's and dotted all our
I's and gone through this and experienced that, might somehow
have a little bit of hope that at the end we're going to be
saved. No, he said it was an assurance,
an anchor for those who have taken refuge in Christ. Have you ever seen someone taken
refuge? If you ever notice, they're just running. They see a refuge
and they run. And they might have their head
covered up because things are falling, but they're just running.
And they get there and there's no, can I come in? It busts through
the door and take cover. That's pretty simple. God's not insincere. We watch advertising on the TV,
and most of the time, we take it with a real grain of salt,
don't we? Best cars in town. Well, maybe. We'll give you the best deal.
Well, let's see. I'm not going to believe that
from you until I've checked with everybody else in town, because
maybe it won't be true after all. You can count on God's promises. They will come to pass. Just
as he said to them, there are no tricks in here. Now, there's
a trickster in the world who will twist what is said here
to trick you, but God's not out to trick anybody. Not anybody
that wants to know the truth. Now, have I been saved? What
are we talking about when we ask that question? There's an
eternal aspect to salvation. You say, why? Why would you say
there's an eternal aspect to salvation? Well, salvation's
of the Lord and the Lord's eternal. Now see, eternal does not simply
mean for an infinite amount of time. Eternal, when the scriptures
speak of eternal, often what they're talking about is timelessness. Remember, time is a creation.
There was no such thing as space and time until God said, let
there be. God doesn't dwell in time. He dwells outside of time
and space, and whatever he's done, that's where he's done
it. So when we talk about eternal salvation, we're not talking
about a salvation that simply has an infinite number of moments
involved. We're talking about a salvation
that actually was accomplished outside of the whole framework
of time and space. And nothing that goes on in time
and space is going to change that. Simply because we're locked into
thinking in terms of time and space. We'll talk about old eternity
and the eternity to come. Friends, there's only one eternity. And God and his salvation is
equally on both ends of time because time, it's not like there
was this big blob of eternity over here and now we've got this
bar of time and then we enter another big blob of eternity.
Time is a little old stick floating in a sea of eternity. And I don't
care which end of time you look out of, you're looking into the
same eternity, and that's where our salvation is. So that's, we can look at salvation
that way. And there is a sense in which
salvation is an ongoing experience in the heart of a child of God. Scripture talks about those who
are being saved. You say, well, I thought they
said we are fully saved. Brethren, if I'm fully saved,
I'm gonna be real disappointed. If this is all there is to my
salvation. Now, I'm not gonna be unthankful.
It's better than what I had. But if this is it, it's not what
I thought it was. Paul says we've been given a
down payment. We've been given an earnest of
the inheritance. Now what you and I have and experience
right now, if we're in Christ, it's a wonderful thing. Wonderful
thing, isn't it? But it's just a down payment. Virtually everything we look
for in the gospel, we're just hoping for it. And Paul says,
who hopes for what he already has? It's a lot of salvation
that has not yet been done. God began a good work in us. And we can be confident of this,
that the one who began the work will bring it to perfection at
the day of Christ. He will. But it ain't complete
yet. So we're being saved. But what
I'm talking about here in this question, have I been saved? I'm talking about that beginning
of the work in us. In salvation, there's much that
God does for us. These are the objective aspects
of salvation. He chose us. That's just done. He redeems us through Christ.
That's done. Had absolutely nothing to do
with us. When God redeemed me in time
and space, well, I hadn't entered time and space. I didn't exist
yet. And when he chose me, time and space didn't exist. It's done for me. But in everyone
for whom he did those works, there comes a day when he begins
to work in them. It's God that works in you to
will and do of his good pleasure. And he that began that good work
in you will bring it to perfection in the day of Christ. And what
I'm asking this morning, or calling on each of us to ask ourselves,
Have I ever, has that ever happened to me? Has God ever begun a good
work in me? Now, it's not going to be difficult
for you to come to a conclusion about that. There's just going to be three
questions to ask yourself. Very simply this, and spend the
next few minutes asking these questions. The first question
of this, the whole big question is, have I been saved? Okay,
here's the first sub-question. Do I believe that I am someone
who needs to be saved? Because not everybody does. Not
everybody does, and I don't mean Are you someone who needs a little
help? The word save does not just mean
help, like, you know, I can't quite get over the wall, and
so somebody grabs your foot and, you know, does a little bit more
and boosts you up over. The word saved, we use that word,
and like I say, it's one of those words we use so much. We've kind
of got it all encrusted with our religious ideas, and every
time somebody says the word save, that's what we think of. That's
why I like to use different words once in a while. The word simply
means rescued. Be rescued. A guy, he's not drowning,
he's drowned. He's face down in the water,
he has stopped breathing, and life is going out of him irrevocably. If somebody doesn't go out there,
and without his permission, without even his knowledge, snatch him
out of the water, breathe life back into him. That's got to happen. But not
everybody thinks they're that drowned man. Some folks say,
