TANC Homework #4 John Macarthur T4G2008 SESSION3

As I have said in previous TANC homework assignments the challenge I have is directly tied to what and how much too present. This is particularly true when discussing specific ideas advanced by specific people. I try to avoid taking people out of context but establishing context in the conference is very time consuming and marginally productive. I was provided a proprietary  transcript of the following lecture given by John Macarthur at the T4G 2008 conference. As of right this minute I plan on talking about some extended sections of this lecture and I want to show his words in broader context. Even if I choose not to use excerpts in the conference the following lecture is illustrative of the primary themes imbedded in Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin and its direct philosophical relationship to determinism.

Think of it this way: John Macarthur is presenting these central doctrines—with appropriate proof texts—to the next generation of American intellectual leadership.

Think of that as you read through the first three paragraphs.

Questions:

1.  What is the relationship between Plato’s world of Forms and Augustine’s Idealism as it applies to the Good?
   1.        (Hint: look up the philosophic term Idealsim.)
2.  What is the GOOD and how can Man know it is Good?
3. What is the difference between Salvific Good and Human Good?
4. If Man is an Original Sin moral monster how can he volitionally do any GOOD?
5. When Macarthur discusses Neo Liberalism how can he make a claim to rational independence when his central premise is man has no ability qua ability?
6. What epistemological concept is he stealing to endow Man with rational choice?
   1. (Hint: review my introduction concept formation in my TANC 2014 discussion of Aristotle’s Law of Identity)
   2. (Hint: review Ayn Rand’s fallacy of the “Stolen Concept”

*   *   *

The subject that I have this morning, and by the way, before we dig into that a little bit, it’s just always an honor to minister with these men, and it’s a privilege and a joy to be here at this conference and to minister to you.

Obviously, you are the most important people in the world. The most important people in the world preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. They don’t run nations. They don’t run institutions. They don’t run corporations. They don’t run universities. They make an eternal difference. They’re a saver of life to life and death to death. And who is adequate for such things except that one called to minister the gospel? So I know who I’m talking to. A more important group than kings and princes and presidents and emperors and prime ministers and all others. It is therefore critically incumbent upon us that we understand the nature of our message, that we understand the foundations of our gospel. And that’s what kind of prompted me to want to talk about the subject of total depravity or unwilling and unable as a theme, a gospel theme.

If you would open the Bible for a moment, I want to read a few scriptures to you, just a very few, and then we’ll talk a little bit about importance of this subject and then come back to the scripture. In John 5:39-40, our Lord said, “You searched the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. And it is these that bear witness of me. And you are unwilling to come to me that you may have life.” Those who search the scriptures with a view to eternal life, those who search the scriptures with a view to eternal life, which scriptures bear witness to Jesus Christ are nonetheless unwilling to come to him. Why is that? Turn to John 6:44. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

The doctrine of human unwillingness and inability is perhaps the most attacked doctrine wittingly or unwittingly. The idea that sinners are completely helpless to redeem themselves or to make any contribution to that redemption from sin and divine judgment is the most attacked because in the big picture, it is the most despised doctrine. Consequently, it is the most distinctively Christian doctrine, contrary to all non-Christian views of men. All religions in the world are some form of a works righteousness system. And at the foundation of all those religions other than the true faith in the true gospel is the idea that people can be good and good enough to contribute to their salvation, to somehow merit favor with deity and a happy after life. Because this is the universal foundational doctrine of all false systems of religion, it is therefore the most – because, I should say, the opposite of it is the foundation of all these religions, it is therefore the most attacked Christian doctrine. It is distinctively Christian because it affirms the absolute inability of man to do anything to contribute to his salvation.

It is a contrary doctrine as well. It doesn’t sit well with the sinner because one of the dominant features of universal human fallenness is deception about one’s true condition. Based on the dominating reality of human pride, the sinner is unwilling to see himself in his true condition and is convinced to one degree or another of his goodness. People will deny that they are evil, that there are sins in their lives, but they do not see the evil in their good, and they do not see the evil in their religion. They will deny that they are incurably evil, hostile to God, and utterly incapable of any true good. This because they are self-deceived. There are people who even invoke the name of the true God, people who invoke the name of Jesus, people who claim to love God while in reality they hate the true God. They may have sentimental affection for the god of their own making, but they actually hate and cannot love the true God.

