Because of Adam's fall in the garden, every
mother's son born into this world is born
with a rune nature and bent towards sin.
The heart is deceitful above all things and
desperately wicked.
Who can know it?
So says the prophet Jeremiah.
Because of his natural condition, man is at
enmity with God and hates all things holy.
He cannot lay hold of the Christ of
the Gospels, for he has no desire for
Him.
A self-ruled man will die in his
sins and be brought down to hell, where
his soul will suffer eternal damnation.
1 Corinthians 2.14 declares, But the natural
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit
of God, for they are foolishness unto him,
nor can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned.
What that means, friend, is unless God performs
a miracle of divine grace in your heart
by way of regeneration, you will die in
your natural state, as Isaiah 57.20 describes
all those tortured souls in perdition and hell.
But the wicked are like the troubled sea,
when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up
mire and dirt.
To better appreciate that verse, one must live
by the sea, to witness times of storm
and hurricanes.
I live in the state of Florida, and
often in hurricane season, I will go down
by the seashore and look out at the
turbulence taking place in the ocean.
At times the water looks like a boiling
pot, with the waves tumbling up with a
violent force and then crashing down upon the
rocks below.
It is all unrest.
Mire and dirt are brought up to the
surface of the water by those storm-tossed
waves.
That is a vivid picture of a tortured
soul in hell.
Never a moment's rest, and like the troubled
sea, it is constantly in turmoil.
The title of my message today, friends, is
Divine Grace in the Sinner's Heart, and my
text can be found in the book of
Ezekiel in chapter 11 and verse 19.
Here now is the word of God, and
may the Spirit of the Lord attend the
reading of His holy word.
And I will give them one heart, and
I will put a new spirit within you,
and I will take the stony heart out
of their flesh, and will give them a
heart of flesh.
This speaks of the supernatural work of God's
Spirit in the heart of the sinner, called
regeneration, whereby divine light being imparted to the
soul, the sinner can acquiesce to the demands
of the gospel and close with Christ.
By this divine light in the sinner's heart,
imparted by the Spirit of God, the soul
is finally brought to unite with the revealed
Christ by faith, and to be reconciled with
God by giving up of oneself to God,
to love Him and live to Him forever.
And like the good ground hearers in the
parable of the sower and the seed, they
heard the word and understood it.
When God works divine grace in the sinner's
heart, he is enabled to have repentance and
faith.
In the act of regeneration, we receive this
divine light, which is a new spiritual sense
of things.
Our eyes are opened, and we are brought
out of darkness into this marvelous light, to
where we have a right view of ourselves,
a right view of God, and a right
view of Christ.
To be saved means we receive a revealed
Christ and are united to Him in a
living faith, but God must turn on the
divine light upon our soul if we are
to receive salvation by free grace through Him.
Jesus said, No man can come to me
except the Father, which hath sent me draw
him, and I will raise him up at
the last day.
If you get saved, friend, it's because God
gave you saving faith.
I know the majority of our Baptist churches
don't believe that or teach that anymore, but
the majority of our Baptist churches are in
deep spiritual apostasy.
The spiritual illumination of divine grace lays the
foundation for repentance and faith.
The way of salvation is spoken of by
the apostle in Acts, a repentance toward God
and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.
Repentance and faith always go hand in hand,
as the gospel calls sinners to repent and
to believe in Christ.
Because of the false gospel that is prominently
preached in the modern church, many are deluded
into a false hope of heaven because they
have no repentance and do not turn to
God with all their hearts.
This devil's gospel has deceived millions of baptized
individuals into an empty religious profession.
They have never been awakened to their lost
condition, never come under Holy Spirit conviction.
They are strangers to regeneration and strangers to
repentance and faith, and therefore are strangers to
Christ Jesus.
He will say to them on that day,
I never knew you, depart from me ye
that work iniquity.