I don't think I can make it quite back to shore. Brethren, here's
the condition we're in. We're face down in the water,
lungs full of water, not breathing, without hope, unless somebody
does something for us. Rescue. Rescue. Are you in need of a
rescue? Have you ever come to realize
you are so lost, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it? The Bible talks about the lost
sheep. And the shepherd went out to find him. But you know
something? We are lost sheep, but we are
lost in the sense not that God doesn't know where we are. We're
lost because we don't know where we are. And if you don't know
where you are, you can't find your way back. Are you that lost
that you can't find your way back? Have you ever perceived yourself
to be someone who needs to be safe? Safe from what? Well, it
says, you shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his
people from their sins. Unfortunately, in our area, it
seems as though some of the churches, in their attempt to help people
overcome the challenges of their lives, they give to them the
idea that the ability to overcome a particular sin amounts to their
salvation. For example, alcoholics. And
alcoholics, they'll come to the end of their rope, most of them,
eventually. And quite often, the church is where they'll end
up, trying to find out how to no longer be an alcoholic. And
these churches, they'll have the 12-step programs. And I'm
not faulting the 12-step program. I'm glad when somebody gets sober,
really. It's a good thing when somebody
who's got trouble with alcohol finds out how to get control
of that situation and quits making a mess of his life and the lives
of everybody around him. but that's not salvation. And they have these people, they'll
say, well, you know, you need to call on Christ to come into
your life. And so they do. And they give
their lives to Jesus and some, you know, and keep going to meetings
and they quit drinking and they call it salvation. Well, friends,
drunkenness is a sin. But it's not the only one, and
by no means is it the worst one. We are sinners through and through,
such that when we come into this world, there's absolutely nothing
good about us, nothing which God could look upon and say,
I like that. Our parents maybe did. Mothers,
they put that baby in their arms, You know, they bond and that
mother thinks that that little child is the most perfect thing
there ever was. Of course, then they try to get
it to go to sleep later and they find out it's not quite so perfect
as their first impression was. But no, the most innocent little
child in the world is nothing but corruption. And the most virtuous human in
the world is nothing but corruption. People say, well, you know, in
the end, he's going to weigh our good deeds against our bad
deeds. And you know, as long as it comes
out there's more good than bad, we'll get in. Let me tell you
how such a judgment would come out. Because this hand would
be full of evil, and this side would have nothing on it. Have you ever been that sinful
in your own eyes? You know, it's easy to get people to repent
of transgression. Fairly easy, I mean, you know.
You, for example, I mentioned the alcoholic. Even alcoholics
know that's wrong. You can get people to repent
of theft. You can get people to repent of murder. Can you get people to repent
of being a volunteer EMT instead of a murderer? You say, well,
that's good. Well, it's good on a human scale.
It's not good in God's eyes. You can get people to repent
of adultery. Can you get people to repent
of their faithfulness? Not strut that in the presence
of God as though it's some good thing that he could say, now,
there's a faithful man. I'll let him in. It says that
darkness or that light came into the darkness and the darkness
couldn't comprehend or overcome it. And men hated the light. They hated the light because
it exposed their deeds as evil. Now he's talking about the light
of truth of the gospel. And see what had happened is
these guys, he was not talking there about the drunks and the
adulterers. and the thieves and the murderers.
It doesn't take much light to reveal the sinfulness of what
they're doing. The light that he was talking about was the
light of the gospel and the people he was talking about that hated
it were the Pharisees and the religious self-righteous of all
brands because they had been hiding in the shadows of the
law because they'd been able to outwardly keep it and therefore
whatever light the law could shine wasn't enough to reveal
how wicked they were. But when the gospel came, it
outed them. Their righteousness was shown
to be the filthy rags that it actually was and that's why they
hated it. Christ was hated because he was
real righteousness and it exposed that phony righteousness that
all those people were hiding in. Have you ever been outed
by the gospel? Have you ever had the gospel
shine into that dark closet you hid in and reveal you to be the
sinner that you are without hope and without God in the world?
Have I ever been a sinner? Second question. Do I understand God's way of
salvation? Paul describes it here. Verse
three, for I delivered unto you first of all, and that could
be translated as of first importance, that which I also received, how
that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures,
and that he was buried and that he rose again the third day according
to the scriptures. Now this is just a brief historical
account of the central historical event of the gospel. And it's simply saying that Jesus
Christ was crucified And to be crucified meant one had been
cursed by men and by God. He that hangs on a tree is cursed,
says the scripture. Our Lord was hung upon a tree.
And he died, he was crucified as a substitute for sinners,
a substitute for his people. He stood in their place and lived
the life that they should have lived. And then he stood in their
place and died the death they most certainly would have died
had he not died it for them. He was crucified. And then he
was buried. Why does he mention that point?
