Well, good day. We're the Mississippi Gulf Coast Fire, an organization of like-minded Reformed brethren who are gathered together to talk about the things of God from a biblical perspective. hopefully that will bring honor and glory to our Lord Jesus Christ through our discussions. And with us today is Brother Gary Lankford, the founder of Brothers Keepers Ministry. Brother Joe Tolan, who is the founding pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in the Woolmarket area. And Brother Len Chappas, who is an itinerant preacher in Harrison County. And I'm Blair Bradley. I'm the pastor of the Covenant of Peace Church in Gulfport, Mississippi. And today we're gathered to talk about the wonder of God's grace. Brothers, praise the Lord. Good morning. And let's talk about God's grace. Good morning. Brothers, I just want to maybe start this conversation a little bit like this. I think one of the problems that we have when we're discussing grace is that we've gotten away from a lot of the biblical terms, the biblical terminologies and jargon that we actually grew up with and learned in church years ago. For instance, the word conversion. I grew up hearing about people being converted, which is a strongly biblical word. Nowadays, in a lot of traditional churches, you hear the expression, got saved or getting saved, which is not a biblical expression. Being saved is a biblical expression, but when we see somebody experience conversion by God's grace, we talk about people getting saved and that brings up I think a different approach and a different way of looking at things than the Bible teaches us. I say that to say this. We've done the same thing with grace. We don't understand the term. There needs to be a better definition of the term. which would only be a biblical definition for people to get a real grasp of what grace is. So, Brother Lynn, in your opinion, what would be, or from a biblical opinion, what would be your definition of grace? I mean, we've all heard that term, God's riches at Christ's expense, and those little acronyms like that. But what would be a good definition, a working definition of grace? Without just wording a definition, I think I would rely again on an acronym. uh... and one of the best acronyms i've heard is uh... god rescuing alienated and condemned enemies and i think if you take that acronym and you break it down then you can come up with what i think would be a better biblical idea of what grace is yes amen to that so really like you said brother lynn One of the problems that we're faced in the modern church is definitions that over the years, the definition of words have changed. And then we're trying to make the Bible fit in with our definitions rather than make our definitions fit in with Scripture. And you just brought up an excellent point because if God is rescuing alienated and condemned enemies, then that tells us that grace is not something helpful. It's not just a tool that helps us to get along in life. It is a mandatory act of God because we have to start out in this discussion of grace that we're enemies. That we're not just separated from God, but we are separated, but we're hostile as fallen individuals. We are hostile toward God. We are God haters by nature. That's exactly right, and I think This kind of approach is also the subject of the depravity of man. If we realize what the real condition of man is outside of grace, outside of divine intervention, then if we realize how fallen we are, how spiritually dead we are. After all, the Bible doesn't speak of us being spiritually sick. It says we're spiritually dead in trespasses and sin. And the idea that we can expect a dead man to make a decision It's about as ridiculous as you and I walking out into a graveyard and preaching the word and expecting a response. Dead is dead. If we go back to the Genesis account, the Lord told Adam and Eve the day that they eat of the fruit, they will surely die. And so that process of physical death did actually start taking place that day, but something more radical took place in that garden when the Lord cursed the earth cursed Adam and Eve, spiritual death came upon them immediately. And so as the Apostle Paul said, and Brother Lynn just quoted a minute ago in Ephesians 2 verse 1, we were dead in our sins and trespasses. We were not injured. We were not hurt. We weren't in a coma. We were dead. And not only that, he talks about how we lived our life in verse 2, he says, in which you once walked, following the course of the world, following the prince and power of the air. So not only are we dead in our sins and trespasses, but we also do what Satan wants us to do. We are his slave and we do that apart from a work of Christ. So when we talk about grace, people often quote Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves is the gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast. And oftentimes they think of that passage is like, OK, God gives the grace, but I've got the faith. And that passage doesn't teach that at all. That passage in context teaches that we were dead and God made us alive. And in that process of making us alive, which is all of his grace, he granted us grace and faith in order to believe. Right. Because dead men don't have grace or faith. Exactly. Dead men don't have the ability. The problem that most people see in understanding grace is that we walk, we talk, we think, we act, we do things, we make choices all the time in our life. And when you tell someone that by nature we're spiritually dead, they can't understand, well, what do you mean we're spiritually dead? I make decisions all the time. So why can't I make a decision for God? And the fact is, it's not that you don't make a decision for God. By your nature, you do. every single day. You decide that you're not going to obey God. And that's what all natural men do apart from a work of grace of God. So, in a discussion of how to understand what the Bible teaches about grace, that discussion must begin with the radical, all-encompassing destruction and ruination of our spirit, our bodies, our souls, our ambitions, our loves, our desires that occurred in Adam in the fall and was transferred to us through the seed of the Father to each successive generation. So one of the things then that I think we need to acknowledge is the reason that grace is so minimized today. that grace is so little understood, that