Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. Sowing to our own fallen human nature (the flesh) results in corruption, but sowing to the Spirit results in eternal life. Because of our total depravity, we are entirely unable to save ourselves; there is no ceremony or good work that can earn salvation. Instead, eternal life is a free gift received through faith in Jesus, whose atoning death on the cross paid for our sins in full. Then as converted people we experience the work of the Spirit seeking to sanctify us. This is enabled when we take the faith we had to come to Christ in the first place and continue with it in trusting the Holy Spirit to empower our sanctification and Christian service.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] I enjoyed the accuracy of the language just used then as we celebrated the Lord’s Supper. Andrew, you said things very accurately and I noticed how Andrew mentioned that in the communion service we do a number of things, but one is that we remember what Christ has done. In fact, it is the ceremony that Jesus instituted to have his disciples perpetually to remember how he went to the cross and how he paid for our sins. Another word there, of course, about the communion service is that it’s also a purpose, it also has a purpose of proclaiming. And the wording is that we proclaim by that ceremony. We proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. You know, not everybody in Christendom, if I could use that word in the wider sense of people

[00:01:06] who are within the general understanding of Christianity, not everybody has as accurate an understanding. We actually don’t call the Lord’s Supper a sacrament. Mind you, the word sacrament’s one word that is used generally and some people do use it, meaning simply a ceremony, but the word sacrament has a deeper meaning and we don’t use it about the Lord’s Supper, but what officially, if you want to know, the word that is used in Baptist circles is that it’s an ordinance because it’s something Jesus commanded us to do, so we call it an ordinance. An ordinance for us to remember and to proclaim the significance of his death. The reason for that is that there is a difference between an understanding, a theology we call an understanding of things to do with God, which is called sacramental,

[00:02:06] and the type of theology that isn’t called based on sacramentalism. A sacrament is something that is done to achieve the salvation or to bring it to you. It is true that we proclaim the Lord’s death in communion and we do use it as something to remind ourselves of the cost it was to Jesus to die on the cross for us. But it’s not a sacrament in the sense that that ceremony caused any of you to be saved. I apologise for taking that away from your thinking if you thought it did. Because what the Bible teaches about Jesus’ death is where we were reconciled to God. Well, let me word it a bit more better, where he paid for our sins so that we might be reconciled to God. And the actual mechanism that brings you to that reconciliation

[00:03:08] is when you hear the gospel and you respond to it by putting your belief and trust in Jesus. Hence the worth of that very famous verse that Joey was mentioning and that our songs have reflected thus far tonight from John 3.16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. The only action that’s done that can save you was that by Jesus when he laid down his life for your sins. And the way that gets to apply to you is when you hear the message of the forgiveness of sins, the central message of the Bible. This message tells you if you put your trust and belief in Jesus then he will forgive you. the atonement will be applied to you and you will become a real Christian and you get to become a Christian by that moment of central faith I wanted to just use tonight

[00:04:11] as a type of message that we are clarifying some of these very precious things to do with the Christian faith and we’ll start with the verse in Galatians in chapter 6 through to 8 and in this particular Bible passage it’s talking about reaping eternal life eternal life is going on not having your life snuffed out permanently by death but your life, you still die in this world but if you have eternal life you go on living through death and the fact that we have one of our people Barnabas who has passed away suddenly he wasn’t really that old he wasn’t old like me this is a new phase of my life to realise I’m old but he was someone who nonetheless loved and knew the Lord Jesus and it was a shock to his family of course but we Christians do go through death but we do not die eternally there is the fact that Jesus

[00:05:28] will take us to be with him in glory in the future and right now Barnabas is a man at ease Barnabas is a man with a saviour and there will come all the future moments when people who have died in Christ the Bible talks about those who die in Christ it means you’re a Christian when you die that God will change our bodies the exact timing is something that isn’t quite as easily seen in the scriptures but how I read them and I don’t worry if I get little details wrong if I’m trying my best at seeing what the Bible says but in Corinthians it tells us that there’s going to be a moment when all of those of us who are Christians will have this body change from being one that dies to one that will be eternally living in the case of Barnabas he is in a present condition with Christ but without his new body yet

