Friend, I believe with all my heart that
you couldn't have saved, you couldn't have saved
and not know it.
You can't show me in the word of
God, you can't find it in any of
the hymns that is ever written.
You've never heard a clean-cut testimony that
ever talked like that.
Whenever you get anybody that's really saved, genuinely,
spirit-born and blood-washed, glory to God,
they know it.
Not only do they know it, but they
show it.
You couldn't have Jesus Christ in your heart
and the devil in your heart at the
one time.
When Christ comes in, the devil goes out.
If Christ's not there, then the devil's there,
Christ's on the outside.
But a man that's saved, a man that
has come for salvation to Jesus Christ, has
accepted Christ, and the devil has been kicked
out in all his furniture.
And so when Christ comes into the heart,
glory to God, he says that he brings
light and life with him and the Spirit
of God gives us the witness and also
the outward evidence that Jesus Christ is really
in our heart.
We begin to show it, we have the
evidence of a changed life.
We're new creatures in Jesus Christ.
Old things have passed away and old things
have become new.
If you're not sure that you're really born
again, dear friend, to me, I give every
thought and anxiety to make sure that I
was really born again, because if you're not
sure, you may be dead sure that you're
not born again.
You hear so many talk about, I hope
I'm saved, I think I'm saved, I trust
I'm saved, I believe I'm saved.
That's all nonsense, that'll never keep you out
of hell or get you to heaven, dear
friend.
That's not God's salvation, that's not God's way
of it, according to his word.
You know this is a no-soul salvation.
It's a heart experience and the Spirit witnessing
to our spirit that we're born again.
And then we have the evidence of a
changed life, a new life, in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
You and I wouldn't allow such uncertainty in
any other department of our life.
Supposing you were going to build a house,
bless your heart, you wouldn't, an architect could
tell you that he's got all the degrees
and medals and he's got all the certificates
and show you exactly what a wonderful fellow
he was in college, but he couldn't draw
you out the plan of a house and
tell you that so many feet of this
and so many feet of that would cost
you this.
No!
Well, you wouldn't trust him to build a
dog kennel, in spite of all that he
talked about going through college and knowing.
Same thing if he went to a doctor,
and he tells you that he's a degree
man and a gold medal man in examinations,
and yet he says, I know so much
in that I don't know anything about what
you've got or how you feel or any
remedy for you.
Well, you wouldn't go near him, you wouldn't
send a cat to him.
If you want to make a journey, you
go down to the agent and you say,
I want to make a journey, say to
London.
Well, he says, I've been 15 years in
transportation business and I couldn't tell you how
much it'll cost you, what time you leave,
what kind of conditions you travel under, and
so on.
Well, bless your heart, he wouldn't hold his
job five minutes.
And isn't it a strange thing when it
comes to this all-important matter of salvation?
The matter that's going to determine your eternal
destiny, whether you live with God through eternity
in heaven or live as long as God
lives in hell with the devil in the
dam.
And you say that we're not to know
and that we don't know, and you're satisfied
with that uncertainty.
I can't understand such mentality as that at
all.
If you get into a train and you're
not sure where you're going, bless your heart,
to me you're the most miserable creature under
heaven until somebody comes along and assures you
and gives you the satisfaction that you're on
the right road.
If you're driving your car along the road
and you don't know whether you're on the
right road or not, you're not enjoying the
journey very much.
At least that's the way I've always felt
about it.
And when you come to somebody, you say,
could you tell me, is this the right
road or not?
I remember one time crossing the continent here
when we struck the Atlantic coast.
We were in a motel that night.
Next morning, instead of turning north to go
to New York, I took the turn south
and was making for Florida.
And after it had been three hours on
it, went into a station to get gas,
and the fellow said, where are you going?
I said, I'm going to New York.
He says, you're going to Florida.
My word, that fellow had a hard job
convincing me that I wasn't going to New
York.
But there I was going down south.
But my, whenever I got to know that
I was on the right road, was enjoyment
you had on your journey.
And you mean to tell me that you
can go through life and you know that
you're going to live for as long as
God lives, live forever, either in hell or
heaven, and you're satisfied to be uncertain as
to what it's going to be.
Boys, I think you need to get your
head examined and see whether you're really compass
menace or not.
Why, it's only natural that a person wants
to know just exactly the road they're on,
and want to know, make sure that they're
really on the right road, and certainly about
this matter of our salvation.
Why is it so many lack the assurance?
They say they believe in Christ, they say
they're trusted in Christ, they've decided for Christ,
they've held up their hand, they've gone into
an inquiry room, they've signed a card, they've
joined church, they've been baptized, they've taken a
communion, they profess all that, say, are you
saved?
