A Sweet Call to Salvation

 

 For Weary Souls: Greenhill on the Sweetness of the Savior - Reformation 21

 

First, the Puritans presented Christ as a Savior who really desires to save sinners. He had a heart for the lost, so they tried to entice sinners with His sweetness. Hear what William Greenhill had to say:

Does not Christ sweetly invite you, and use sweet invitations and allurements to draw sinners to Him? Can there be sweeter invitations than what you have from Christ upon this account in Matthew 11:28: ‘Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest”? 

Can you hear Christ crying out, “Oh, you poor sinners of the world, you poor sinners of the earth, you who travail under the burden of your sins, you who are heavy laden, you who are ready to sink into hell through fear of wrath: come unto Me; come unto Me.” He does not say, “Why have you broken Moses’ law? Why have you offended My Father? Why have you lived so basely and vilely?” No, He says, “Come unto Me, you who are weary and heavy laden, you who are ready to sink and perish, who are hungry and thirsty and know not which way to turn for relief; come unto Me.”

See what a blessed invitation is given in Isaiah 55:1–2: “Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat; yea, come buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do you lay out your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not? Hearken diligently unto Me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.” Is not here a sweet, gracious, blessed invitation to poor sinners, unto such as we are here this day? The Lord Christ is speaking unto you this day: “Ho, everyone, everyone who thirsts, young or old, rich or poor, learned or unlearned, of whatsoever condition you are—are you thirsty? Would you have mercy, peace, grace, and the Spirit of Christ? Would you have anything to do your souls good? Then come, come unto Me. Come to the waters.”

“Aye, but I have no money!”

It matters not; come without money. Come, for here is wine, milk, bread, marrow, and fatness; there’s that which will make your souls live; here’s virtue in Christ to make your souls live forever. So we read in Proverbs 23:26: “My son, give me thy heart.” God says, “O my son, give Me your heart.” Christ is the everlasting Father and He says, “My son, give Me your heart. Come to me.”

How are we to take this water? “Let him take of the water of life freely.” There’s something in this word “freely.” It notes, first, that, let a sinner be what he will, there is no bar put in against him to keep him off from this water. Let a man be a great sinner, an old sinner, let his sins be crimson and scarlet sins, God puts in no bar. Christ does not say, “Let a little sinner,” or “a young sinner,” or “a sinner who has sinned once or twice, or a hundred or a thousand times,” come, but He says, “Let whosoever will come; let him take of the water of life freely. Let his sins be what they will, all manner of blasphemies shall be forgiven.” There’s no bar except against the unpardonable sin; but whatever sin, though long continued in, though of the most heinous nature, though clothed with the most dreadful aggravations, yet it shall be forgiven. Let that sinner come and take of this water of life freely. A man who is leprous all over may as freely go into the river or sea and wash himself as the man who is sound. There is no bar in his way.

If the water of life is freely offered to sinners, then you who are barren and dead-hearted, who complain of unfruitfulness and unprofitableness, wait upon the Lord Christ in the use of means; for here is water of life, and Christ gives it out in the use of means. Are you dry, barren, and fruitless? Have you a dead heart? Christ has water of life to quicken you. Christ has water of life to make you more lively. “I am come,” said Christ in John 10:10, “that ye might have life, and that ye might have it in more abundance.” Christ is saying, “I have come for the very purpose of giving life, and to give life more abundantly, to give out these waters freely and fully.”  When the rain falls from heaven upon the mountains and barren places, it will make them look green. So when Christ gives out these waters to mountainous hearts, to barren spirits, this water of life will soak into you, soften you, make you grow and flourish, and bring forth fruit. 

This is all that God require. Under the covenant of works there was “Do this and live.” But now the last motion that Christ made when He left the world and gave out the Scripture was this: “If any man has a will, if there is willingness in you to receive waters of life, that’s the only thing I require, and all I require.” 

He does not require great matters at your hands. He does not say, “Give Me house and lands; give Me your shops and your wares; give Me your ships; give Me your limbs, your blood and your lives.” No, He says, “If any man will, let Me have but willingness in you; this is all I require.” Proverbs 23:26: “My son, give Me thy heart.” What is His meaning? “Let Me but see a heart in you prizing, choosing, and pursuing the waters of life. That’s all I require. My son, give Me your heart.” He does not mean the piece of flesh in your body which you call your heart. But He would have you to have so much understanding as to see an excellence in Himself, His Son, His Spirit, His Word, and His grace, and then to choose the same, and to use the means to attain them. This is that which God requires, and all He requires. Shall the Lord only require your hearts, nothing but your hearts, and will you not study to have a heart willing to have God, to have waters of life?

