Total Depravity (Calvinism Series: Part One)

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Hi, this is Jimmy. On Theocast today, we are beginning a five -week series on the ever -debated topic of Calvinism and specifically the doctrine of total depravity.

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We talk about some confusion over its origins, what it is and what it is not.

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We even address some proof texts that seem to oppose this doctrine and then aim to place those within the broader narrative of Scripture and hopefully point you to where we believe

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Scripture actually does teach the total depraved nature of man. While we do all this, we seek to be charitable, accessible, and rich if this doctrine or even the five points of Calvinism are new to you.

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And then on our members podcast, we discuss those who claim to be Calvinist and yet perhaps deny total depravity in their preaching.

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Often this can confuse our assurance, what justification is and what it's not, and even sanctification.

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We hope that you find this conversation helpful. Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are

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John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and myself,

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Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota. Good to see you guys again.

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Good to be back. Good to be here. Justin, Justin, you are our cultural update today.

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What's going on in your world? Yeah, I am. Hey, Jimmy. So my cultural update today is on behalf of the three of us, really.

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It's not just about me. So by the time this podcast goes live and you, the listener, are hearing this, it will already be the month of October.

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And in the month of October, Lord willing, we do plan to be going to San Diego and Metro LA.

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We're going to be spending some time out on the West Coast, the three of us, the Theocast guys. We are going to be attending the

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Here We Still Stand conference put on by the 1517 Network. We're really excited about that.

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Thanks to Daniel Emery Price for the shout out to us and offering us the opportunity to come and be a part of everything that's going on there.

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That's October 17th through the 19th in San Diego. And so that's a Thursday through Saturday that the conference itself will be going on.

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The Theocast guys are going to be out there from Wednesday through basically like Monday morning. So we've got several events lined up out there in San Diego and also in LA and then in Lancaster, which is north of LA.

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So Wednesday night, we've got an event in San Diego. Saturday night, we're in LA. Sunday night, we're in Lancaster.

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So if you're in those areas, be planning to come meet us, hang out. We might be doing some live podcasts and some other fun stuff out there.

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And so we hope to make the most of the trip. You can head over to Theocast .org and get more details on the plans for that West Coast trip.

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Look forward to meeting some of you. Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We've already heard from a lot of you.

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We've kind of sent some feelers out there just to see if people would be interested in. A lot of you have already signed up, so it's good to see you.

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We've graciously have had several churches offer their buildings so that we could use them for the recordings and for meeting some of you.

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And we've got apparently several restaurants we're supposed to hit afterwards. Some of you have made some great recommendations.

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So excited about that. I'm just excited. I'm always excited for restaurant recommendations. I love San Diego, LA. Yeah, and I actually grew up near Lancaster, so it'd be good to go back.

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I used to play football there. So, you know, right. So, you know, we tend to we tend to accept the recommendations that come with gift cards.

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So I'm just going to throw them. Said the church planner. Yeah, I know. Let the listener understand.

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The poor church planner. That's right. That's right. So John, as a church planner, you learned to never turn down anything free.

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That's right. That's absolutely true. Yeah. Space. Communion elements.

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Anything you want to give me, I'll take it. That's right. I'll take it. We'll find. Sometimes, though. Sometimes it's a bad thing.

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Yeah, sometimes a bad thing is people trying to give away things that they just don't want to take the time to take to the dump.

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So they're like, hey, do you want this? Yeah, no, that's true. We're not talking about, you know, turning into goodwill or anything like that.

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We're talking about like really useful things. Could you use this hide -a -bed in your church plant?

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Anyway. Yeah, for the all -nighters. We got to get this moving. John, you want to introduce our topic for today?

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So we are starting a new series on Calvinism or doctrines of grace.

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For those of you who may have received this podcast as a recommendation from a friend or you were searching on Google or YouTube or your podcast app for Calvinism, this may have popped up for you.

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And the goal behind this is a simple conversation really with three friends who have all wrestled.

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At one point, we were not Reformed. We were not Calvinistic. We did not understand historically or the understanding of God's sovereignty and then have shifted to it.

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And we probably have read and heard everything you shouldn't say. That is offensive and not helpful.

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And then we've come across a lot of what has been extremely helpful to really tackle and wrap your mind around God's sovereignty and the salvation of man.