[00:06:30] he will get that when Jesus returns coming with him all those disembodied people who are in glory and they will have their bodies changed to the new one that they’ll have eternally and non-dying body and that’s the moment when Christ returns with them and that’s also the same moment if you believe the Corinthians verse when we are going to have our bodies changed to be an eternal one and we will have a body like Jesus had after his resurrection. So these are just some of the facts whereby we can get to know the exactness of our faith and we can understand about what Jesus has done to give to us eternal life. Nonetheless, to really understand eternal life and you see it there up on the screen that the Spirit is the one who gives you so that you will reap eternal life in the long moment.

[00:07:31] But the one who gives eternal life, that eternal life you receive spiritually when you come to Christ. The Bible tells us that when a person repents of their sin and turns to Jesus that they get not only the forgiveness of sins, the fruit of the atonement that Jesus earned by his death on the cross, but they also get the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit is the one who gives you eternal life and you get eternal life, immediately you come to Christ. Therefore Barnabas is a person you can understand as one who had eternal life and though he’s gone through death, which all of us do the eternal life that he has issues in his eternally living with Christ in glory but you get that eternal life when you come to the Saviour and that had happened to Barnabas back in his in Eritrea, his home country

[00:08:28] Milku was someone who came to us as a young Christian woman and has been with us quite a number of years and eventually she went back, I think she knew Barnabas already but she went back to find him and to marry him and then brought him back over here but both of them had become Christians in Eritrea that was the moment for them when they put their trust in Jesus and they received eternal life it didn’t happen for them because they did the right ceremony or anything that would be a sacramentalism but it happened to them because they heard the message of the Gospel and they put their belief in Jesus to save them now if we read this passage Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. I haven’t worked out how to give a sermon on that verse

[00:09:22] so I will leave it sitting there. Verse 7 is where we need to look. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever one sows that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption. For the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Now you have here the contrast between the wording of sowing to the flesh and sowing to the spirit. Because of that wording, once again in church history, people have had varying understandings as the contrast that’s being depicted here, the flesh or the spirit. And because of that, there has been a picking up of what was in the first instance an old classical Greek, what I’ll call a misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding is that there is this contrast between the flesh and the spirit.

[00:10:22] But the flesh stands for the body and the spirit, in the Greek understanding, stood for the exercise of your mental capacities. Here is where the Greek people were latching on to a true thing about us, that we have the capacity for clear thinking. They have bequeathed to the world quite a lot of philosophical ideas and also a history that has continued down to today in our education where people are encouraged to exercise a growing intellectual life. But how that has affected us today is that there are a lot of people who, because of the old Greek idea, have the idea that the body is what makes you sinful, but the mind is how you have, you know, better than sinful. And the mind is something that lifts you above how the body pulls you down.

[00:11:23] There’s actually a misunderstanding because it demeans the body which was made by God. Jesus came in the body and he was not sinful. It is true that there is something about giving yourself over to the inheritance that you have as a human being that comes down from the history of the race, the human race from the beginning, which history carries with it the result of the initial sin. You’ve probably heard it said about the fall of the human race, of how our original ancestors fell into sin and that became that which was bequeathed to the rest of us. We all have got, unfortunately, the fact of being sinners because of what was begun with our forebears. Adam and Eve is who I’m talking about. And even the people reading the Bible who don’t believe in the exact historicity of Adam and Eve,

[00:12:22] not like me, I think they are real people, but there are plenty of Christian folks who believe that God created the world, but this is a way of speaking metaphorically of the first initial persons. But nonetheless, most of those people who are Christians do, however, nonetheless believe that there was a fall and the human race has been affected by sin ever since. I have some intellectual relatives who are very strong Christians and when I go to live in their house, they are ones who don’t quite know how to believe in the literalness of Adam and Eve, quite like I do. But they are strong Christians and they certainly do believe that sin has come into the human race and the evidence of that is very hard to refute. You only have to be a person who reads history for a start.