grace is so belittled today, is because we have not been taught biblically about our ruination, about our depravity, about how devastating the fall was upon us, because for some reason we still think even though I think many people would acknowledge that we're separated from God. That's pretty much the extent of what people understand about the fall. But now you're talking about something far deeper. You're talking about spiritual death. Moral inability. Moral inability, spiritual death. All these terms that we need to explore that will give us a way to understand the magnificence of God's grace and appreciate grace from a biblical perspective. Right. And so many people will confuse this. And this is where the rub is, I think, for most people. When you talk about moral inability, you talk about dead and sins and trespasses, and then you talk about the gospel proclamation, which is a command to repent and believe. the gospel, they'll say, well, how is that fair? How is that fair? If we're dead in our sins and trespasses and we cannot choose God and we will not, it's not just we can't, we won't. It is an act of our fallen nature to reject God. And so God is not obligated in any way to save us in spite of ourselves. And that's why it's so beautiful to talk about grace. Amen to that. I think one of the natural illustrations in the Old Testament is with Joseph and his brothers. The Bible says that Joseph's brothers hated him. And then the next verse says, they could not speak favorably to him because of their hatred. So the hatred that they naturally and normally had toward Joseph because of the love that the father had shown to Joseph produced an inability. It didn't say they did not, it said they could not speak favorably. They weren't able, they didn't have the power or the ability to speak favorably to Joseph because of this intrinsic, inherent, deep-seated hatred they had toward Joseph. So that's a natural example of a spiritual truth. If the Bible is true, which we say that it is, the Bible says that we're not just neutral toward God as lost, fallen people, that we hate God. We are actively hostile toward God in our mind, in our disposition, and in our activity. Therefore, that hatred that we naturally and normally have for God by nature produces in us an inability. We cannot love God. We cannot serve God. We cannot even desire to do these things in and of ourselves absent a sovereign move of God because of this hatred. So this hatred has produced in us an inability, not a mental inability, but a moral inability to do what is right. And sadly, what has happened is that Instead of churches, and we're speaking of traditional churches today, instead of churches remaining true to those principles that you two basically have so well verbalized here today, I think what we've allowed to happen in our churches is there's such a strong cultural influence on our churches And the cultural influence that is being pressed upon churches nowadays is the idea of humanism. Humanism is so prevalent in our society. Secularism and all those kinds of humanisms, so to speak. And humanism stresses that man can do anything for himself. If he can think it, he can accomplish it. And so we are seeing many generations actually at 62 years old I can say that I've seen many generations literally being indoctrinated in our schools, but unfortunately even in our churches. I mean, you know, you hear preachers going and preaching baccalaureates, which we don't see much more of these days, but we do see some of that. And their idea of preaching a baccalaureate service is to say something to them that they can do anything they want to. They can accomplish anything they want to in their human strength. And these are things that are coming out of the pulpits nowadays. And so the result of that sort of cultural influence in our church, especially as regards to humanism, is that we have lost completely what grace really means. And it must start not with an idea that you can accomplish anything and do anything if you just set your mind to do it or if you'll just want to do it or will to do it or anything of that nature. what we've accomplished in doing that is we've we've literally trained even in our churches nowadays uh... our young people that grace is just a little bit of assistance it's just god assisting you to do something spiritual which is absolutely wrong brother joe alluded a while ago to the passage from ephesians two where it says, for by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. Even the faith that we exercise is not of ourselves. But the Bible also says that the repentance that we exercise is a gift from God. We have nothing to offer spiritually to God. Nothing whatsoever. It takes a divine intervention, just like Jesus said to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. The wind blows where it wills. We don't know where it comes from, how it's going to accomplish what it accomplishes. And the Spirit is the same way. The Spirit does what He does in His own time, in His own way. And there's nothing that we can do to conjure it up or make it happen. It all has to be of God. Brother Lynn has made a real salient point that I think we could explore. Humanism, unbiblical, patently anti-biblical teaching is now prevalent in the pulpits today. So my question is why? Why, after 2,000 years of having our Bibles in churches, after having the Bible translated into English 400 years ago so we could all have our own Bibles, after the tyranny of the Papists who kept the Word of God secret and only for the illiterate and the elite, now that the people have their Bibles and they're able to read their Bibles and study their... Why has humanism become more popular today, and I suggest it is more popular today than it was when it began with Pelagius, why would that be true in our churches today? I think Brother Lamb alluded to it, it's a cultural thing a lot of times. And the reason for that is we're Americans. And so Americans have always been those who did things on their own. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They built a great nation. We see that around us today. And so we think we're able to do anything that we want to. And so when somebody is confronted with the truth of spiritual death and the truth of the depravity of man, especially in our culture, we tend to think, well, that's not, that can't be true. Because surely, surely we haven't ruined ourselves to the point that we can't, we can't even reach for God. But Romans 3 is very plain. There's no one who even seeks after God. That's what it says. That's exactly what it says. And we have a whole movement in our day. It started probably back in the in the mid 80s called the seeker movement. And that seeker movement is the prevalent movement in our day. We do everything. Well, I shouldn't say we, many churches do everything they can to entice the seeker to come in. We've got to have the right music. We've got to have the right kind of speaker. We've got to have the right kind of message. We've got to have the right lighting. We've got to have the right kind of special effects lighting. All of those things. So if we can move somebody in their will, and this goes back to Phineasim, if we can move somebody in their will, then we can get them to make a decision for Christ and they'll be saved. And I think all that's true, but I do think there is, though, something even deeper Because, of course, this was not scientific, but I did my own independent research. And I went to people who were just average people. I went to the checkout lady at Walmart. I went to the guy working on the side of the road. I did interviews with these people, videotaped them, and recorded them. And I asked them about these issues. And everybody that I talked to 100% naturally and normally believed that even though periodically we may do bad things as human beings, that underneath it all, we're basically good people. And even though periodically we get weak and we slip up and murder somebody or smoke dope or whatever, that underneath it all, we're basically good. And so if we can learn how to tap into that inner goodness that already is within the human being, then let that inner goodness come out from within us. Tap into that inner power, that inner strength that already is there. then we can become good people. And of course, what people believe, good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell. So the goal is to be a good person by what we do. So let's learn how to tap in because the goodness is already there, inherent. And I think one of the most profound summations of the condition of man after the fall is in Genesis 6, verse 5, that God saw the wickedness of man. And this is how the King James puts it. The wickedness of man was great in the earth. Meaning, great doesn't mean great in the sense of wonderful. It means great in the sense of all pervasive that it touches every area of life. And here's the end of that verse. And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Meaning, all evil all the time. No capacity for good. No capacity for righteous. No capacity for moral. No capacity for anything that's holy. None seek after God. And Romans 3 goes into great detail to explain what I think Genesis 6-5 says. And so here we are. That's where we're starting out from. that the sociological and the humanistic teachings that we've all been raised up in and that I think are naturally believed by lost people because of their fallen condition. Because part of being fallen is we don't believe we're fallen. That we believe we're God. That's part of what it means to be fallen. that we normally and naturally just automatically believe, well, we might not be as holy as Paul, but we're certainly not as bad as Genghis Khan. So we're somewhere in the middle between these two great extremes. So that makes we're okay. And we just need to fine tune a few areas of our lives and put forth a little more effort. And church is all about giving us tips on how to do that in little cute little quotes. and little clever phrases about how to improve ourselves. So basically, the focus now of church is to turn inward to the self of man rather than outward to the glory and the majesty and the grace of God. I think most of you know that I work in churches that don't think about grace the way we do. And I think one thing that we see in the churches, one thing that I see is When we mention grace, it takes away our ability to be God. And if you look at the fall, Satan tempted Adam, and he said, you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. So a lot of the grace thing takes away our pride. And it all boils down to pride, because we all want to be God. It's like I preach a sermon in the church here, and I mention sovereign grace. Well, after that sermon, I had so much, man, that was a really good sermon. And about a week or two later, I kept visiting the church, and the pastor called me in his office and said, what did you mean by sovereign grace? Yeah, what do you mean by that? You know, he said, that usually leads to heresy. And that was his exact words, which he had a bad misunderstanding. And that's back to those terminologies we were talking about a while ago. Those are things that we grew up with. Exactly. Sovereign grace. Well, I didn't, but that's what I preach. I use the sovereign grace, you know. And if God's not sovereign, who is? You know, and we need to find out who it is and we need to be worshiping Him. Whoever is sovereign needs to be worshiped. Exactly. And God is sovereign. And we understand that. So grace, I think it takes away our ability to be God. So really our American culture with our liberty and our focus on freedom and individual liberty has hindered the American church in their recognition of the sovereignty of God. and their awe and respect and admiration for God because it focuses on the benefit of man to the exclusion of God. And self-esteem. Self-esteem is being taught in the churches. Your self-worth. Your self-esteem. All that self. That's limited. The last church that I preached in, the pastor, well, the ex-pastor had come to me and said, you know, my daughter was crying because of what you said from the pulpit. And it was probably because our worth about self-worth. It was not teaching self-esteem. I thought Christ-esteem is what I teach. Our self-worth comes through what Christ did on the cross. The finished work on the cross. and not what we're worth. But I think the invitation of Christianity is not come to the cross and be all you can be. It's come to the cross and die so that Christ can be all that He is. God is not up in heaven to help me fulfill my ambitions, to help me score more touchdowns, and to get my teeth whiter and brighter. God is on the throne to be