Well, his burial was to prove of a certainty that he was dead. And they still try to say, well,
he just swooned. And then he got up and rolled
the stone out of the way. Brethren, I couldn't roll the
stone out of the way by myself healthy. How would a man who
had just a couple days before been crucified, lost most all
the blood he had, and now been laying in a tomb for three days,
and he's gonna get up and from the inside, roll a stone out
of the way? Easier for me to believe that
he raised from the dead as the son of God. But he did that, and when he
died, He paid the penalty for all the sins that he bore in
such a way that God will never require anything from anyone's
hands for those sins again. God is a just God. He's not going
to punish sin twice. And he rose again. Why is that
important? That's God's testimony that he
accepted the work of Christ. You've probably heard people
say, Have you accepted Christ? If anybody ever asks you that,
say, no, he was never offered to me. Now you think about that. The Bible never talks about Christ
being offered to us for acceptance or rejection. He, without spot,
offered himself to God. God's the one who must say whether
Christ is accepted or rejected. And when Christ came out of the
tomb, That was God saying with a loud and undeniable voice,
I have accepted him. His work was good enough. The
sins that he bore are gone. They shall never be brought up
again. Their sins and iniquities I'll remember no more because,
quite frankly, they don't exist anymore. They've been covered,
washed away, paid for by the blood of my son. And so much
as is so, I've raised him from the dead, because after all,
the dead's for the sinful. Christ is no longer bearing sin,
because he put them away, so he doesn't belong in the tomb
anymore. Come out! In fact, don't just come out,
sit right here, in my right hand, and I'm gonna make all your enemies
a footstool for your feet. The resurrection was just the
first step back to the throne. It wasn't an event all by itself.
But do you understand, that's how God saves sinners. That's
how he puts away their sin, through the sacrifice of Christ. Do you
understand that? You say, well, but there's some ways the scriptures
have described it that are a little bit mysterious, and I must understand. No, you don't have to understand
that first. Understand the real simple thing. Christ bore sin,
and he bore it in such a way he put it away. It's gone. Well, but you know, it says three
days and three nights, but then they say Friday, and there are
three days and three nights between Friday and Sunday morning. Who
do you think brings up that question? Spirit of God didn't. That's
the devil throwing a question in your way. You don't need to
answer. All right, and then the third question. And I find that,
at least among some, this is the most Obvious thing and yet
they never act upon it Have I ever asked God to save me People think that they have to
have some warrant to call upon God other than the simple gospel
Again, that church from which most of our folks came, they
said, well, you know what the gospel is, and you believe it,
and you mourn over your sins, and maybe someday God will kind
of give you some indication through some experience you had that
you're one of his, and you can call on him. Here is your warrant
to call upon him. And I'm telling you right now,
everybody here, everybody, you say, well, don't you believe
in election? Yes, I do. But election is not our warrant
to call on him. Don't you believe in particular
redemption? Yes, I do. But his redemption
is not our warrant to call on him. You know what our warrant
is to call upon him? His promise, whosoever shall
call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Well, yeah, but
how do you reconcile whosoever with elect? Don't bother with
that. Seriously. Don't let it get in your way.
Everyone that calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Did the Lord say that? Well, are we going to say, Lord,
you didn't make it quite clear enough there. Let me add some
things here so that folks don't call. Act like they're afraid
one of the non-elect is going to call, and God's going to be
putting a fix. Let me tell you something. You
want God's salvation? You think you need it? You know
how God provided salvation? Do you want it? Ask for it. Call on his name. Call upon his name with the absolute
full assurance that the one on whom you call will make good
on his promise to save you. Well, I called on his name, I
hope he saves me. Oh, that's all? I called upon
the name of the Lord and he saved me. Bartimaeus cried out mercy. Have mercy on me and there's
our Lord Jesus so busy healing, teaching and everything. Do you
realize the word mercy stopped the Son of God? Stopped him in
his tracks. It's like when children are playing
together and the mothers are over here talking. You notice
how mother's ear is tuned to the voice of her child. And there
can be a whole lot going on and all at once that voice, Or we're all tuned to the sound
of our own name. If there's a conversation going
on, we blot it out, and then someone says our name. You know,
it's like our ears suddenly came on. Our Lord's walking between
old and new Jericho there, and he's doing all this, and suddenly
the word mercy comes on his ears. Mercy! Jesus, thou son of David,
have mercy! Who was that? Who was that? It was this guy over here. What
do you want? What do you want? You want the
attention of God? Cry for mercy. He delights in
it. Well, brethren, my heart is full
and I could go on preaching a lot longer if I wanted to, but I'd
just mess things up if I did. Just let me repeat those three
questions. Answer them because you know
the answer to them. The answer to these questions is no secret
to you. Do I see myself as a sinner in need of God's salvation? Do
I know how it is that God saves sinners? And have I ever asked
him to save me? And if you can answer yes to
those three questions, don't doubt for a minute that God has
saved you. And don't let anyone confuse
the issue for you any more than that. May the Lord God bless
his word.