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So that's what this podcast is about. We're actually going to walk through the historic understanding of what we call

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Calvinism or the five points of Calvinism and then walk through each point. So total depravity would be the one that we cover today.

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And if you're new to the concept of Calvinism, you may not even know what the five points are.

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So we'll walk through what each five point is and why historically and theologically we hold to them.

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And then we will then try and give you some practical understandings of how this applies to things like your assurance, the way in which you evangelize, the way in which you see your hope before God, and you relate to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

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So that's the overview of the next five podcasts. Today, we're going to start with really most people, they kind of have heard all kinds of different histories of where Calvinism came from.

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And believe it or not, before I throw it over to Justin, John Calvin actually did not come up with the five points of Calvinism.

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It's kind of shocking, shocking. So Justin, why don't you give us, just so the listener that may not know, why don't you give us a brief overview of the history and really the importance behind the history of this movement?

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This will be a brief sort of drive -by treatment of the history of the five points of Calvinism.

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There will be more information in the show notes for the listener if you want to do some reading on this from a historical and theological perspective.

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But just for our understanding before we really launch into the rest of this conversation, in the year 1610, the followers of a theologian named

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Jacob Arminius wrote a manifesto, a large document known as the Remonstrance, in which they were challenging a number of the major doctrines of what was understood in that era to be historic

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Orthodox Christianity. And so in the years 1618 and 1619, a number of theologians convened at a meeting known as the

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Senate of Dort to discuss not only just the assertions of the

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Arminians in the Remonstrance, but then to rebut those and to posit good theology from their perspective.

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And so that Senate, known as the Senate of Dort, produced a number of doctrines, a number of heads of doctrine.

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And so what the five points of Calvinism are is a synopsis of the five heads of doctrine of the canons of Dort.

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And so this is well after John Calvin is dead, John, to your point that you made. Calvin died in the mid 1500s, and so this is happening over a half century after Calvin's death.

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So he certainly was not the one that articulated the five points of Calvinism. It's, again, the five heads of doctrine of the canons of Dort summarized with this acronym

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TULIP, Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited or Particular Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the

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Preservation or Perseverance of the Saints. So we're talking about total depravity today and real talk.

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There's a lot of confusion out there about what total depravity is. And so we're going to chop it up for just a few minutes about total depravity and what it isn't before we move into what it is.

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Yeah. Before we moved on from the history. So what you're saying is that this is not something, the five points is not something, a system that someone created and said, okay,

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I am now going to teach these. It's actually five points that a group of men said, we don't, we are going to challenge the church at large that these five points are not consistent with scripture.

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Is that accurate? I would even say, John, I would even say that it's a defense of orthodoxy is really what it was because you had people rising up, you know, again, after Arminius where,

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I'm just going to go and say this briefly, Arminian theology is a synthesis of post -enlightenment rationalism and historic orthodox

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Christianity. And so what these men were doing who gathered at the Senate of Dort, they were gathering to refute these new ideas, you know, these very rationalistic ideas that were asserted by the

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Arminians in their remonstrance. And so it was a defense of orthodoxy. It was not some offensive like assault upon what everybody else already thought.

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You know, it was more, again, a defense of orthodox theology. And that's where these things even came from in the first place.

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I think that's super helpful because when a lot of times when people combat this theology, they think it's created by a man.

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It's not from the Bible. And it was some guy who said, listen, this is what I think God is.

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And they assumed that the Calvinistic perspective historically was the minority perspective, but that simply just wasn't the case back in the 15th century.

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Not at all. So even in my own research, looking at different books and resources, you know,

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I wanted to get the other side of this. I wanted to see what people really thought about this.

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And I was reading a review of a book that a gentleman wrote against Reformed or Calvinistic theology.

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And in his own intro, he talks about how 500 some years ago when

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Calvin boiled down Christianity into five points. And I stopped right there and I said,

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I can't take the rest of this book seriously because this guy, this particular author, doesn't even understand where these five points came from.

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Just poor scholarship. That's right. Very poor scholarship, indeed. Yeah. And I find that unfortunately a lot of evangelicals are ignorant of church history and ignorant of historical theology.

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And we need to understand too that the term Calvinism, when it was coined, was a derogatory term.