Are you born again?
And then they wonder how they are, and
I hope, I think, I trust, I believe,
but they don't know.
Why is that?
Why is it?
Why is there so much of this uncertainty
about this matter?
In the reading some time ago, I was
reading a sermon by old Dr. Horatius Bonner,
a man whose name is fragrant in Scotland,
as fragrant as the name of Morimichi, and
for 40 odd years was a minister of
that big west-born church yonder in Glasgow.
Many a time I preached there, his son
-in-law was minister at that time.
Now, Dr. Bonner, in his sermon, he said
that the reason for so much uncertainty about
the matter of salvation, the lack of assurance
about this matter of salvation, was disbelief in
three things.
Now, I'm going to take just exactly these
three things that old Dr. Bonner says the
disbelief in was the cause of this uncertainty
and lack of assurance.
He said, first of all, it was disbelief
in the fact that we all, by nature,
by birth, by natural birth, are complete sinners.
That is, we're perfect sinners.
Couldn't be any more perfect, couldn't be any
more complete than we are.
We were born in sin and shaken, shaken
in iniquity.
You know, when you look at your hand,
what a marvelous thing it is, how wonderfully
shaken.
Some 50 odd joints there, and glory to
God, mine have been 76 years there, and
there's never been an oil can on the
joint.
Did you ever see a piece of mechanism
that you could use the same as you
could use your hand?
What a wonderful thing your eye is.
And it's so shaken, you couldn't get anything
better to give a man vision than the
eye that God has made.
It's just the same with your heart.
What a marvelous, what a marvelous piece of
mechanism that is, pumping away there so many
gallons every hour through your body and mind,
and never a squeak on it, never a
squeak on it, if it's kind of healthy
and well cared for.
And what a marvelous thing.
Could you invent anything that would be a
substitute for the heart?
I believe that they're trying to get a
kind of a mechanical one made to keep
a fellow alive while they're doctoring up with
the old one.
I don't know whether they can manage it
or not.
But my, what a wonderful thing God made
when he made your heart.
Same with your lungs, the same with the
different members of our body.
They're shaken, they're shaken.
Could you know anything more shaken to give
a bird ability to fly than a bird's
wing?
Did you ever think anything more shaken, beautiful
than a fish, for living in the water
and doing without air?
And so a sinner is just as perfectly
shaken as anything that was ever made.
God didn't make us that way, mind you.
When God made us, he made us perfect.
But when man fell, and man is not
only a fallen, but he is a fallen
sinner.
And he's perfect, he's complete, as a sinner.
That's why you never had to teach a
child to go wrong.
You never had to teach a child to
lie.
You never had to teach a child to
deceive.
You never had to teach a child to
make belief.
Why is it just as natural as a
wee duck taken to the water or as
a wee bird taken to the air?
The child just took to wrong and to
wrongdoing.
Before I got married, I had a kind
of a doubt about that.
I thought, well now, we're born and born
pretty good and all that, and it's only
when you do wrong that you become wrong,
and it's only when you sin that you
became a sinner, and so on.
But boy, when I got married, it made
a change in things.
I remember a wee boy came to our
home, and when he just was learning to
talk a bit, one day his mother made
a batch of cookies and went downtown and
did some shopping and came back and laid
the table for tea, got everything ready, and
went into the pantry to get her cookies,
and they were gone.
She thought to herself, blessed by heart, I'm
sure I've baked them.
Surely I can't make a mistake about that.
And then she looked at the wee fella,
and she said, did you take Mama's cookies?
No.
And yet his wee tummy was just bulging
with them.
My, when I looked at him, I said,
listen, I'm thirty-odd years older than you,
and I couldn't have done better, and I
couldn't have told a better lie.
The first lie he told was a mature
lie.
Where did he get it?
My, bless your soul, he was a born
liar.
He was born in sin.
He was shaped in iniquity.
He just took to sin just like a
duck taken to water.
You can baptize them and catechize them and
vaccinate them and scalp them and educate them
and do anything you like, but you can't
change that old nature.
It is not conformed to the law of
God.
Neither indeed can be.
You couldn't be a more complete sinner than
you are.
You're perfectly adapted for living in sin.
You're perfectly adapted for continuing in sin and
for continuing sinning in sin.
You couldn't be more perfectly adapted than you
are.
And so, dear friend, if you've any doubt
regarding that fact, why, bless your heart, how
could you expect to be saved?
Because those are the only kind of people
that God loves.
Those are the only kind of people that
Jesus died to save.
He didn't come to call the righteous.
He didn't come to call good people.
He came to call sinners.