[00:13:16] I mean, how many years are there where there have been no wars anywhere in the world? The answer to that is very much fewer than how many years there have been where there has been death and destruction because of human warfare. We’re living in a generation that maybe has the best assets in terms of the knowledge of science who has the best assets in terms of being able to look back into history and see how things went to do a little better, but we don’t do any better as far as the fear of death and the onset of warfare. And that’s happening today. If you listen to President Trump, he’ll tell you of how many hundreds of bodies there are every week in the war going on between Russia and Ukraine. And it’s not the only place where there are wars that are happening in the world.

[00:14:13] And even in countries which present themselves as modern and as having much learning and whatever, like Australia, the amount of crime is going up, not down. So let’s not pretend that somehow or other we’ve conquered crime and death or wars or whatever. We’re living in a dangerous era, which I think most of you already know. Now the next verse, 7, says, Do not be deceived, God is not mocked. Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. Now this verse is very vivid to me because of my father often preaching and using an illustration of the fact that when he and my mother first were married, they didn’t have much money. He was studying at a theological college, which made it even worse money-wise. But the way that he helped my mother get through with a meagre amount of funds for the food and all

[00:15:17] was that he started gardening. Luckily back in those days, most houses had large backyards. And so my father set himself the task. If you knew my father, he wasn’t the person that had, oh, he had white hands like me. And he was someone that was an intellectual and someone that hardly ever did anything, but he decided to take up gardening. And he got for himself a whole lot of seeds and his idea was that he’d plant them and reap the crops and then give them to his wife so she wouldn’t have to buy them down the shops. The only trouble was that my dad wasn’t too good at spotting what type of seeds he had. And when he put in all the seeds, thinking he was going to get up beans and potatoes, instead came up other things. And he had to put up with the truth of this verse. Do not be deceived.

[00:16:10] Whatever one sows, that will you also reap. And the reaping of every time, he shows what the seed has got. Now, Jesus is speaking here. It’s actually Paul, but Jesus through Paul. This is the book of Galatians. But he’s speaking about the facts that what you sow is what you reap. And this is where the contrast is put down. If you sow to the flesh, you reap corruption. But if you sow to the spirit, notice it has a capital S, you’ll reap eternal life. And what we have to do in interpreting the scriptures is to dig in to see what they mean by the flesh and what they mean by the spirit and why the translators have put a capital S. Well, I’ll answer that quickly without belabouring it. But the flesh is not just the fact of your humanity alone. Some spots in the Bible, the word flesh is used for just humanity

[00:17:13] as compared to God. Other places it’s used for the evil in the human person. And so the flesh represents that inheritance that comes down from Adam and Eve and their fall. And the fact that all of us are sinners. You know how the Bible says, for all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God. And so we in our humanity, remember that the flesh is often a metaphor for humanity also in the scriptures. It can mean also what’s underneath the skin. Some of us have less than others, but what’s underneath the skin is your flesh. But then it’s used in a sort of metaphorical way for our humanity. And then going another metaphorical step away from the original, I was going to say concrete, original, literal meaning of flesh, it means sinful humanity. And in Paul’s writings,

[00:18:15] you’ll find him referring to the flesh in that sense of sinful humanity that can’t get away from corruption and is always going to produce corruption. He that sows to his flesh is a metaphorical way in Paul’s writings. This is the book of Romans, book of Galatians written by Paul, who also wrote Romans. And the way he’s using the word flesh is of sinful humanity. So if you trust in your humanness to make you a super nice person and eventually win your way into God’s good books and go to glory, or if you believe in heaven and hell, you’re expecting to be one of the ones going to heaven because you’re doing your best. If you trust in your humanity, you’re going to be disappointed with yourself. And that’s what the passage is saying. Whoever sows to the flesh, that’s what you’ll get back,

[00:19:14] the sinfulness that is a part of what flesh is spoken of by Paul. He had some terrible pictures that he used for the flesh and one of them in the Book of Romans he pictures his own state and the state of every person who’s alive now since the fall as being like a prisoner who’s thrown into jail and back in Paul’s day they had some terrible things to do to people they threw into jail and one of them was they ripped their shirts off and then tie them back to back against a dead corpse. And the dead corpse would have decay and germs and worms and because they were put into this prison back to back, tied back to back to the corpse, the decay and the germs and the worms would eat through into the poor prisoner’s back. And it was called a body of death, the thing tied to your back.