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So it's not as though it's like, oh, John Calvin and his followers were just like proudly like putting on the badge and waving the flag around.

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That's not at all how this happens historically. The men who identified themselves, you know, with even the canons of Dort and some of the, certainly the guys who came after Calvin who embraced not only his theology, but just kind of Orthodox Christian theology were labeled as Calvinists, you know, over and against Arminians and others who were in the church at that time.

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So along with the history of being confused, I would say there's also a history of confusing point one, which is understanding the depravity of man or total depravity.

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So I think it'd be helpful at this point to, we had just explained what Calvinism historically was not.

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And now we're going to move to, okay, before we explain what total depravity is, it's going to be helpful to explain what it is not.

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This is where I think Michael Horton, professor out at Westminster Seminary in California, is really helpful.

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He has a little book called For Calvinism and under a section called

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How Total is Total Depravity, he writes this, total depravity is often misunderstood as understood in Reformation theology, it does not mean that each of us has committed every possible sin or that everyone is equally depraved in terms of outward actions.

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In other words, what I think Michael Horton is pointing out there and what historic

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Christianity would say in terms of total depravity, what we are not saying is utter depravity.

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And what I mean by that is that every single human across the globe is completely carrying out every possible sin that they can think of.

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That's exactly right, Jimmy. What we are not saying is that human beings are as bad as we could possibly be.

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We are also not saying that there is no inherent good in the human race. Because we are made in God's image, there is still inherent good in man.

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Now that image of God has been tragically marred and corrupted through the fall.

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And we're going to be talking about that more later. But we don't want to be misunderstood. I'm going to quote one other theologian.

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We're going to be giving you mostly Bible throughout this podcast episode, but it's good for us to quote some guys who have gone before us so that you don't think that this is just new with us.

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Here's another Reformed theologian named Herman Bovink speaking to this very issue. He talks about the fact that Calvin and the

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Reformed have often honored the virtues of unbelievers. And he says this, not only are many sinful deeds restrained by the sword of the government, common civil decency, public opinion, the fear of disgrace and punishment and so on, but a variety of factors such as the natural love still inherent in every person, the moral character fostered by upbringing and struggle, favorable circumstances of constitution, environment or job and so on, all these frequently lead people to practice beautiful and praiseworthy virtues.

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Note however, here's the key, that while these factors may subdue the sinful disposition of the heart, they do not eradicate it.

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So this is where the freedom of the will comes in, because someone hears, okay, wait,

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John, Jimmy, Justin, you were making it sound like that man does not have the freedom to choose, but yet every single day

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I see humanity choose to do evil or to do good, and I'm having a hard time thinking that what you're saying when you say total depravity, it means that people, unless they're a

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Christian, they don't have the capacity to choose to help the old lady across the street, so Jimmy, how would you respond to that?

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I think it's in understanding what do we mean by free will? What do we mean by will in general, particularly in terms of our conversation today, when we think about total depravity, we are not, again, we're not saying utter depravity, but in terms of our will, what we are saying in total depravity is that every single part of our personhood has been affected by the fall, has been affected by sin.

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This is what we mean by total. Historically, this has been known as the noetic effects of sin, that every part of your personhood, whether it's your emotions, your will, your mind, even your body has been affected by the fall in some point, so this is what we would understand in light of Ephesians 2,

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Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 10, where how does Paul describe the human condition pre -Christ?

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What does he say? You were dead. So it's not that you were broken, which is very popular language today.

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It's not that you needed fixing, it's you needed resurrection. That's right.

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Because you were dead, face down in the water, perhaps even better put, you are at the bottom of the ocean kind of dead, and so as we understand total depravity, again, what we are saying is that every part of us has been affected by the fall, even so when it comes to our will, when it comes to the decisions we make, we are free to make the decisions, am

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I going to like Coke or am I going to like Pepsi, but in terms of our relation to God, we are dead to the things of God.

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We are dead in our spiritual state. We still have a will that we exercise and use.

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We obviously make all kinds of choices. We're not saying that the will is not free in that sense.

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What we're saying is that the will after the fall of man is no longer good. And so again, to go back to Ephesians 2, we may pick up on this more later, but this is so incredibly helpful.

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Not only does Paul tell us that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, he tells us that we were following the course of the world.