Lost sinners.
Guilty sinners.
Ruined sinners.
Fallen sinners.
Falling sinners.
Sinners that were condemned already.
Blind and dead and desperately wicked.
Sinners that were incorrigible, incurable in the disease
of sin.
But the Bible is a great description of
how complete a sinner we are.
That's why you think it's just as natural
for you to go wrong as it is
for a bird to fly as a duck
to swell.
You've no difficulty about that.
All you've got to do is let yourself
go.
And you're just as naturally going to drift
down the stream and down the stream to
a lost eternity.
And so, dear friend, if you've any doubt
on the fact of total depravity, that's a
real old, good old-fashioned theological term.
Don't hear it much used nowadays.
These are days when we spell God with
a wee G and man with a capital
M.
God's the wee fella.
Man's the big fella.
And so we think that man's this, that,
and the other.
And boy's what he is and what he
is and the other.
He's just a complete sinner.
That every particle of him has gone wrong.
From the crown of his head to the
sole of his foot.
It's wounds and bruises and putrefying sores that
can never be notified.
His heart's deceitful above all things.
And desperately wicked, who can know it?
And the Lord says that the thoughts of
his mind and his imagination is evil and
only evil continually.
You can never change it.
The leopard cannot change its spots.
Can't change him.
You can't turn a lion into a lamb.
You can't turn a hog into a sheep.
You can't change the nature.
You can do as you like with it.
You can educate it.
You can cultivate it.
You can domesticate it.
You can do anything you like.
But you can't change that nature, dear friend.
There's only one can do that.
And Jesus Christ has made that possible by
his life and death and dying and resurrection
for you and me.
You know that's about the hardest thing anybody's
got to accept.
The biggest job under heaven is to get
men and women is to get men and
women to believe what God says about them
and to accept that and humbly accept that
before God.
Oh, pride's a desperate thing.
Oh, there's more people damned with pride than
ever was damned with any other sin the
devil had.
Pride was such a thing that it could
reach up into heaven and get the hold
of the greatest being that God ever created
and that is Satan, Lucifer, son of the
morning, guardian of the throne of God and
could take the hold of that perfect creature,
perfect in his beauty, perfect in his wisdom
and that creature could hurl him down until
the bottomless pit was dug for him and
for his fallen angel.
Well, that's a novel thing.
Pride took the heart of Eve and Adam,
perfect creatures created in the image of God.
God could walk with them and talk with
them and have fellowship with them and yet
pride got in there until they believed the
lie of the devil and wanted to be
as God himself and know as much as
God.
It's a terrible thing, pride.
And whenever the word of God comes to
you, whether you read it or whether somebody's
preaching it to you as I am, it
gets your back up and you get annoyed.
You say the preacher's vulgar, he's rough, he's
coarse.
You call him everything under God's heaven just
because he's telling you God's simple truth about
the matter.
Dear friend, you'll never know you're saved.
You'll never be saved or know it until
you take your place as a poor, lost,
guilty, hell-deserving, hell-born, undeserving sinner.
And until you do that, there's no hope
for you ever having that blessed assurance that
Jesus is yours.
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.
Then says old Dr. Bonner, first of all,
the disbelief is caused by disbelief in the
fact that we're complete sinners and second, that
Jesus is a complete Savior.
You know, these are days of motherness and
there's nothing modern about it.
It's as old as the devil and the
garden of Eden.
The only thing modern is it's got a
frock coat and a stovepipe on it.
But it's all old and it's been repudiated
again and again and the theological battlegrounds are
covered with the defeats of it.
Yet it crops up its head with all
the arrogance and conceit and pride inoculated by
the devil to think that this is motherness.
But however, it's abroad.
It's in our churches.
It's in our pulpits.
It's in our pews.
It's in our Sunday schools.
It's in our literature.
And you meet it there right and left.
And it's this.
Our Sunday schools.
It's in our literature.
And you meet it there right and left.
And it's this.
A kind of a thing they call evolution.
Some philosophy of life that some old fella
invented some years ago.
And that man's the big fella and he's
rising to nobler things than his dead self.
And all that kind of thing.
And of course, whenever you get that, you
get the making light of the Savior.
That Jesus Christ was a mere man.
Well now, dear friends, you want to remember
that when you begin to get on ground
like that, you're on sinking's hand.
You're getting into blasphemy against the Holy Ghost
when you begin to touch the deity of
my Lord.
If Jesus Christ was a mere man, then
he was born out of wedlock.
You know what that means.
Do you need to say that Jesus Christ
was illegitimate?
That Jesus Christ, let me use that awful
word, that terrible word, was Jesus Christ a
bastard?