And when you tell them that there is nothing in them that is good and nothing in them that can please God, they can do human good, they can do human philanthropy in the sight of men, they can do things that are moral and noble, but they can do nothing that ascends to satisfy God’s requirement for a relationship with him and for entrance into heaven, they resent it. It is the most paradoxical doctrine in that sense because people denying that they are so bad they can make no contribution to their salvation still have to admit that there are some sins in their lives, and they’re unwilling to assume that God has a right to hold them eternally accountable for those. False religion becomes the most heinous of all sins. It is the breach of the first commandment: to love the Lord your God and have no other gods before you. And religion does not cancel out this doctrine, rather it proves it. Man is so deeply sinful that he invents false gods, gods of his own making and religions to directly show his hatred of the true God. It was John Bunyan who said the best prayer I ever prayed had enough sin in it to damn the whole world,” and Isaiah who said all our righteousness is as filthy rags, a very, very gross expression in the Hebrew language.

I’m concerned because so many evangelical spokesmen today seem to hate the truth of total depravity as they seem to hate the God of Scripture because they continue to deceive the sinner about his goodness, and they hide the true God behind a benign, domesticated god of their own making. This doctrine is most minimized when it should be most maximized. False belief systems all affirm human goodness, that man has enough goodness in him to contribute in some way to his salvation. This becomes the basis of manipulative church growth strategies. Those who reject, those who despise, those who derogate, those who minimize or ignore the doctrine of depravity, I think, have done as much to impede the advance of the gospel as the open enemies of the cross. Every movement in Christianity that has minimized or rejected this truth has badly strayed soteriologically. It’s not to say they’re not Christians. It is to say that they are profoundly confused. To grasp the truth of depravity is to understand all other doctrinal components of salvation. They become obvious. And true gospel ministry transcends all forms of manipulation and is recognized purely as a divine work. It is the most God-glorifying doctrine honoring God completely and leaving no honor for men.

If you just dropped into the world today, the evangelical world, you might think that this doctrine was a recent arrival because free will “doctrine” is so popular today that when people hear the doctrine of total depravity, they think it’s something new. They think that the idea of man’s free will and ability to contribute to his salvation is orthodox. But the fact is this is the most historical doctrine, this doctrine of total depravity. The Bible’s clear teaching on Original Sin has been defended as essential to Christian orthodoxy for a long time. It was not invented in the modern time. It was not invented by John Calvin or Luther or any other reformer.

Just a quick bit of history. You don’t need a lot of this, but the quintessential episode was the Pelagian controversy early in the 5th century. As you well know, Pelagius and Caelestius objected to the biblical teaching as represented by Augustine who taught that sinners are totally unable to obey the gospel of God unless God intervenes by grace to free them from sin. According to Pelagianism, anyone who chooses to obey God can do so. Pelagianism denies that human nature is in any way defiled or disabled by inherited sin, that Adam’s sin put the whole race in a hopeless bondage to sin is just not true. Pelagianism says every person possesses perfect freedom of will as Adam did, and so we sin purely by choice, not by compulsion and not by nature. Sinners have the power to change those choices and free themselves from sin by the freedom of their own will. This idea, by the way, was formally denounced at the Council of Ephesus in 431.

A new wave followed as people struggled to hang on to human freedom which said that Adam’s sin had “in some measure” affected and disabled all men, but sinners were left with just enough freedom of the will to make the first move of faith toward God. And then God’s grace kicked in. But sinners made the first move, and that’s what became known as semi-Pelagianism. Some would call it prevenient grace. There’s a component of grace in all human beings that gives them in the freedom of their own will the ability to initiate salvation. The idea is that depravity is real, but it is not total. Saving grace from God then becomes a divine response rather than the efficient cause of our salvation. This view is denounced, as you know, by several councils starting around 529.

Centuries before John Calvin, this doctrine of depravity was upheld when you study the history of Hus and Wycliffe and later Tyndale, Luther, and of course Calvin and the reformers. Luther’s great treatise, The Bondage of the Will, which he wrestled with Erasmus to defend this great doctrine was really the fruit of Augustine and those who adhered to that before Luther. Calvin defends this biblical truth as the first point in his Institutes, the foundation of all anthropology and all soteriology. The Westminster Confession says man by his fallen state of sin has wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation. You’ll find similar things in the London Baptist Confession in the Anglican 39 Articles, in the Belgic Confession, et cetera. This is a historic doctrine.