[00:20:09] and it was a terrible thing to be tied to a body of death. And Paul said about his own Christian life, trying not to do wrong things, he said, the terrible woe is me, who shall deliver me from this body of death? And he’s referring to the facts that we in our humanity have got a corruption, that we have got something that’s gone wrong, that we are people who are sinners, even though that doesn’t mean that we’re always doing ugly things. When if you want a picture in your mind to think about what sin has done to a human being, don’t picture, you know, like Paul did, just the ugliness of that awful body of death on your back. But also think of the other verses that speak about how wonderfully and beautifully God has made us. And so theologians down through the years have found a way to describe of humanity

[00:21:07] as certainly being sinful and certainly having the sin of death in a sense that’s yours because of what you’ve gotten from being human in a sinful humanity. But at the same time you can see within humanity all the signs and all the things that tell you how wonderfully we’ve been made. Now I’m not speaking against the doctrine of total depravity which is where I’m leading to talk about this morning but the doctrine of total depravity is a doctrine that says how you can’t overcome the fact that you’re a sinner and it’s eating away at you but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t good things I think it’s one of the beauties of humanity that even the people who are down and outs even the people whose lives are in a wreck and if you’ve ever done any visiting of people in jail

[00:21:58] you find some terrible people still doing bad things wrong in jail but there’s also people who are seeking not to be like that and sometimes you see a wonderful thing in humanity even of folk who are ones who are right at the bottom of what’s going on as far as human careers are concerned because one person said that humanity should be likened to a beautiful cathedral or maybe a wonderful castle. I learned this when Michelle and I were travelling around in Scotland and we went to see this castle that was on the lake where there’s meant to be a monster inside, Lake Ness. And this beautiful castle, I walked around it with awe. You know, just because it was back in history, it didn’t mean they only had little huts or shanties or something.

[00:22:52] Or rather, some of the buildings back then were absolutely awe-inspiring. But it was broken down. The walls were falling apart. Strange birds were flowing around with yark-yark noises making. You know, it was a strange thing to walk into that castle and feel an awe of how it had been created and yet to see that it was useful for nothing. No one used it because of how it had been wrecked. That’s how humanity is. There’s no hope for us being any different. And so there has come to be a doctrine that, the type of Christianity that believes the Bible, the only one worth having, mind you, type, but that type of Christianity describes humanity as totally corrupt. And it talks about, in terms of a doctrine, as being, you know, total corruption or totally lost

[00:23:56] or that word total there is something that describes the absolute depth that we are at if we haven’t yet come to Christ. Now, I looked up, I do this often when I’m preparing messages, I use my little phone and type in just to see what they say. I’m amazed actually at how much good theology you can find in your phone. It won’t not only have good theology, you can find the other type as well. But if you type in there total, the term that is used is total depravity. And if you were to type that in, you’d find it says, it says a Calvinistic doctrine. That’s a bit unfortunate because anybody who’s an evangelical, that is someone who believes the message of the Bible, someone who accepts the scriptures as inspired, are put amongst the number of such persons as Jesus is one, which is why I follow suit.

[00:24:57] I believe you’d be a bit of a silly donkey to think of anything and try and believe in Jesus and then disagree with Jesus. And if he believed that it was accurate, then I follow suit. But it’s not only Calvinists, and they’re people known to particularly stress of predestination and some of those doctrines, but it’s not only Calvinists who believe in the total depravity of humanity. It’s anybody who believes the Bible. And the proof of the pudding is, of course, verse 7, that whatever you sow, that’s what you’re going to reap. And that’s why humanity keeps coming out. There isn’t a new generation that arises unhelped of God that can do any better than the previous ones. In fact, the drift is usually to go back to how we’ve been in a worse state. Just look at Australia. We’re the proof.

