Why is Salvation Difficult? | The Whole Counsel

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I think the second one that he mentions jumped out at me. A person must understand that believing is the only way of receiving the salvation.

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And he lists that as one of the reasons that it is scarcely or only with difficulty that anyone is saved.

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And that just seems kind of counterintuitive. If you say to a person who asks you, what must

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I do? If you say, well, believe. He thinks, only believe?

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Well, I mean, I can do that anytime then. And immediately the human nature thinks, well, belief is the easiest thing in the world.

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But Frelinghuysen is right. He gives a long explanation there that we won't go over. But he basically shows that when a man is in the grip of a fallen sinful nature and his mind is blinded by his pride, the very last thing he would ever do is go out of himself to look away from himself for hope and cast himself completely upon Jesus Christ.

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That that is just so against our nature, it is impossible apart from the work of God.

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One of the ones that jumped out at me was the eighth one. So there's all these obstacles that are insurmountable to us.

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And then on top of that, you have this condition that you're dead. You have no ability to deal with any of these obstacles by yourself.

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There's nothing in you, no ability, but also no desire. You have no real feeling to want to deny yourself or to want to follow

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Christ and, you know, put aside possibly your own reputation, possessions, maybe even your own life, as he mentions in one of them.

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Why would you want to do that? Well, you can't want to do that until God changes something in you.

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Yeah. So, you know, coming from what Paul says in many places, but in particular Ephesians 2, that we are spiritually dead.

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Does a corpse ever run a race? Does a corpse ever earn, you know, a paycheck?

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Does a corpse ever fight a war? Does a corpse follow? Does it understand? Does it respond to a voice?

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But when Paul says we're spiritually dead, we do not want to venture into wrong territory and say, well,

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I want to follow Christ. But like Paul says, I'm spiritually dead, so I can't do anything about it.

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The spiritual death does not mean that we are spiritually inactive, sadly. We're very active.

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We're just always active in the wrong direction. My heart is extremely responsive, before I was a

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Christian, to every idol. My legs ran to every lie. My, you know, my eyes were all open toward things that promised that John could be the center of the world.

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But I was unresponsive to God. So being spiritually dead does mean incapable, incapable of doing what would be required to rescue myself.

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But the inability is also woven together with an unwillingness.

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The stain of sin is so complete in me. It's not just that I can't follow

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Christ. It's that I won't follow Christ until Christ gives me a new heart.

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So it's not the kind of a position that's kind of this guiltless, pitiable condition. A man is lame, and he can't walk.

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It's a man that so prefers lameness that he would never walk. Another thing that he mentions here is the atmosphere that we're required to follow

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Christ in. That we're required to believe in, to repent in, to persevere in, and that is the world.

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And in two ways, the world is a poisonous atmosphere for the believer. One way is the world's false friendship.

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It's counterfeit smiles, where it comes to us and says, now that you're a Christian, great!

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Now you can have Christ and the old life. And sadly, there would be many churches, perhaps, that would unknowingly kind of assume that that's true or promote that view.

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So the world comes along the Christian, you know, the old way of living comes alongside the

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Christian, and there's this false friendship. But there's also these dreadful terrors, where if you're not tempted and seduced by the world, you're terrified by the world.

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You're paralyzed with this kind of fear or despair or disillusionment. You think,

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I thought the Christian life was going to be easy. I'm on the side of the King. But life has become very difficult at times, and I wasn't prepared for that.

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I didn't count the cost. And, you know, if you're not biblically informed, you might think that Christ isn't all he said he would be.

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But in fact, he did warn us about that. We could say it this way, Ephesians 6, with Paul's battle language,

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Paul brings that at the end of that wonderful letter, in which he has spent nearly three chapters giving the church at Ephesus the most sublime descriptions of doctrine, and then a couple of chapters of duty, and then the battle scene.

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And so one thing that we learn from that is that every doctrine that we have to believe is custom designed for a battlefield, and every duty that we have to do is to be done while surrounded by and opposed by enemies.

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There's just no exception. Friedenheisen concludes these 14 statements with the question, or rather the statement.

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It becomes us then not to esteem salvation so lightly and of such easy attainment.

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If we see these things to be true, if we see others who have at great cost persevered, and we see that there have been many difficulties in their

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Christian life, that there has been a battle, then why would we think that there would be no battle for us?