glorified. And my duty is to live for His glory, not for Him to exist for my benefit. To me, we talk about the loss of the proper nomenclature in our language in the church and everything, but here's the real danger of this. If we lose sight of what grace really is, this puts us in the company of some very bad people. I don't know how else to say it than to be real straight about this. but if you don't believe that grace is grace in the degree that we have talked about here today and you believe that there is that little spark of good in man as you talked about a while ago that puts us in the company of other world religions like the muslim religion, the hindus all of whom teach basically that there's really no such thing as grace there it's all about whatever works you can perform in order to make yourself acceptable to God. I mean, whether it's killing infidels like some of the Muslims are doing and thinking that's their ticket to heaven. But we have basically the same thing going on in our traditional churches today because when we speak of decisional regeneration, for instance, that's nothing more than works. That doesn't make what we teach any better. than what the Hindus are saying, or the Muslims are saying, or anybody else who has a works-oriented theology, which I use the word theology very loosely because it's not really theology. Even baptismal regeneration, that's being taught even in many so-called Christian churches today. obey the Lord and get baptized, for instance, then you're saved. The water saves you. Again, that's the emphasis on human work, human decision, human abilities, and so on down the line. That is such a dangerous road to go down, because if the traditional church today continues to go down that road, it is going to be unidentifiable as a Christian church. Where did that come from? Why do we naturally and normally try to make ourselves acceptable in God's sight? One of the most glaring examples I think in scripture comes from John chapter 8 about people denying their own depravity. There were some Jews who believed in the Lord Jesus and we use that term believe very loosely there because what John is pointing out they didn't really believe. They started to follow him for a moment. And then the Lord in verse 31 said to them, if you abide in my word and you are truly my disciples, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. And when the Lord said that, it so greatly offended them that their response was this. We are offspring of Abraham and we have never been enslaved to anyone. And the fact is that in the first century, Jewish world, they were enslaved to the Romans. Right at that moment. At that very moment. And so Jesus doesn't bring that up. But what he says to them is really pertinent to our discussion. He says, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. That's what it says. And a slave has a master. And they can't do anything other than what that master says to do. And that great theologian Bob Dylan said, you're going to serve somebody. Yeah, the sun must set you free. And if the sun doesn't set you free, you are not free. You're not free. You're not free. So so back in the garden. God said, you just brought it up, Brother Joe. God said, the day you eat this, you're going to die. So, the first thing man did was do what God told him not to do. Now, so he died spiritually, right? So, immediately after the fall, you go back to Genesis 3, and you look at how did they behave? How did they act immediately after the fall? The first thing they did was run and hide, right? So now it's natural and normal for all people to run and hide from God. The second thing they did was they made aprons out of fig leaves. Now what was that? That was their first attempt at earning their place with God by what they did for themselves. They were trying to cover their own sins by what they do for themselves. There's humanism. Humanism was birthed immediately after the fall when they believed the lie that you're going to be as God's. If you do this, so now their eyes are open. They know they're naked, which they didn't know they were naked before. And their first thing was to run and hide. The second thing is, let me see what I can do for myself in my own strength, through my own ability, in my own human inclination, by my own willpower. to make myself now acceptable in God's sight. And eventually God said, that's not going to satisfy me at all. So God killed an animal. God shed blood. And God made coats of skins for them. Because unless God covers our sin, our sins are not covered by anything that we do. So again, I think that we need to explore this possibility that it is not something you even have to teach people. You don't have to teach people humanism. People automatically believe humanism. They automatically believe the value of the self. That's where you have the self-health, self-worth, self-esteem. All that comes from focusing inward into that place somewhere in us that's supposedly good to develop that and build it up and by doing that we become good. That's a religion. And that's automatically believed by everybody who has fallen and lost. You have to be taught. Scripture. You have to be taught Christianity. You have to be taught grace because you won't automatically believe it because it runs counterintuitive to our fallen human nature. That's what Romans 12 says. Don't be conformed to the images of the world. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The 19th century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon said that everyone is a natural born Armenian. If he lived in the 20th or 21st century, he would have said everyone is a natural born human. Absolutely. So by default, by the church either minimizing or neglecting line upon line, precept upon precept, deep, serious teachings of the profound truths of Scripture. Over a period of time, what has happened, that vacuum has been automatically filled with the normal, natural religion of fallen man, which is humanism. So part of what we have to do growing in grace and in knowledge as we are learning how to behave ourselves as Christians and all, is that there are many things that we have to unlearn. That's part of our Christian education is there are many things we have to unlearn. And unfortunately, those of us who have come out of an Arminian background, which I did, and many of us, probably most of us