Now having said that, we ask the question, what is the Bible’s teaching on this doctrine? When the Bible speaks about the condition of the sinner, with what words does it speak? Well, when the Bible speaks of the sinner’s condition, it is usually in the language of death, sometimes darkness, sometimes blindness, hardness, slavery, incurable sickness, alienation, and the Bible is clear that this is a condition that affects the body, the mind, the emotion, the desire, the motive, the will, the behavior. And it is a condition that is so powerful no sinner unaided by God can ever overcome it. It should be obvious why I am dealing with this on this occasion because pragmatism has engulfed and swallowed up the progressive church. Theology has been replaced by, or subverted to styles of methodology.

I think it is a strange phenomenon that throughout history denominations were established based around a common theology, and now associations are established based around a common methodology. So much of current evangelical strategy is to identify what people desire and tell them Jesus will give it to them if they choose him as their savior. In fact, God is seen as sitting in heaven loving them so much that it’s almost irritating to him that they won’t come to him for the things that they desire. No one seems to be considering, or a few seem to be considering the fact that what the unconverted sinner desires is the last thing that God wants to give him until he desires righteousness, hungers after righteousness, deliverance from sin and death and judgment.

Some familiar texts need to be looked at. So let’s look at them. Ephesians 2, here’s the language of death in a very familiar portion of Scripture. “You are dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that’s now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them, we too all formerly live in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind and we’re by nature children of wrath even as the rest.”

The prepositional phrase “by nature,” is by birth. By birth. We have inherited a corrupt nature from Adam. We understand that. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans is clear that in Adam we all died. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says it again. We have all literally inherited death. This is the corruption of Original Sin. We are sinners by nature, by birth. And it is a profound kind of condition in that we walk according to the course of this world, borrowing from 1 John 2, driven by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, according to the power of the prince of the air, the spirit working in the sons of disobedience motivated and driven by lusts of our flesh, desires of the flesh and of the mind.

If anything is to change this, it must be the grace of God. That’s why verse 4 says, “God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our transgressions made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved.” This is the divine miracle in which God makes the dead alive. In chapter 4 of Ephesians, in verse 18, this condition is described again as death “being darkened in their understanding excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them because of the hardness of their hearts.” It is a condition from which the sinner cannot recover on his own. Colossians 2:13, “You were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh. He made you alive.” God commands and life comes. It’s kind of analogous to the resurrection of Lazarus when Jesus stepped before the tomb of Lazarus and said, “Lazarus, come out,” there was nothing in dead Lazarus capable of responding. And so the one who gave the command gave the life so that Lazarus could respond to the command. We are a race of Lazaruses. God commands us and must give us life to respond. This is foundational as you know, and it is a profound kind of condition that we must understand. We’ll talk about some implications in a minute.

But let me just work you through John for a minute, John 1:12-13. “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become the children of God even to those who believed in his name who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of men, but of God.” That is unmistakable. Unmistakable. Salvation being the work of God. But perhaps, the most significant of John’s indications regarding the necessary act of God to awaken the sinner is found in the third chapter, and it’s a familiar section of Scripture but perhaps a little overlooked at the point that I want to make. John 3, you are very familiar with it, Nicodemus, and no one is going to be able to see the kingdom of God unless he’s born again, Jesus said in verse 3, very interesting. Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born, can he?” He is not stupid. He’s a teacher in Israel. He’s speaking metaphorically. He’s picking up on Jesus’ born again metaphor and asking the question, how does that happen? How does it happen? You can’t do it on your own. You can’t birth yourself. That’s his point. He gets it. He understands that man has no capability to bring birth to himself. Jesus follows up by saying, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit,” referring back to Ezekiel, the regeneration, the New Covenant picture of that, “he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Flesh can only produce flesh, and flesh cannot produce spiritual life. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.” “But how? How does it happen? How can I enter into my mother’s womb?” speaking metaphorically. “How can I be born again?”

And what Jesus doesn’t say is pray this prayer. What Jesus doesn’t say is here are the four steps, five steps, six steps or whatever. What Jesus says in verse 8 is just absolutely shocking to the free will world. “The wind blows where it wishes. You hear the sound of it. You don’t know where it comes from and where it’s going, so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

What in the world kind of an answer is that? Our Lord is saying it’s not up to you. It’s up to the Holy Spirit, and you have no control over where and when the Spirit moves. No control. This is a divine work. It has to be a divine work. Flesh just produces flesh. Dead people can’t give themselves life. Spirit gives life to whom he will, and you can see when it happens, but you can’t make it happen. It’s the Spirit’s work.