 

Consider how easy that which the Lord requires at your hands is. The Lord requires no hard matters of you, only that whosoever will may take of the waters of life freely. The Lord might have put hard conditions and hard terms upon men and women. He might have done as Saul did with David in 1 Samuel 18:25: “Give me 100 foreskins of the Philistines, and thou shalt have Michal my daughter as your wife”; or as Caleb did when he said, “If any man will go and take Kiriath Sephar and subdue it, he shall have my daughter, Achsah” (Joshua 15:16). He might have put you upon it as he did the young man in Matthew 19:21: “Go and sell all that thou hast and follow Me, and thou shalt have waters of life.” But He does not put you upon such things. He only says, “Whosoever will, let him come and drink of the waters of life.” So it is easily received. Therefore, consider these things, and through the blessing of God they may prevail with your hearts to be more willing than ever to have water of life.

 

The next use is to let us see the infinite goodness of God, and His condescension toward poor creatures: that He who is greatness and glory, majesty and excellence, should condescend to us who are flesh and blood, who are corrupt, full of guilt, full of deformity, having no beauty, no excellence, no good in us; that God should condescend so far as that, upon our being willing, we should have waters of life. As was said before, He puts no hard terms upon us, but says, “Whosoever will, let him take of the waters of life.” That is, “let him take Me for his portion; let him take My Son. He shall be his righteousness. Let him take My Spirit; He shall be his sanctification. Let him take My Word; it shall be his light, his rule, and his comfort, and he shall be blessed here and hereafter.”

Oh, the infinite goodness and condescension of God towards poor wretches such as we are! Had you seen Solomon in all his glory and royalty to have stooped this far to a poor woman, leprous and full of sores, having no friends to speak for her, and had you heard him say to her, “Come, manifest your willingness to have me, and I will take you into my house, wash you, make you my queen and make you happy,” would this not have been a wonderful condescension from Solomon? 

 

Thus it is with God. We were dirty and full of sores, with no friend to plead for us, but all was against us. We have no good or worth in us. Now Christ, the Prince of peace and life, comes and says, “Will you be saved, poor creatures? Will you be washed in My blood? Will you go along with Me? Will you be happy? Come, go along with Me. I will carry you to My Father. You shall sit upon a throne and live forever and enjoy God.” Oh, the goodness and condescension of God to poor sinners!

 

Soul Food: forgiveness, Regeneration, Self Denial, Presumption, and Bunyan's Grace Abounding... etc

Storming The Battlements: Charles Spurgeon Sermon Audio - YouTube

\Justification: Old Paths - J. C. Ryle - YouTube

Forgiveness: Old Paths - J. C. Ryle - YouTube

Having The Spirit: Old Paths - J. C. Ryle - YouTube

Alive or Dead?: Old Paths - J. C. Ryle - YouTubeRyle Are There Few Who are Saved?

Few Saved: Old Paths - J. C. Ryle Sermon / Audio Book - YouTube

How to Die to Self - G. D. Watson Sermon - YouTube

A Caution To The Presumptuous: Charles Spurgeon Sermon Audio - YouTube

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners | John Bunyan | Audiobook Video - YouTube

Repentance, What it Means to Repent and Why We Must Do So | J. C. Ryle | Christian Audiobook Video - YouTube

According to Promise. Of Salvation, Life, and Eternity | Charles H. Spurgeon | Free Audiobook - YouTube

Holiness (Part 1) | J C Ryle | Free Christian Audiobook -

Paul Washer says we can't learn self-denial because we dobn't understand regeneration

Self Denial & Regeneration ~ Christian sermon by Paul Washer -

A  Pink on the New Birth:

Regeneration, or The New Birth, by A.W. Pink. -

Ryle on the Cross:

The Cross | J C Ryle | Christian Audiobook - YouTube

Spurgeon takes Us Deep Into the fallen Nature, our Natural Enmity to God

 Charles Spurgeon plumbs the depths of the fallen human natur, the carnal mind which is enmity with God.  Have you ever taken a glimpse into that enmity inb your own fleshly nature?  It's terrifying to someone who hopes to be saved because it looks absolutely impossible for such a creature so naturally at odds with God ever to be changed to such an emormous extent.   Yet that is what all the works of salvation done by Christ accomplished.   