in this room did at some point or another, I have found myself, since the Lord has revealed to me the beauty of his sovereign grace and what grace really is. I have found myself in the past few years having to unlearn much of what I had been taught in some of these traditional churches where grace is not truly understood in its biblical sense. I think growing up, when I can look back growing up in the church, the thing that came from the pulpit for the most was moralism. They taught moralism. Don't drink, don't curse, and don't date women that do. And that's what was taught instead of Jesus Christ. And you're pointed to your own ability not to do sin instead of pointed to Christ. And through Him, you can accomplish the things that He wants you to. And only by His grace can you be the man that you need to be. instead of pointing to myself. And the Church is pointing to you. You don't need to do this. You don't need to do that. Instead, the only way that you can get into the Kingdom of God, the only way that you can be worthy to stand in His presence is through the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Brother Lynn and Brother Gary, what you are saying is that it's just like when you have a glass, and the glass is supposedly empty, but it's not. It's full of air. And you're going to pour in the truth of God's Word, the water, into the glass. You're doing two things when you do that. You're pouring in truth to the degree that you are expelling error. When you're preaching and teaching, you're inserting truth into the minds and hearts of people, and that by default then is rejecting the error that they already have. We're not taught error. We're already born with error. We're born fallen. We're born lost. We're born sinful. We don't have to do something to become lost. We're born, when we're shaken in our mother's womb, that's when we need grace. We need grace at that moment. And so, as we're born into this sinful world, left to ourselves, we will automatically manifest this fallen nature. that will be hostile toward God, aliens from the commonwealth, strangers, and all these other things that the Bible speaks about. You don't have to teach your children to disobey. I spent a lot of time trying to teach my children to mind me. And they were bent on rebelling because they're completely all evil all the time. My children were born total reprobates. They were conceived as total depraved people. I was too. So the goal of the church then should be to proclaim and teach and live and obey and love and defend, but proclaim and teach divine truth. What God said about the condition of man and what that does, that's the bad news. That's the bad news. The good news that Jesus says and that grace is available. is meaningless to people if they don't understand the bad news. It's just news. And you know, there was a day in our nation where the churches were filled, the pulpits were full of men who would teach the truth of the word of God, line by line, precept upon precept, verse by verse. And that was the normal thing in church. You went to church and you heard an exposition of scripture. You heard that scripture applied to you. What did God say? Yeah, exactly. And today you go to churches and what do you hear? You hear humanism. You hear good stories. You hear a man who's up there that could be a standup comedian. You hear lots of good fluffy stuff. But the norm is that it's not no longer. Do you go to a church and expect to hear an exposition of Scripture? That's the rarity. And so that's the problem in our churches, in our nation, is people have taken the truth of the Word of God and decided they don't want to preach it anymore. And so we're going to do things to attract people into our congregations to build buildings and programs and build a kingdom for ourselves rather than the kingdom of God going out by the seed of the Gospel and the proclamation of His Word. So the focus of the church then is to be popular, to have a lot of people, to be accepted in society, to blend in with the culture and not be standing alone, standing apart from the culture. The goal of the modern church then is to make people feel good about themselves, again that word self, and to build up the self of man because they bought into the lie rather than preach the magnificence of God, preach His holiness, preach His worth, so that Jesus becomes the most valuable commodity in the universe. And I am a wicked sinner. God is infinitely holy. I am unbelievably wicked. And I desperately need His grace. So we get these little shallow terms of grace birthed out of a shallow understanding of our great need and a shallow understanding of God. So the only solution then is to put the brakes on and begin to teach the magnificence of God? That's right. And what will be one of the casualties that will happen if we do that? Many of those false converts that sit in churches to be entertained every single week and to have something to do will no longer come. They will be offended at the Word of God. But the truth is, Jesus said in John 10, My sheep hear My voice and they follow Me. And those who do not follow Him are not His sheep. That's what it says. That's exactly what it says. They're going to reject the truth. They're going to reject that. As you know, like I said, I visit a lot of churches and I actually enjoy doing that and listening. But what I found out is there's not enough gospel preached in most of the churches I visit to fill up a thimble. It's usually moralism or self-esteem being taught from the pulpit. The word is not being preached. And the word that is being preached is so weak, they weaken it down and water it down to where, like I said, there's not enough gospel to fill the thimble. And revitalization of the churches today must begin in the pulpit. So a way to recapture the majesty of grace, Brother Gary, is to start preaching the gospel. Exactly. And having men to preach the gospel. And I think there is a reformation starting now. I see that a lot in younger men. Some of the younger men are coming up. It's almost like they're tired of the play in church, the moralism. And they want to hear the Word of God preached. It's a small reformation, but I do believe it is happening. I believe God's working now in a lot of our younger men. Yeah, I do too. I think so. I think one thing that will help us all too and what has helped me personally is to