In chapter 5 and verse 21, “Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom he wishes.” The Spirit and the Son are in agreement that this work is a work of divine, sovereign power. And then, of course, we commented earlier, reading John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” John 8:36, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.” It’s the work of the Son. It’s the work of the Spirit. It’s the work of the Father who draws. In none of these texts, by the way, did Jesus defend the sinner’s ability. In none of these texts did Jesus defend free will. Yes, the sinner has will, and his will is activated by the Spirit in the work of salvation, but his will is not free.

All sinners are the living dead. Their hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And Jeremiah also says they don’t have the power like the leopard change his spots, the Ethiopian his skin. His mind is corrupt as well as his heart every way possible. It is also unable and incapable. Listen to Romans 8:7-8. “The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God. It does not subject itself to the law of God. It is not even able to do so. For those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” Perhaps that’s the most definitive text of all texts to talk about the sinner’s absolute inability. The sinner is unwilling to acknowledge the true God on his own. The sinner is unable to acknowledge the gospel on his own.

1 Corinthians 2:14, “The natural man understands not the things of God,” and again they’re a foolishness to him,” because we go back to the natural. It is his nature that is fallen and corrupt and unwilling and unable. “He cannot understand these things because they are spiritually discerned or appraised,” and he is spiritually dead. The language of 1 Corinthians 12:3, “No man can say Jesus is lord but by the Spirit of God.” In 2 Corinthians 4:4, it says, “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving that they might not see the light of it. The gospel of the glory of Christ is the image of God.” It’s a compounded blindness. They are blinded by their own fallenness, blinded by Original Sin, blinded by their own corruption, and then they are doubly blinded by the God of this world.

What can remedy that? We do not preach ourselves, verse 5, we preach Christ Jesus as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. We preach the gospel of Christ as lord and ourselves as slaves. And what happens? Verse 6, God who said light shall shine out of darkness, that’s taking you back to creation, God who created, who spoke light into existence is the one who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Again, it’s a divine miracle. It’s a transcendent interruption from a sovereign God to give life to the dead and light to the blind. The heart and the mind are affected and infected by depravity.

And we’ve already talked about the will, and it shows up, of course, in the conduct. Read Mark 7. You’re familiar with it. What is it that comes out of the inside of man? What does man produce? That which proceeds out of the man is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts—fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man. They defile his life because they come from his heart.

And I think you’re very aware of one other text, but just look at it for a moment. I’ve preached it many times, I’m sure. Romans 3, none righteous, not even one, none who understands, none who seeks for God. No potential. No capability. No hope on our own. The sum is that man is evil and selfish, unwilling and unable because he is dead. He loves his sin. He loves the darkness. He thrives on selfish lust. He’s happy to make a god of his own, manufacturing and convinced himself that he is good enough to satisfy that god. He may see his sin in his sin, but he does not see his sin in his goodness, and he does not see his sin in his religion, and it is his sin in his goodness that is most despicable for there is the deception and it is his sin in his religion that is most blasphemous because there it is that he worships a false god.

This doctrine has been called Total Depravity, and some people might be confused about that. It might be a little misleading. Depravity, if you look it up in the dictionary or on your computer, you’re going to find the word “depravity” usually associated with viciousness or vice. One definition said to be depraved is to be villainous, degraded, debased, immoral, and dangerous to a twisted degree like rapists and serial killers. So the word itself has come to connote a level of evil not applicable to all. To say someone is totally depraved would take depraved even further and you would imagine Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or somebody who kills people and eats them. But to call someone totally depraved doesn’t necessarily set them outside the realm of moral perversion in some other category of consummate corruption that we can barely comprehend. To say you’re totally depraved simply means that you can only sin. You can do nothing that pleases God savingly. And the total part is it affects you totally—mind, heart, will, action, thought, everything. It’s total because it affects absolutely everything. The sinner is utterly unable to raise himself out of his state of death to do anything to see out of his blindness.