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He tells us that we were following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, namely, we're slaves of Satan, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, so we're ruled by our passions and our desires, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and we're by nature like children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

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That's what we're saying about the will. It's not that all human free will is just obliterated in terms of nobody's making decisions and you're just a robot walking around, but what we're saying is that your will has been tragically and irrevocably corrupted, meaning that you in and of yourself are unable to change yourself and you are going to do what it is in your nature to do, and you are in fact a slave to Satan, and you're a slave even to your own desires, and you're acting in accord with all of that.

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A good way to put this is capacity. So the scripture speaks of the capacity of a human.

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When you have the capacity to choose right and wrong, relatively speaking, in other words, to steal or not to steal, but you do not have the capacity to glorify and honor

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God, or I would say you do not have the capacity to perfectly obey God. The reason we know this is that Genesis 6 -5 says, the

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Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

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That is a good, you can absolutely do a good deed with the intentions of your heart still being wicked. Another, Paul explains this very same concept in Romans chapter eight.

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He says, for the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to the law of God.

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And this is the important key. Indeed, it cannot. So he clarifies those who are in the flesh cannot please

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God. What he means is those who are dead and only listen to their bodies, meaning that the natural state they find themselves, because he then contrasts it to those who are in the spirit.

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Those who are in the spirit live by faith. And it says without faith, it's impossible to please God. So total depravity means you are dead without the capacity to be otherwise in your own power.

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To place this back within its historical context, again, one of the things that Reformation theology was pushing against in Rome was this idea that Rome was putting forth that those who do what lies within God denies not grace.

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In other words, what that really means is that those who, again, John, speaking to your conversation and your words about capacity, those who take advantage of their own capacity to use modern language, those who pick themselves up by their bootstraps,

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God is going to help. God helps those who helps themselves. And really, again, this is what the five heads of doctrine in the canons of door were pushing against, particularly this first one, that there is no pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps.

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There is no, again, if you will, cooperating with grace because again, you are dead.

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We do not need a handshake with God that I will do my part and God will do his part.

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We need total and complete resurrection. We need total and complete CPR because we are dead.

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Dead people don't shake hands. Dead people need to be brought back to life. I think Jesus speaks to that very thing,

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Jimmy. In John 6, you have people who see him feed 5 ,000 people.

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He is turning water into wine. He's doing these amazing miracles and they just absolutely cannot accept the fact that he is the

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Messiah, he is God, and that the only way to the Father is through him, so this is what he finally tells them in John 6 44, no one can come to me unless the

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Father who sent me draws him, meaning they are wandering in their depravity, they are wandering in their lack of capacity to see the

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Son of God standing before them in the flesh. You know what Jesus doesn't say? He doesn't simply say, well, if you're having a problem believing, well, then just listen to me a little bit longer.

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No, he says very clearly that you are not capable unless the

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Father does something through the Spirit, unless he draws you. This is John 3 16 as well. We always say, well, it says right there, and that's the first verse, right?

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I mean, Justin, how do you answer that? First verse, someone's going to go to it, says, well, I mean, I'm just going to say what

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Jesus says, because for whosoever believes, they're saved, so isn't that just free will right there?

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Jesus says a number of things with respect to this, even in the context of John chapter three, immediately, eight verses prior to John 3 16,

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Jesus tells Nicodemus how the new birth, how conversion even happens.

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He tells him that the wind, he compares the working of the Holy Spirit to the wind, he says, the wind blows where it wishes.

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You hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it comes from or where it's going, so it is with all those who are born of the

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Spirit, and then even later on in John's gospel, in John chapter six, Jesus will put these two things right next to each other in terms of the whosoever will piece, but then he also gives the kind of grounding underneath that.

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In John 6 37, he says, all whom the Father gives to me will come to me, right? So there's that, and then whoever comes to me,

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I will never cast out. So you have that in one verse, whosoever will may come, but then also the reason and the ground underneath that as to why they came in the first place.

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So what we're saying in this conversation about total depravity is that we, in and of ourselves, are unwilling and unable to do anything about our spiritual condition.

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So apart from the sovereign grace of God, apart from the sovereign working of the

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Holy Spirit of God to give us life in our dead condition, we will remain as we are, and practically you see people talk all the time in a way that denies this reality.