go back in history. We didn't just pop up out of the ground when we got saved. Christianity didn't start when I got saved. The problem with church, the problem with worldliness, the problem with lack of didn't start in our day. Spurgeon talked about it 150 years ago. Augustine grieved over the worldliness in the church 1700 years ago. So this has been a problem. But as I studied history and I studied the great battles that went on between the giants, Augustine and Pelagius and Luther and all these different ones that battled particular issues of Scripture, one of the things that became so clear to me is the terminology. that the bad guys used. We've got to remember, there were some serious heretics that tried to destroy Christianity. They were not well-meaning people who were just a little off on their theology. These people were determined, Jude calls them certain men who are not saved, who will not be saved, to whom the judgment and the blackness and the darkness of damnation is reserved forever. And they creep into the church while the leaders are asleep at the wheel, and they do great havoc in the church by their false doctrine. And one of the things that I listened to when I was talking to the checkout lady at Walmart and the guy working on the side of the street, they used terminology, they used phrases. Like for example, God would never violate the free will of man. Man is a stand-alone entity that God honors and God respects. And those are almost quotes from Pelagius. Now I know good and well that that checkout lady didn't read Pelagius. So where did she come up with this idea? That's what made me think. This is what people will automatically believe if left to themselves. If the church doesn't do their job in teaching, automatic, the result will be heresy and false teaching and humanism will come in because we're fallen creatures. So we believe what sounds good to fallen creatures. And I promise you the gospel don't sound good to fallen creatures. the right back to where we started our we're talking about terminology that i don't know when clinton this is in the church and it's it's a very sad thing is a simple story that I've shared many times with children to kind of help them understand about their relationship, our relationship to God. A little girl gets up one morning. Her mother is sick. She can't take her to Sunday school, but the little girl wants to go. So her mother dresses her up in this pretty little dress. The church is within walking distance and her mother instructs her. Now don't you dare stop off anywhere between here and the church and you go straight to church and you come home. When she went to church, went to Sunday school, she started home she saw a mud puddle that looked really attractive. So she jumped in that mud puddle with that pretty little dress on, gets all muddy. She goes home and she thinks, now what can I do to keep my mother from being so angry with me? She says, I know what I'll do. So she goes in, she starts making her bed up, cleaning her room. She goes and sits down at the piano. She does practices on the piano like her mother had begged her to do every day. The problem was everywhere that she went and everything she touched was salt, the mud from that mud hole. And so when she stands before her mother and her mother begins to scold her about that, she says, but mother, I did all these things that you always asked me to do that I never seemed to get around to doing. And her mother explained to her, honey, it doesn't matter. Everything you touched, you dirtied it up. And the point here is simply that if we're not regenerated, if we're just a natural man, if we're not born again, There's nothing we can do that's right or good in the eyes of God. And that's where grace comes in. It has to be something. It has to be a source outside of ourselves. It cannot be of ourselves. The thing about the culture, some people do, I don't, but some people watch Oprah, for instance, and she does all these wonderful things, has all these wonderful projects. We have actors and actresses going overseas and adopting dozens of babies and bring them back. What is this really all about? It's about trying to do something that they think pleases a deity or pleases something outside of themselves that's going to make them acceptable. But it does not. If they're not born again, everything they do, no matter how good it might seem in the eyes of men, is nothing but rags. It's dirt. That's all it is. And so we're only always at the mercy of God for His intervening grace, His sovereign grace that has to happen outside of ourselves and despite ourselves. When I was in college and I was being taught sociology, Sociology teaches that what's wrong with people, the reason there's high crime areas in cities is because of a lack of money, a lack of education, and a lack of opportunity. But if we will transfer wealth from people who earn money, and we will give that wealth to people who do not earn that money, and give these people hope and opportunity, that they will automatically change from being drug addicts and criminals to being nice people, i.e. being safe. And so sociology teaches that. So back in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was the president of the United States, we began a great experiment in this country, Bob. He called it a great society. We're going to develop a great society. And if you listen to his speeches, and I've read his speeches, and I'll remember as a child him speaking about these things. It sounded great. I mean, the man was preaching a sermon. You know, if only we will do this for people. People, because they're basically good, they'll change. and they'll appreciate. So we have, over the last 45 years, we have spent the entire net worth of all the Fortune 500 companies in the war on poverty, and we've lowered poverty by 1%. And there's more crime, there's more disease, there's more pestilence, 70% illegitimate rate in the black community, 36% illegitimate rate in the white community. A society cannot sustain itself with these kinds of statistics. So, it's been an abject failure any way you want to look at it. Sociology has failed the United States. And so, in 2011, we're now in our leadership of our country, we are now more committed to doing more of these things than ever before. The point is this. It seems to me, just from a silly little South Mississippi