The contemporary idea today is that there’s some residual good left in the sinner. As this progression came from Pelagianism to Semipelagianism and then came down to sort of contemporary Arminianism and maybe got defined a little more carefully by Wesley who was a sort of a messed up Calvinist because Wesley wanted to give all the glory to God, as you well know, but he wanted to find in men some place where men could initiate salvation on his own will. That system has literally taken over and been the dominant system in evangelical Christianity. It is behind most revivalism. It is behind most evangelism. That there’s something in the sinner that can respond. And this is sort of like the right in a free country. You have to have this right. This wouldn’t be fair if God didn’t give the sinner the right to make his own decision so that the sinner unaided by the Holy Spirit must make the first move. That’s essentially Arminian theology. The sinner unaided must make the first move. And God then will respond when the sinner makes the first move.

What the Bible teaches is, is that the sinner can’t and won’t. He is unable and he is unwilling. He has no capacity to make the first move. He has no interest in making the first move, the first real move. He will make a false move toward God based upon his own fallen desires. So if you tell him God wants to give you whatever you want, wants to fulfill all your desires, you are feeding him a lie. You are compounding his deception. And on the one hand, you are hiding the true God, and the other hand you are continuing to deceive the sinner. Unless God moves in power over the dead soul and brings true life and understanding and repentance and faith, no one will ever come to the true God in true saving faith. Until God regenerates, gives spiritual life, we have neither the ability nor the inclination to cooperate with him.

Regeneration is monergistic. It is the work of God because the Fall has rendered us totally unable to do anything, anything of saving value. In regeneration, we neither resist nor cooperate. We are acted upon. We are changed by the Holy Spirit, not apart from our will but through our will and by means of the Spirit illuminating our minds so as to understand the gospel. He raises us from the dead, gives us new life, and new hearts. This cannot happen apart from the Holy Spirit. This is so foundational, so absolutely basic. That’s why in 1 Corinthians 1 where Paul talks about the preaching of the cross is foolishness and stumbling block and comes all the way down at the end of the chapter and says for by his doing are you in Christ Jesus. For by his doing, he chose you. He chose us about four or five times. He chose, he chose, he chose, he chose, he chose by his doing. There can be no other way.

2 Timothy 2, another text that is familiar to us. It talks about the attitude of the slave of the Lord who ministers with gentleness if perhaps, interesting, God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth that they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. It only can occur if perhaps God may grant them repentance that leads to the knowledge of the truth. This is not some new idea. This is the historic doctrine that has been affirmed through the centuries. The other option is that God is commanding sinners to do what they cannot do. The gospel call assumes that, true gospel call, that the sinner can do nothing. All the preacher can do is pour out the clear truth of the gospel, use the means of grace, pleading with the sinner, and praying that God would be merciful, but God will do what God will do. Only God can make the sinner willing.

In Titus, you’re familiar with chapter 3 as well, verse 3, “We once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lust and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God, our savior, and his love for mankind appeared,” I love these words, “he saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness but according to his mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit which he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our savior that being justified by his grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”

Now what are the implications of this? And I know you know all of these things. What are the implications of this doctrine? Well, there’s some historical implications, I think, of rejecting this truth of total depravity, and it’s good to think about this. Denial of total depravity has been a staple in our religious culture in America for a while. It is at the heart of old modernism, old liberalism, which said we’re not really concerned about theology. We’re not concerned about biblical inerrancy and authority. We just want to live like Jesus in the world. We want to help the poor and the downcast and the disenfranchised, then we want to do good works in the world. And the liberals came along and thought that in doing this, they would revolutionize the church, they would reach out, they would build the church, and instead they destroyed it. They destroyed it. Witness the condition of the mainline denominations that were affected by modernism and liberalism, destroyed the true church and in its place a false religious organization.

When I look at the emerging church or the emergent movement, it’s hard to classify everything in it, but at its foundation, it is neoliberalism. It’s just the same thing exactly back again. We don’t want to argue about what the Bible means. We don’t know what it means. Nobody knows what it means. Nobody got it right. We didn’t get it right. Well, let’s just be like Jesus in the world. Let’s just love everybody, help the poor, the disenfranchised. Let’s live like Jesus would live in the world. So this is just neoliberalism back again in another form, but it doesn’t want to jettison the evangelical label because that gives it access to you. That lets it get in your mind as if it was legitimate. I’m afraid the church growth movement were the middle modernists between the old ones and the new ones, taking us down that same path. We watch the spectacle of church programs and church preaching styles designed explicitly to ape the world and to approach and attract sensual appetites. And we’ve all been affected by this thing. We don’t buy into the whole thing, but we’ve all been affected by the idea that there’s an incipient Arminianism in all this kind of church growth stuff that somehow the sinner will respond better if the methods changed. We have to really be careful of that.