The Carnal Mind Is Enmity Against God: Charles Spurgeon Sermon Audio - YouTube

I think of Christopher Hitchens who wrote "God is not Great" and debated as an atheist for many years before he died.  the epitome of the fallen human nature in himself.  All his arguments come from his inborn enmity to God.  It takes the breath away.

It's all here.   Why we must be born again, regenerated.  We must have a new nature.  It's nothing we can do ourselves because all our means are corrupted by the  Fall.  God Himself has to do it all.  We can't add one smidgen of an iota of our own effotts to the mix,  in fact we must not.   We must become poor in spirit , having absolutely nothing to contribute.    

Jesus Calling and A Course in Miracles Come From the Same Source

 The more I think about the book "Jesus Calling" the more amazed I am at how such things fly under the radar in Christian settings.    How did I overlook it the first time I encountered it?   How was it only a vague sense of a red flat the second time?   Why did it take hearing a number of people experienced with such things before I too came to see it as a demonic counterfeit?

Sad to say I think a lot of it is spiritual dullness brought about by a way too casual attitude to sins of various kinds.   Sin dulls the siritual senses.   their sharpness can be regained but it takes some effortt and self-denial for that.  

But I think in many cases it's a problem of Bible illiteracy.  Great numbers of people are drawn to these counterfeits from within the Church.   Maybe many of them aren't savedb but at least they are not likiely to be very knowledgeable about the bible.    How such enormous numbers could fill a whole stadium to listen to a Beth Moore or a Joel Osteen is hard to explain unless most of them really aren't Christians in the sense of being born again.    the same must be true of those enormous numbers who gobble up the false teachings of a Jewsus Calling or the Shack and that sort of thing.

I realized recently that the method of wriing Jesus Calling is the same as that for A Course in Miracles.  It starts out something like "This is a Coure in Miracles, Please take Notes" and it's supposedly dictated by "Jesus."   "Jesus Calling" is compared by the critics to a New Age book called "God Calling" but it's just as much related to "A Course in Miracles" and probably also many other channeled demonic writingsa that may not use the name Jesus.   

But of course the name Jesus would have a  special attractiveness to people with a Christiian identity, a vague and compromised Christian identity anyway.   Those who live a strong Christian life and know the bible are a lot less likely to be attracted to this sort of thing.

Weak preachin has to have a lot to do with this too.

this Church needs rescuing.

"When the Last Elect Person Believes"

That's when the Rapture occurs, when the Church is snatched away.  That's how John MacArthur puts it here"

The Rapture John MacArthur - YouTube

He's stating the position of the Pre=tribulation Rapture as I've heard it from all those who believe in it.

But isn't there a huge gaping problem with this idea?  Supposedly many will be saved during the tribulation that follows the Rapture, both Jews and Gentiles.  If the last elect person came into the Church just before the rapture, who are all those who get saved after?  

Something is wrong here, and this is just one of the problems I've bbeen having with the Pre trib position, although in saying that I'm not saying there's any other end times system that makes any better sense to me.  Most of the others are far less coherent than this one.    Nevertheless there are pro9blems with ti that I can't resolve.   I've mentioned a number of times the problem of the martyrs under the altar in Revelation Six, the fifth Seal.     How can there be martyrs waiting for the fullness of their number when the Rapture has already occurred which presumably would have taken all the martyrs of the Middle Ages?   Why have a separate group of martyrs that doesn't include those?  

Well, I don't have the answer, all I can do is ask the questions.  lThey lead me to wanting to push the Rapture further ahead into the tribulation or after it, but those answers only raise more problems to solve..     But still I keep coming back to this problem of the two different groups, it's still the biggest problem to me.  If the times of the Gentiles end with the Rapture how can there be millions of Gentiles getting saved after that?   They aren't elect?  How can that be?    

Later , about 5 pm:   Also, how can the "times of the gentiles" be ended with the pre-trib Rapture if there is still to come a gentil Antichrist representing the last of the four Gentile empires of the book of daniel, and the antichrist is to desecrate the Jewish temple?      the Church Age would be ended with teh Rapture burt  the Times of the gentiles relate to the Jewish temple, don't they?Of course there won't have been a Jewish temple for about two thousand years at the time of the Pre-Trib Rapture...