preacher, that the church has bought into this. And we now believe what used to be called the social gospel. That if we will just befriend people If we'll take somebody to lunch, if we'll go mow their yard, if we'll be friends with them, we can kind of sneak the gospel in on them and kind of do a divine bait and switch. We'll have a weenie roast and a sports star. We can get lost people to want to be saved. And there is a method that God used in the Bible, and it wasn't that. It was you preach the Word of the Lord to dead, deaf, blind, angry people who don't want to hear your message and don't want God and don't love God and somehow, A miracle happens when you're preaching that Word of God. God sovereignly comes to them in grace, unstops their ears, opens their eyes, takes out of them a stony heart, gives them a heart of flesh, and God issues grace to these individuals. But through that method, not through these humanistic methods. I think we have to delineate very clearly that the social gospel, what they call relationship evangelism, all of these things that we've tried have been abject failures and we've filled our church with tears and not true confluence. Let me raise an objection and then answer it. Because one of the objections that you hear from the social gospel people is, we need to earn a right to preach the gospel. We need to be able to win these people over to us in order for us to present the gospel to us. But that's not what the scripture teaches at all. Paul said to the Corinthians, we are ambassadors of Christ. And so what that means is we have a king. And our king has given us a message and he has told us to go and proclaim it. We don't have to earn a right to proclaim the gospel. We are under authority to proclaim that gospel. We are ambassadors. We're sent. And it doesn't matter whether they kill us or believe the gospel, we are sent by our king and we are commanded to preach this gospel to every creature on planet earth. and that offensive part of the Gospel that we need grace, that grace is not something useful, that it's mandatory and nobody gets saved because you cannot even hear, you cannot even get convicted lest God allows you to be convicted. You can't even desire to love God, lest God grant you that ability. That's how desperately wicked and fallen we are. That's the offensive part of the Gospel. That's why they kill missionaries. Nobody kills anybody by saying Jesus loves you and has a plan for your life. That's not offensive. The offensive part is, hey Bubba, Mohammed lied to you. Your Buddhist faith is a lie. It's a patent falsehood. Your Hindu faith is of no value to you at all. What Jesus told Nicodemus, He said, all your washings, all your changing of your garments, all your chants, all your prayers have not brought you one inch closer to salvation than a prostitute. Nicodemus, everything you've done your whole life has been a complete waste of time. You, Nicodemus, have to be born again or you will never see the Kingdom of God. And why did Jesus use that phraseology? Why did he use that analogy for regeneration? The new birth. And most people never think through this. The reason he did is because he knew what Nicodemus' reaction was going to be. Can I enter my mother's womb again for a second time as an old man and be born again? No, the analogy is this. You had absolutely nothing to do with your first birth. You didn't have anything to do with your conception. You didn't have anything to do with the time you spent in your mother's womb, nor did you have anything to do with your birth. It was all done to you. You didn't initiate it or cooperate with it. The best definition of grace in the whole Bible isn't it, really, when you get down to it. I mean, there couldn't be anything any better. Nicodemus thought he had salvation in hand. And he thought he had earned it and had done everything required for it. And Jesus said to him, you must be born again. And it took it right out of his hands and put it right where it needed to be, in God's hands. And he says, God is the one who's in control of this. The spirit blows and goes wherever he wills. And you see the action, but you don't know where he comes from. You don't know where he goes. underscoring wherever he wills. And you know, Jesus, really if we were to just go back to the Gospels, I think, and just read the words of Jesus, sometimes he spoke in what we would consider sort of veiled words. You know, it takes a almost a born-again ear to even understand what he's saying, I guess. But, you know, I just read this morning in my little brief devotion time in Matthew 11, 27, where Jesus said that the Father has revealed Himself to the Son, and the Son, you know, excuse me, I'll have to back up just a little bit. The Son reveals Himself to those that He wants to reveal Him to, Matthew 11, 27, you know. You know, it's not a matter of us deciding that we want to know Him or seeking Him, because it does not come from our human nature to seek Him. We cannot. And it's worse than cannot. You alluded to this earlier, Brother Joe, that there's the cannot and the will not part of it. Really, the worst part of it is that fallen man will not. It's bad enough that he cannot. It's even worse that He will not. And bring Romans 1 into the equation. What does Romans 1 say? That what can be known about God is plainly shown to us in the creation. It's there. So that they are without excuse. And what does natural man do with the revelation of God? They suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They push it down. They deny it. They do away with it. They push it aside. They don't think about it. And they serve idols. And they do this as a natural and normal response to their fallen nature. Nobody says, I think I'll hate God today. They just naturally hate God. They naturally suppress the truth because they're fallen. That's what being fallen means. One of our Doctrines of Grace classes recently, I spent the whole hour on one verse. And I didn't say a word the whole hour. I let everybody in the room read Genesis 6-5 and say, what does that verse say? What does it mean? What does it mean to be all evil all the time? And by the third person, people were really getting upset. And they were really getting nervous. And they're saying, well, people do good. We are good. I said, really? I said, turn to Romans 3 and I reread that. The Bible says you're