[00:25:59] In fact, any of the Western nations that have been blessed by being under Christian heritage nonetheless are showing how quickly they can lose that blessing because sin is there all the time. But here, what my father found, that if you sowed the wrong seeds, you got the wrong result. And this is using that idea as a picture that whatever you sow, if you sow to your humanity which is sinful, then you’re going to get corruption. Corruption is unavoidable. It’s what it means by total. The word total when it talks about corruption, when it talks about the fact that we’ve been affected by sin. One who sows to the Spirit, and the reason why there’s a capital S is just as you can track down the word flesh and find how it’s used in the Bible, you can track down, the way you track down,

[00:26:58] you look at all the places it’s used, and then you can make a judgment of what the word means. And our translations, and the ESV Bible that you’ve got in the pews is the one that this translation is taken from. has got a capital S, because the word spirit is nearly always used, not always, not totally, but mostly used as the Holy Spirit. And you have a choice as a Christian even though you’ve come to Christ and you’ve been saved and you belong to Jesus, that you nonetheless can give over to what your fallen humanity is leading you to do or you can give over to what the Holy Spirit that you received on your conversion remember Peter’s first Christian sermon on the day of Pentecost repent, be baptised which means confess faith in Jesus and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit

[00:27:55] so if there’s been a moment when you came to Christ for the forgiveness of sins and you turned around from that rebellious stance and asked him to be your personal saviour at that moment not only were you forgiven but God gave his spirit to live in you and so that’s the capital S in spirit there from one who sows to the Holy Spirit, sows to the spirit in your life, you’ll reap the life that’s eternal the life that goes through all the problems and that’s what the verse is talking about, in fact the book of Galatians is rather good in bringing out the way to handle the sinfulness in a Christian and we all have times of failure is to throw over to the Holy Spirit and to call on him to help us to live the Christian life as a matter of fact the way that you grow as a Christian is not by not failing

[00:28:51] it is not giving up in your failures but racing back to Christ to ask him to help you and the Holy Spirit that he’s given to live in your heart will be the advocate that comes alongside he’ll be the helper who will seek to give you more power to do better and you can sow to the Spirit and from that you reap all the things that do belong to life that is eternal. That’s what the passage is saying. Now I did mention earlier that if you look up your phones and find out then what different ideas are and you wrote in there total depravity you’re actually writing in what is first of five pointers or five aspects of what is called Calvinism. Calvinism is a Christian belief in God’s sovereignty and that he is in charge which is totally correct but it is also a belief that has the idea that we can’t really do very much.

[00:29:49] It’s not too wrong either but I’ve got to tell you that the total is taken the wrong way and even by our phones when it gives you a definition they sometimes take it to mean that there’s absolutely nothing you can do good. If they’re meant by that there’s nothing you can do to overcome the fact that you’re a sinner who needs to be forgiven that’s wrong you can’t save yourself and certainly the idea of total depravity means that we’re not capable of saving ourselves. That interpretation of total depravity is correct. There isn’t anything you can do that will earn your salvation. there’s no amount of church going, there’s no amount of seeking to reform, both of which are good things to do, I’m not speaking against someone taking up a desire to somehow reform themselves, it’s not as though you can’t

[00:30:47] do some reformations it’s just that you’ll never be able to stop yourself being a sinner deserving hell and you’ll never be able to make yourself saved in the bible use of the term. The only way you can be saved is when someone has come and lived a perfect life and then laid his down to pay for your sins and to do what I’ve been describing as the atonement. The atonement is when someone does something to overcome the bad position someone else is in or that person is in. And Jesus, by dying on the cross, first of all by living a sinless life and then dying as a sacrifice that didn’t deserve to die and be punished by God for our sins, he worked our atonement and it’s completely finished. One of the final things Jesus said as he was dying, he said, it is finished.