That's what it means.
If Jesus Christ was a mere man and
Joseph his father, then Jesus Christ was born
out of wedlock.
Don't forget it, dear friends.
They hide it.
They talk about the biological impossibility of the
virgin birth and the incarnation and so on.
And what they're doing is saying in a
refined and scholarly manner that Jesus was ill
-born.
And if Jesus Christ was a mere man,
he was the biggest liar that the world
has ever known.
There's no other man ever lived, claimed to
be God, except this nigger that's running around
calling divine something.
But in the ages that have gone by,
never took the place that they were God,
God Almighty.
Jesus took that place, accepted that whenever they
called him that, when they worshipped him as
God, he accepted him.
And if it wasn't true about him, then
he was the biggest liar that ever lived.
And if Jesus Christ was merely a man,
he was the biggest fraud that ever lived.
He lived like God.
He acted like God.
He talked like God.
He wrought works that only God alone could
do.
Don't you see the terrible position you get
into, dear friend, if you deny the completeness
of Jesus Christ as the Savior?
That he was not only the Son of
God, but God the Son.
That he was God of very God.
That he was virgin-born.
That he lived a virtuous life, sinless life.
That every word he spoke was with the
authority of God, infallible, inerrant word of God.
That he spoke with all authority, all power
given unto him, in heaven and on earth.
In him dwelling all the fullness of God,
the fullness of wisdom, fullness of knowledge.
And yet you get these motherness telling us
that he was a mere man, a great
teacher, a perfect man, and wonderful founder of
religion, and class him with other great leaders
and philosophers that are dead in love.
Well, if he's all that they say he
is today, a mere man and all this,
did ever a man save another man?
Why, he couldn't save himself, however perfect he
might be, however great a teacher he might
be, however wise he may have been, however
wonderful the life he lived.
He couldn't save himself.
There's no man can atone for the sin
of his own soul, and if Jesus Christ
was a mere man, he was a sinner,
never mind how great a man, never mind
how wise a man he was.
But you and I know from the word
of God, dear friend, that he was not
only the Son of God, but God the
Son, and that he is a complete Savior,
the Lamb of God, without sin, without spot,
without stain, separated from sinners.
My, my, my, that's the only one that
could save us.
The blood of ten million angels couldn't atone
for my sin.
The blood of all the archangels and charitables
that ever lived and seraphims couldn't attain, couldn't
redeem a soul like your soul and mine.
It took the very blood of Deity, the
very blood of God, to atone for your
sin and mine.
We're not redeemed with corruptible things such as
silver and gold.
We're redeemed with the precious blood of Jesus
Christ.
God, my Savior.
Whenever I bow to Jesus Christ, I'm not
bowing to a mere man.
I'm bowing to God.
I've never worshipped any man.
I've never bowed my knee to any man.
It doesn't matter whether he's a king on
the throne or a ruler of an empire.
He's only a sinner with a crown on
his head.
But Jesus Christ is King of kings and
Lord of lords.
And glory to God, when we bow to
him, we're bowing to absolute Deity.
And so Jesus Christ is a complete sinner.
Now, if you've any question about that matter,
you're a free moral agent, you're living in
a free country, you can deny Christ's crown
rights and covenant, you can call him what
you like, but dear friend, you can never
be saved.
Doesn't matter what he may be.
You may put him on the highest altar,
you may, like Renon, say the most wonderful
things about him, but rob him of his
Deity.
He can never save you.
Doesn't matter who he is or what he
is.
He can never save you.
It's only God can save you.
It's only God, my Savior, can brought out
my sin.
There's none but God can atone for a
guilty sinner and brought out his sin.
And so if you've any question regarding the
Deity of Christ, how could you have any
assurance of your salvation?
And then old Dr. Bonner says that the
lack of assurance is caused by disbelief, first,
that we're complete sinners, second, that Jesus is
a complete Savior, and third, that Christ saves
complete sinners completely.
Completely.
Glory to God.
There's nobody can add to that perfect word.
When he sadly lived, when he died on
Calvary's cross, he said, It is finished.
And in the original, it's one word.
Finished.
Reverberating down through the centuries.
Reverberating down through the caverns of hell.
Finished.
Nothing can ever, never, never can be added
to it.
Nothing can be ever taken from it.
And there's no substitute for the salvation and
the work of Jesus Christ.
No substitute would ever.
It's a complete, it's a complete salvation.
Fifty-three years ago, the 22nd of last
May, sitting at my mother's fireside one Monday
morning at half past eight in the morning,
I'd come home from sea, I was a
cadet in the mercantile marine, and I was
home at the end of the four years.