Never offer Jesus as the one willing to fulfill the fallen sinner’s natural desires. Never. Recognize that the fallen sinner hates God, the true God. And the fallen sinner loves himself fatally. Sure, he wants a god who gives him what he wants. But a biblical approach assaults the sinner’s self-worship, blasts the sinner’s self-confidence, attacks his smugness, shatters his confidence in his religion and his spirituality, crushes him under the full weight of the law of God and renders him guilty and all his desires evil. You have to call for the sinner to hate himself. All his ambitions, repetitive [SOUNDS LIKE] sins, and come to love the true God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the message under which God awakens the sinner and leads him to repentance and faith. Never appeal to that which enslaves the sinner in an effort to convince the sinner of his need to be rescued from the very enslavement you’re appealing to. What is that about? Don’t ever appeal to materialism, sex, pleasure, personal ambition, a better life, success. Don’t ever appeal to that. You’re appealing to what enslaves the sinner in the effort to convince him of his need to be rescued from that very enslavement. Call the sinner to flee from all that is natural and all that powerfully enslaves him. Call him to run, fleeing from all of this to the cross to be saved from judgment.

Soft preaching makes hard people. You preach a soft message and you’ll have hard, selfish people. You preach the hard truth and it will break the hard hearts, and you’ll have a soft people. Never change the message from cultural group to cultural group. Shifting context do not identify reality. Reality is not on the outside. It’s on the inside. And all hearts are the same. All hearts are the same. The hearts of sinners are the same. Paul’s message never changed from Jew to Gentile. The starting point may have changed from Creation to get to God or from the Old Testament to get to God, but the gospel never changed. The gospel message never changed, and Paul went from country to country, nation to nation. Everywhere he want, he preached the very same message. And without media, cultures were defined. The local cultures were defined. Even town cultures were defined. City cultures were defined. Village cultures were highly defined and maybe not mingled with others. You might think if he lived today that it would be absolutely paralyzing to try to define some way to speak to people on a cultural level, some contextualization. Paul ignored all of that, absolutely ignored it completely.

There’s one immutable truth: all hearts are the same. And there’s a second immutable truth: all need the same message, same gospel. God’s work is heart work, mind work. And the Word of God is the source of that which God uses to change the mind and change the heart. The sinner anywhere he lives, any time, any country is always the same, always the same. This has been experience that God has allowed me to have through the years, traveling all around the world and preaching everywhere in so many different languages through so many different kinds of interpreters, and the message never changes, never ever changes.

Also, maybe a final practical implication. I just try to share the things with you. I know you already know, just to encourage you a little this morning. Be meek. Be humble. No one should be so humble, no one should be so meek as those who preach the gospel because we’re the only profession in the world where we can take absolutely no credit for everything we do. That’s right. Yeah. We can only take credit for what we mess up. We’re the only ones in the world responsible only for the failures and none of the successes. Be meek. Don’t parade yourself as if you’ve accomplished some great thing if God in his mercy saves sinners under your preaching. We’re just clay pots—replaceable, breakable, ugly. We get credit for nothing that happens in our work.

I guess the bottom line this morning is that I would just call you to be faithful, to understand the condition of the sinner is not one that you can remedy with any kind of human manipulation. And the heart of the sinner is the same in any time, in any place, and the message cannot change. And the message is the means that God uses. We are begotten again, Peter said, by the word of truth. That’s why it’s so great to have an event like this just in case somebody might be missing the critical issue of getting the gospel right. It’s not about how cool you are; it’s about how clear you are in the proclamation of the truth. You say, “Well, wait a minute. Aren’t we supposed to adjust like Paul did on all things to all man, 1 Corinthians 9?” You know, he was just saying one thing when he said all things to all men. He didn’t say I changed the message. He didn’t say I changed my clothes. He didn’t say I changed my vocabulary. He simply said this, “I became all things to all men. Not my message. I,” he says, “became a slave to all.” All he means by that is I made all necessary personal sacrifices to reach everyone. That’s what he was saying. And so it is that we’re called to be slaves of Christ and make those sacrifices. May God use us as we’re faithful to his gospel.

Father, we pray that you’ll give us a great time today and just seal to our minds that which would honor you and use it Lord for your glory. We pray in Savior’s name, amen.