[00:31:41] And the words in the original language, in the Greek that we read it in the scriptures, tetelestai, it means it is finished and it was the same thing that people would write across a bill that had been not yet paid and at last when someone brings the final payment in they would write, Tetelestai, paid in full. And when Jesus on the cross bore our sins, he was able if he were to, he did, he said Tetelestai, I don’t know if he said it in Greek or another language, but Jesus said, paid in full as he finished dying, when he came out of the hours of darkness, paid in full. And there’s not anything that you can do in any case because of total depravity, overcome your own sin. You can’t save yourself. The only saving possibility that you have is that which Jesus works when he paid it in full

[00:32:40] and invites you to come and have a free forgiveness. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And when you understand that he has paid for it in full, forever, the Bible teaches a once and for all death of Christ, which is why we don’t believe in Baptist circles if they know what they’re doing. We don’t believe in sacraments because the sacraments, the idea is somehow doing something that is paying for it. We don’t have to have a sacrament. We don’t have to think that what happened before when we had the communion was somehow making possible for people to be forgiven. Our ceremony didn’t forgive anything. Thank goodness it doesn’t because we’re often people who go out and still go on sinning. That doesn’t save you.

[00:33:37] But what it is telling you of is the thing that did happen when Jesus gave his body to the cross, when he shed his blood, when they thrust the spear in his side and out came that blood and water separated. I don’t know exactly what to say that means but when Jesus shed his blood on the cross, God the Father saw it as a perfect sacrifice and when Jesus finished and he was old before he got the spear of course but before he died and he said paid in full. He was talking about your sins and you don’t have to add anything to it. So great was the cost of Jesus in his death that it would be an insult to reach into your pocket and pull out your wallet and say, I’ve got $25, I’ll put it in the church offering, maybe that’ll help me get more forgiven. I want to tell you, keep your $25

[00:34:32] because the church doesn’t need it. Whoa, boy that sounds bad. A lot of churches, they don’t want people like me saying that. That’s what really frustrated me when I went to England once and all the churches in London have this sign on, oh please help us, we’re going bankrupt. Please give to, one of them said, our roof needs repairing. Please give to repair the roof of the church. Oh my goodness. God’s church doesn’t need any of your money. God likes it when we give our all to him and we take on board the role of supporting good things with our funds. I’m not saying it’s wrong for the church to have a way to use money to do good things. But I really hated seeing those English signs, you know, about the poor church about to go bankrupt. But God has enough that he can support his own church.

[00:35:35] We have people who give offerings here but we don’t take up. It’s been an idea I got from what happened at one of these dinners around the back. Because well we had a dinner around the back one time after the evening service and I had some people there who came in from outside who didn’t know the Lord and I was looking for an opportunity I would share with them of what all that Christ had done and someone else in the congregation realised that the offering hadn’t been taken and they got a bag and came around and asked the people to put something in, you know. I felt so ashamed. Jesus is not bankrupt. You don’t… What can you give to Jesus in comparison to how he paid it in full with his death for you? No, the motive for giving is when you know everything he’s done all you want to do is say thank you.

[00:36:36] That’s why we give, to say thank you. And it’s really a privilege to be able to give towards other people knowing what he’s done on the cross. I got off the track there. Well, the one who sows to the Spirit that means giving over to the Holy Spirit to lead you. From what he leads you in and equips you to do is a growth of sanctification. The Spirit helps you to become sanctified and coming to church having the communion service all of those things teach you so that you can learn more and be sanctified. But they’re not the thing that does it. It’s the work of the Spirit. And if you sow to the spiritual side of life, sow to reading the Scriptures and letting the Word of God speak to you, sow to coming, as you’ve done tonight, to worship the Lord. There’s something very wonderful of being in the presence

[00:37:36] of the Word of God being opened and that surgency of the Holy Spirit is present. We praise God for what he does in our church and those times when there is that sense of the Spirit moving, the presence of the Holy Spirit is how God blesses his church and that is where the blessing is. Well, I have four verses to show you. I’ve been stuck on the first one and what will we do? Let’s go to another one. I’ll take you to the last one, John 6, 44. Now, this verse that talked about total depravity, a part of, if you want to understand, it’s not a verse, the statement that Calvinists claim that is actually true by most evangelicals, they believe that we’re totally unable to save ourselves and this verse is basically saying, it says, no one can come to me, this is Jesus speaking, unless the Father who sent me draws him