Sitting there, poor, lost, drunken sinner, sitting at
my mother's fireside, reading the paper, smoking a
cigarette.
Suddenly, do you hear me?
Suddenly, God spoke to my soul.
Glory to God, conviction seized me.
I knew I was lost.
I not only knew it, but I felt
it.
And the pains of hell got hold of
me.
And I said, Lord, I come.
I yield.
I accept you as my Savior.
And friend, I was instantaneously I was, I
would say, I was instantaneously, I was consciously,
glory to God, eternally safe.
In a moment's time, from a child of
the devil, I became a child of God.
From the road to hell, galloping sixty minutes
in the hour, twenty-four hours in the
day, glory to God, I started on the
road to heaven.
Then the old mother came in to lay
the breakfast things, says, I, mother, I was
her baby boy, the Benjamin of the home.
Says, I, mother, your prayers are answered and
your anxiety is ended.
She says, what's happened?
I am safe.
What?
She says, when did it happen?
Right now, says I.
And she says, how do you know?
No, says I.
God says it.
Him that cometh to me, I will in
no wise test have.
And friend, although I have served God for
fifty-three years and wandered up and down
this world more than a dozen times round
it and preached to nearly every country in
it and sacrificed and suffered and rejoiced everything
you could think of, do you know I'm
not one more converted and not one more
saved than I was the moment I was
saved?
That moment I was saved, I was eternally,
completely saved.
And if I had died, I would have
gone to heaven and been like Christ and
saved as if I had never sinned.
Why do you hear that?
Isn't it wonderful, this my marvelous salvation?
This is none of your half-crowned or
ten or six feet kind of salvation.
This is God's salvation, a complete salvation where
our sins are blotted out from the very
memory of God, where we are made new
creatures in Christ Jesus and the old thing's
gone, gone.
We're new, we're Christ-like, we've got the
nature of God, we're children of God and
I'll be as like Christ as one pea
is like another through all eternity.
Glory to God.
What a complete salvation.
I was born of my mother sixty-three,
seventy-six years ago, the third of last
April and I became my mother's son but
I was just as much my mother's son
then as I am now and I'm no
more my mother's son now than I was
then.
In spite of all the good or bad
that I'd ever done, anything you ever did
never made you more a child of your
mother than you were the day you were
born and when you were born again into
the family of God, glory to God, you
became a child of God, as much a
child of God that moment as you are
now after all these years and you're no
more a child of God than you were
then.
Maybe you can be more like it.
Oh, I've learned to appreciate it.
I've been born of a mother and I've
learned to appreciate what a wonderful thing to
be a child of God but that didn't
make me any more a child of God.
It's made me more like a child of
God and not only that, it's taught me
to enjoy such a relationship and to appreciate
such a relationship and to revel and delight
in such a relationship as that day in
and day out.
Now do you see that, dear friend?
Now if you think that you've got to
do this, that and the other to add
to your salvation, how could you ever be
sure you're safe?
When will you ever have done enough?
How do you know when you've done enough?
Don't you see the awful fix you're in?
But if you take your place as a
complete sinner and believe that Jesus is a
complete Savior, God of our God, and you've
accepted Him as your Savior on the ground
of God's free grace, then glory to God,
you're eternally, completely, perfectly safe.
You couldn't be any better saved and you
couldn't be any more saved than you were
the moment you decided for Christ.
Maybe you can enjoy it better and you
appreciate it better and you marvel and wonder
more at it as the days come and
go.
Why, every day it's a marvel to me
I'm lost in wonder, love and praise when
I think of the love that sought me
and the blood that bought me and the
grace that has brought me to the fold.
Wondrous grace that has brought me to the
fold.
And so, dear friend, have no doubt, oh,
have no doubt.
Take your place as a bona fide, complete
sinner.
Believe that Jesus Christ is God your Savior
and accept Him as your Savior and believe
it with all your heart for He has
given you the assurance and the witness that
you're completely saved.
All the means of grace and the word
of God and prayer, all that is not
to make you more a Christian, it's to
make you to enjoy being a Christian and
to appreciate the wonderful salvation of God.
Oh, blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine, heir
of salvation and prevalent, washed in His blood,
born of His Spirit and washed in His
blood.
Praise God.
Amen.
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.
Oh, what a foretaste of His glory divine,
heir of salvation and purchased at God, born
of His Spirit and washed in His blood.
This is my story and this is my
song praising my Savior all the day
long.
This is my story and this is my
song praising my Savior all the day long.
Oh, what perfect delight, this vision's a perfect
submission.
All is at rest.
I am my Savior.
Oh, I am happy and blessed.