Diluting Total Depravity — E.A. Johnston

The biggest sickness in our churches today is the elevation of man. That man isn't as bad as the Bible says he is. But all you have to do is read the evening news. You'll soon see how bad man is in his natural state.

The Total Fall of Adam

And in our churches today, we try our best to get folks to believe that when Adam fell, all he did was skin his knee a little. It wasn't a total fall. That man has enough goodness in him to want to seek God and Christ without any help from heaven.

But you can only prop up a corpse so long, for he'll soon topple over. My Bible says this about man. In Job 15, 16, it declares, how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water.

But our evangelism today will do its level best to try and convince you that you're really not all that bad. You just need Jesus to be a little better. The diluting of total depravity is a complete underrating of the sinner's desperate case and condition.

It is a divine fact that every man is completely corrupted by nature, thoroughly unaware of his own helpless, wretched, blind, dead, and undone condition in trespasses and sins. God's solemn truth about man is a unpalatable subject and too much of a theological hot potato that few preachers will pick it up.

Instead, you will hear that when Adam fell, he just skinned his knee somewhat, for he still has enough good in him to desire God. But that's a lie, friend, from the pit of hell, because the badness of man's heart is so great that no man can be saved without the special intervention of Almighty God.

Salvation Requires Divine Intervention

Listen to me, friends. I'm giving you the oil straight from the can. Like we say in the South, I'm not diluting this great doctrine of Scripture one drop to make it more palatable to sinful man. The Bible declares that man's plight is so grave that his salvation is impossible unless God puts forth his mighty power and intervenes.

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. That man is so dead in sin that none but the Spirit can make men willing in the day of his power.

Man in his natural state cannot trump up godly sorrow for sin or have saving faith in the gospel because God alone can save sinners in Christ because he leads them to repentance by moving on them through the Holy Spirit and causing them to drop self-love for divine love.

God's Sovereignty Versus Man-Centered Evangelism

The gospel is about God's glory in the salvation of sinners. But our modern evangelism puts the emphasis on man, man making the decision instead of God's divine sovereignty and glory, the unconverted church member who is not born again.

It's because he's never seen his total depravity and his dire need of a saving Lord. The superficial professions we see today in our churches are produced by our man-centered diluted gospel that has no power to save.

For a man to be saved, he has to have a definite knowledge of sin. For according to scripture, God is holy and hates sin. God's wrath against sin demands justice for sin. And his love through mercy provides a way of escape for the sinner in the person of Christ Jesus.

Lost sinners can only be awakened by divine intervention through the spirit that shines the gospel into the heart of the awakened sinner. Now, do you want to do some good, brother preacher? Then start here.

Repentance and the Necessity of Conviction

Start with the badness of the human heart in its total depravity. Because if you merely just tell a wicked sinner that all he has to do to be saved is to just accept Christ, then we tell a falsehood. Because God's word is plain that sinners must repent and turn from their wicked ways.

The modern diluted gospel has produced a generation of religious zombies who are nothing more than dead men walking about in the filthy rags of their self-righteousness. That's why it's so dead in our churches today.

Because the sanctuary is just a graveyard. But if you start telling men, hardened in their sins, that they must repent and turn to the Lord in their utter helplessness, for they are in imminent danger.

Judgment, Hell, and the Need to Warn Sinners

And a terrible judgment awaits them because if God let his severest judgment fall on his blessed son, the spotless lamb of God, how much more will the punishment be for sin-loving, God-hating rebels who live under the cloak of an empty religious profession and sit on deacon boards.

Because unless you repent, you will surely bust hell wide open when you die. Where is the Holy Ghost conviction and heartfelt repentance in our churches today? We must warn men of their danger of dying in their sins and going to hell.

Or we'll just continue to fill our churches with religious zombies who stumble and stagger while they try to climb their way up to heaven on false hopes while they cling to a rope of sand. Let us pray.