Otherwise it's a very satisfying coherent tsystem, bringing in the Seventieth Week of daneil in a specifically Jewish framework etc etc etc.  

Badn English Drives Mde Bonkers

Bad English eats at me when it comes out of the mouth of educated people as it too often does these days.  I don't have such a reactio to people who simply speak English the way they learned it as children if they had no opportunity to learn otherwise, I don't even really notice it and would certainly not wanto to make an issue of it.   But when college-ed7cated people say "I could care less" or "If I would have known" or "{I was laying down when..." and so on, it's  very hard to take.

We've heard that the French have an agency that protects their lan\\

guage, I why don't we have something like that for English?  We wouldn't havew had the abominable English in the NASB if we did.

And I wouldn't be having to deal with the bad English in some of the books I've been listening to, which I'm very sure were not the original speech of the writer but added by editors to "update" it for modern readers or listeners.   Did Bunyan really write "if the crows would have been able to ..." ?  I doubt it.  But I have to be subjected to it because of some "well meaning" editor who doesn't know it's bad English.

That's all I'm going to say.  I've probably already committed the sin of unkindness

Does Matthew 5:32 Allow Divorce for Adultery?

 Well, here I go again.   I've had this objection to the accepted understanding of a biblical passage for a long time, though I've thought maybe I'm just not getting something about it that would change my mind, and since it came up again I wanted to see if I could get to the bottom of it once and for all.   

This is Matthew 5:32 where Jesus says "But I say unto you that if a man put away his wife, save for the cause of fornication, he causes her to comitt adultery..."

This verse is interpreted to mean that forniicatiobn is a legitimate reason for diverose.  I don't read it that way and I wantedd to know if everybody does or if some see it the wsay I do.  I foudn a three part series on this passage by John MacArthur and it seemed from some of the early statements he makes that he might end up saying what I've been thinking so I listened to the whole thing and he finally gets to a direct statement about that verse at the very end pf Part three:

JOHN MACARTHUR - Divorce and Remarriage, Part 3 (Matthew 5:31-32) - YouTube

that's Parrt 3, I thought I had Part 1 but I guess I lost it.  If you start at the f beginning it will roll over to the second and then the third parts, but maybe starting at part 3 is enough anyway for my purposes.

Throughout his discussion he mentions many times that there was only one legitimate reason for divorce given by Moses or by Jesus or by any of the New Testament writers, yet as he quoted passage after passage I saw nothing that seemed to me to say anything like that.   Where does it say divorce is  not condoned except for the cause of sexual sin or fornication or adulter?  Nowhere.  What am I missing?  The ONLY place it seems to be said, and he finally seems to be saying this too, is in Matthew 5:32, "He who puts away his wife, except for the cause o fornication, causes her to commit adulter."  

And that is the common interpretation that I just don't see at all there.  What I see there is a simple logical point:  if the cause of the man's putting away his wife is fornication, which is the same thing as adultery, as MadArthur also makes clear, then of course divrocing her isn't going to cause her to commit adultery becaused she's already committed it.  It's a simple logical point.  If you divorce her for any other cause THEN she will commit adultery by remarrying, but if the cause IS adultery, just logically speaking you won't cause her to commit it by divorcing her.   The man she marries will commit adultery in marrying her and the husband who divorces her will commit adultery when he remarries, but the woman who is divorced for committing adultery won't be made to commit it by the divorce because she's allrady committed it.

I read that verse over and over and over again and that's all I can get out of it.  It's a simple logical point, it is not an "esxception clause" to the prohibition on divorce which is otherwise all-encompassing.

MacArthur's discussion otherwise is his usual terrific thoroughly biblical discussion.  I learned a lot from it and I'm impressed at his seweing it as part of the discussion about adultery which starts in verse 27.  I think he's right about that.  

But I've still got my objection to the interpretation of verse 32 and I continue to be pe rather bewildered at anyone's every getting that interpreation out of it.   MacArthur makes a great case for even adultery's not being a legitimate reason for divorce despite what he sees as this exception clause that appears to allow it, but nevertheless I don't think it allows it and I stil ldon't see how anybody gets that out of it.