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Jimmy, you already picked up on what was being said in the medieval church. Well, in the centuries that have transpired since that time, people have said all kinds of things that sound quite similar.

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People, I think the common instinct for folks in the evangelical world is that, yeah, we're messed up and we're sinful and all those kinds of things, but we still can take a step towards God.

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We can make a move towards God. Like, yes, we need grace and we can't save ourselves based on our own merit.

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We get that. We need God's help. We need his grace and his mercy, but I can make a move toward God, which biblically from the perspective of total depravity, we're saying, no, that's actually not true.

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Jimmy, like you said, you're a dead person in your own casket and you can't open that casket.

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Dead people don't do stuff in that sense. God is the one that has to do it.

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We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith vs.

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Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

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And you can get this at theocast .org slash primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by joining our total access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

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You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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If total depravity was embraced in its fullness, if total depravity was believed upon by the masses,

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I would just make a prediction that the Christian self -help section in Barnes &

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Noble or whatever bookstore you may have, it would just be completely eradicated. Because what we would realize is that we do not change our own hearts.

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We do not change our own natural dispositions. We need an outside of us alien work in the spirit of God to do that.

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John Calvin writes this, because of the bondage of sin by which the will is held bound, it cannot move toward good, much less apply itself thereto.

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Four, a movement of this sort is the beginning of conversion to God, which in scripture is ascribed entirely to God's grace.

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Nonetheless, the will remains, with the most eager inclination disposed and hastening to sin, for man, when he gave himself over to this necessity, was not deprived of will.

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But this is key, what John Calvin says next, was not deprived of will, but of soundness of will.

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Therefore, simply to will is of man, to will ill of a corrupt nature, to will well of grace.

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And so it's important, again, to keep this conversation in context, that total depravity, as much as it points to the wickedness of man, ultimately what it points even more so to is the grace of God in the salvation of sinners.

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Great point. This is to continue on in John with the concept of the depravity of man.

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Jesus, multiple times, has to inform his disciples just about their lack of capacity, and often he is asked, so there's the

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Pharisees are standing there, they hear, I think they're actually beginning to understand what

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Jesus is saying, not that they believe, but they understand to the point where now they're angry. And so they just want to make sure, they just want to make sure, they've got to the right guy, they want to peg the right guy.

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So John 10, 24, so the Jews gathered around him and said to him, how long will you keep us in suspense?

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If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and you do not believe the works that I do in my father's name, bear witness about me.

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But you do not believe, here's the key, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me.

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I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

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Well, some will say, well, yeah, okay, they're the sheep of God because he's speaking of those who finally chose to be his followers and once they finally chose to be his followers, now they're his sheep and now they hear his voice.

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Well, he clarifies that in five chapters later, John 15, 16, speaking directly to his disciples.

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He says, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask in the father's name, he may give it to you.

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It's very obvious as you work through John's words of Jesus that he was trying to get the point across that God sovereignly has to save because men are dead and incapable of saving themselves.

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Just to continue to pile this on and still using those red letters, those words that Jesus spoke again in John's gospel.

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Yeah, I mean, yeah, obviously they're all inspired. You know, the red letters are no more inspired than the black ones.

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But here we go. John 6, again, just to be crystal clear that the point we're driving at here is our inability to do something about our natural spiritual condition.

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Jesus, in talking to his disciples, says this to them in John 6, 63, he tells them it is the spirit who gives life.

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The flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life, but there are some of you who do not believe.

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And he's just reiterating this reality that it is the Holy Spirit of God, the sovereign working of God alone that would bring someone to faith in him.

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Human beings naturally do not have that ability. And to be really clear, like lest we be misunderstood, not only do we not have the ability, we don't have the desire either.

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It's not as though there are people who are wanting, you know, in some way to come to Jesus, you know, but are being somehow hindered by this mechanical robotic limitation that God has put on us.

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Naturally, we do not want to come to Christ. So we're unable, but we're also unwilling.

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It's not what we desire. We do not naturally desire the things of God. We desire other things in accord with our fallen nature.