[00:38:45] and I’ll raise him up at the last day when Christ returns, the person that’s come to Jesus, he’s going to raise you up like I was talking before, Barnabas. When the Lord comes back, he’ll bring with him the disembodied Barnabas who’ll be kept in glory but come back with Jesus and he’ll get a resurrection body. Along with, if we’re still living and the Lord comes, we will have our bodies changed as Corinthians tells us. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. Now, the inference is, you’ve got no hope of saving yourself. You can’t do anything about your depravity. You can mask it. You can suppress it. You have a responsibility to somehow control it. Don’t end up being thrown in jail because you give in to what your sinfulness draws you to do. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him

[00:39:44] because that moment of coming to know Christ and becoming forgiven happens only because God enables it. in our sinfulness we are totally depraved such that we can’t save ourselves nor we probably even want to. It doesn’t mean that every area of humanity is affected and doesn’t work properly. There are some groups, I think the Roman Catholics are one, where the official doctrine, though I must say that many Roman Catholics don’t necessarily follow suit wrongly there, but they have as the official doctrine that you can do some good and you can offer to God a blessing and their sacraments that they have are meant to make you a better person and how I think the system works is if you keep going and taking the sacraments you’ll be made better and better and then when the judgement day comes you might get in the door but that really is

[00:40:42] a way of saving yourself and the doctrine of total depravity, John Calvin’s the person who I think talked a lot about this, is true that there’s nothing you can do to save yourself. The only way you’ll get saved is by the Spirit of God, Spirit of the Father drawing you. What is that like? It happens when someone has told you the message of the Gospel or when you go to church and they sometimes read a Bible verse. It’s amazing when you meet people and they tell you how they got saved because there was a moment when somehow or other in church God spoke to them and they sensed the calling of God to come and put their trust in Jesus. That’s a happening. It’s called Christian conversion and you don’t deserve it. You get it because God has grace on you to call you. I don’t believe though that he does it in a way

[00:41:42] that you haven’t got any choice. He doesn’t turn you into a little robot and say, yes, Lord, I’m here. No, he calls you and seeks to win you and you have a bit of a battle sometimes. But when you have the sense of his calling you, then run to him and say, I want to be a Christian. Please, Jesus, make me one. And then your coming to Jesus is called you a moment of your conversion, the moment when you become a child of God, a moment when you are saved. All of salvation hasn’t happened yet, but you are saved in terms of you’ve been accepted by God and he gives the promise. He’s going to raise you up at the last day. You’ll be amongst the ones. You know that old song, when the rollers call up yonder, I’ll be there. We use that song in all sorts of funny places, but it’s actually about

[00:42:40] when someone has been drawn by the Father and they come to Jesus and ask for his forgiveness, they become among the number that he’s going to raise up on the last day. Isn’t that a fantastic thing? So total depravity doesn’t mean that you have no capacity to be a nice person ever or that you can’t help your neighbours when their house is burnt down and you run over there or like we’re trying to help in the case of Barnabas dying in Fumuku. Of course, our humanity has not been made such that we become total rats but we are total sinners. The total doesn’t mean there’s no goodness left in you because of how God made us as that beautiful cathedral set in the hill that you can see the wonder of the design but you know you’ve also perhaps been bombed and gutted by sin.

[00:43:42] And so that’s the way to understand humanity that’s lost. Is there anybody here who needs Jesus and you’re feeling he’s calling you? What to do about it is find a Christian that you know loves the Lord. Come and talk to me if you will or talk to Andrew. He’d love the opportunity of following up his communion service to someone to say to him, can I become a Christian tonight? And what would happen is we’d lead you in a prayer. There’s not any exact prayer you have to pray. It’s an honest prayer to say to Jesus, you know you’re a sinner and you want him to forgive you and make you a Christian. And that’s the most glorious moment of your life. Believe me, coming to Jesus and walking with him is what real happiness can be all about. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for this verse and the other ones.

[00:44:49] I thank you that when we sow to the Spirit, to the power of the Holy Spirit, it produces an spiritual uplift. It produces that which can never be done by fallen humanity. Thank you, Father, Lord, that you’ve promised that if we come to you that you’ll take us on board. That’s a forgiveness that we could never earn, a forgiveness that you’ve totally paid for when you said paid in full, when you’d finished bearing our sins. There’s nothing left for us to pay but just come. May it be that tonight, if there’s a person here who’s never gotten into that door, may they do so this evening, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.