not good. What about the Shriners Hospital? What about little burn children? They treat them for free. Isn't that good? Well, let's see. The Bible says, whatever is not done of faith, is sin. So even these humanly speaking noble efforts that people do, the soldier jumping on a grenade to rescue his fellow soldiers, an act of nobility, an act that we honor as a culture and as human beings, and we should honor that. That was an act that is birthed in glory for self, glory for others, but not glory for God. The definition of sin is that whatever we do that falls short of the glory of God. Conversely, whatever we do, whether we eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. So how do you eat oatmeal to the glory of God? How do you mow your yard to the glory of God? Well, you do it in recognition of the fact that I don't deserve this beautiful day. I don't deserve this peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I don't deserve my beautiful wife. I don't deserve any of this. I'm a wretched, wicked sinner that deserves the wrath of God. God would be wonderful He would be perfectly just, perfectly glorious to condemn me to eternal damnation immediately because of the wickedness of my... and the repeated sins that I have committed. So the God-given cognizant ability for us to know that as fallen people we deserve His wrath. That's the offensive part. Therefore, Grace becomes wonderful. So outside of redeeming grace and regeneration, even the very best acts that we perform are nothing more than filthy rags. What do we tell our children? Give money to people. Why do you want to give money to people? Because it makes you feel good. And that's still another thing you see there. Anything that I do to bring attention to myself I'm still in glory from God. Absolutely. Because I can do nothing apart from Jesus Christ. That's John 15, 5. Apart from me, you can do nothing. Right. And if I'm doing anything to be seen, and you see a lot of that, especially in the social gospel, you see a lot of that. They pat him on the back. Oh, Brother so-and-so is a good guy. You know, during Katrina, he built me a house. He came in and helped me remodel my house. He gave me this. He gave me that. Yeah, that is good. But apart from Christ, you can do anything. And if you get up there, you're actually stealing. You're a thief. You're a thief. You're trying to be God. It falls back to Adam. We'll be like God. And even that, you're trying to be like God. As someone said in the beginning, God created man in His image. And ever since then, man has been busy. trying to create God in his image. I think one of the main problems that I've seen in churches I've visited around is, first of all, man does not understand who he is. That's not taught from the pulpit. And they don't understand who God is. And that's one of the things that I do when I go into a church and I'm allowed in the pulpit. the cost of discipleship, what man really is. I'll preach that and I'll preach the holiness of God from Isaiah chapter 6. And usually that just tells me how far I'm going to get to go. Usually it's out the door. You know, one of the analogies that I've used before, and I borrowed this from somebody else, I didn't make it up, is to help us understand the depth of our depravity. My wife's favorite drink is a Diet Coke from Sonic with extra ice. And if I go get that for her and bring that to her, she's one of the happiest people you've ever seen in your life. But, if I go get that Sonic Diet Coke with extra ice and I go into the house and I take a Visine dropper and I just reach down into the toilet and I just draw out some water out of the toilet and I drop just a couple of drops of that toilet water into that Diet Coke. And I hand it to her and I say, here's your favorite drink, honey. Just want you to know, though, that I dropped a couple of drops of water from the toilet into this drink. Do you think she's going to drink it? No, she's not going to drink it. Why? It's defiled. The truth is, we're not a Diet Coke that's good with a couple of drops of evil in it. We are that toilet water. And nobody, including God, wants to drink that. And another thing that people often think when we're talking about salvation and God bestowing grace on some, when they think of the idea of election and predestination, they often think of it this way, that you walk up, God walks up to this truck bed and it's full of puppies and they're all cute and they're cuddly. He reaches in and he grabs a couple of puppies out of there for himself, but he leaves the rest of them to be destroyed. The rest of them go on and go to the Humane Society, ultimately to the pound, and they're put down. But that's not the picture the Bible gives us of humanity. We're not cute, cuddly puppies. Puppies, we are snarling rabid wolves waiting to bite his arm off with rabies when he puts his arm in there to pull us out and by his grace he does snatch some of us out of there and rescues us so the mystery then is not why does God save some and doesn't save all the mystery is why does God save anybody amen that's right that's grace yeah exactly and when we try to move why don't you uh you know sum it up you know brothers what we have talked about here is what uh Some of the followers of Jesus said when he was teaching some, quote, hard things. And you remember what happened? Many departed at that point. And the truth of the matter is we've talked about some hard things this morning. To me, they're blessed things. I love every word that we said today and discussed in this room today. But to many of our listeners out there, these are going to be some hard sayings. But the prayer of every man in this room right now is that by God's grace, those who have heard this today will begin to embrace these truths. There will no longer be hard things that drive them away from the Lord. but they will be hard sayings of the Lord Jesus that will cause them to fall on their knees in faith and repentance. Cry out to Him for forgiveness and embrace the wonderful, life-changing, future-giving, eternity-giving truths of God. that will be all to the glory of God for their good. So we want to be sure that we pray for everybody who have heard these words. And if they want more information, hopefully we'll have a way of them being able to contact us. Contact us through our website, www.mscoastfire.org. That's mscoastfire.org.