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Paul speaks to that too, Justin, in 1 Corinthians 1. He says in verse 21, for since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know

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God through wisdom. It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

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For the Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly or stupidity to the

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Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

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So there, it's very clear. Paul understands that the gospel when being presented is not something someone logically can say, oh yes,

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I accept that. As a matter of fact, Paul says, unless they are called, they cannot come out of their depravity.

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They can't come from death to life. They are stuck here. And this is why it is a power that is outside of themselves.

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Let's think about this practically. So you're a believer. That wouldn't be helpful.

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That wouldn't be helpful. Right. Why would we ever want to be practical, Jimmy? Practical. Practical.

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Practical. Practical. Practical. We're talking about practical. We're talking about the Bible. Not a game. Not the

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Bible. Not the Bible. Practical. So, I mean, here's the thing. Here's the thing.

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Think about the unbeliever in your life. Let's say you are listening. You're half an hour into this conversation with us.

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You're sitting at the table with us. Think about the unbeliever in your life. How do you pray for their salvation?

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What do you ask God to do? Here's what you're probably not praying. And if you are, maybe we need to continue this conversation elsewhere.

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But here is most likely what you are not praying. Dear Lord, I pray that my friend, co -worker, father, brother, sister, whoever, naturally within themselves comes to a saving decision in Christ.

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You're probably not praying that. In fact, you are actually probably praying as a

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Galvanist that you are asking God to do a supernatural work in their heart to bring them to Christ.

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And again, just to keep piling on the scriptures that attest to this, Romans 3, where Paul is quoting various Old Testament passages.

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Romans 3 .10, as it is written, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands.

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No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless.

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No one does good, not even one. And this is where, and it's probably coming to the end of its time,

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Lord willing, but this is why the seeker -sensitive movement is just so silly.

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Because not only is it a world of problems in terms of its strategy and how they reach people, but rather it's just anti -scriptural.

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You can't be seeker -sensitive and be jiving with Romans 3 at the same time.

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Because Romans 3 says what? Well, no one seeks God. Apart from the supernatural work of the

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Holy Spirit upon the hard and obstinate human heart, no one is seeking after God.

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We're told in Scripture that our hearts naturally are like stone and that the Lord has to do a work in replacing those.

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He describes that most poignantly in Ezekiel 36 through the prophet there. Jeremiah 17 .9,

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another one of the prophets in the Old Testament, in these words describes our heart.

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The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? Answer, nobody, because that's how deep the depravity is.

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We don't even understand our own hearts and their own wickedness. I mean, picking up, Jimmy, you referenced

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Romans 3. Romans 1, at the end of that chapter, Paul describes the fact that God has not only given us over to our own lusts and passions and desires, he's also given us over to a debased mind to do what ought not be done.

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Then he names all of these things that describe the human race and the things that we do naturally, that we are full of envy and murder and strife, deceit, maliciousness, all of these things.

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He goes on and on and on. One way I would illustrate this, guys, and you can pick up on this maybe and chew this up a little bit, if you want a practical apologetic for total depravity, look at young children.

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I mean, all three of us on the mic are dads, and maybe you don't have kids of your own, but you're at least around children on a semi -regular basis, maybe in your local church or whatever, if you're listening to this.

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Well, just observe kids. None of us as dads have ever had to teach our children to do wrong.

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Doing wrong is as natural as breathing for us as children of Adam. It's the things that are righteous, upright, good, and virtuous that we have to train our children in.

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So we've never had to look at our kids and tell them to covet what their sibling has.

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We've never once had to look to our children and tell them to be selfish or tell them to just blow up in anger when things don't go their way.

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That comes naturally. We have to teach them love and joy, patience, kindness, self -control, all of those kinds of things, because that does not come naturally for them.

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This is something we referenced, that sin is a state versus sin is a condition. We do not believe that it's a condition.

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As the famous preacher of revivalism would teach,

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Mr. Finney, that basically your decision to sin was based upon your decision to sin.

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Scripture, Paul tells us specifically that every single human being is born under Adam, meaning that the nature that has fallen, the sinful nature, that desire to sin, you're born with.

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This is in Psalms 51, where David says,

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In sin did my mother conceive me. Psalm 51 .5. That's right, Psalm 51 .5.

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Then Paul says in Romans that we are all born under Adam, and therefore it's part of our nature.

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Therefore, you don't gain sinful—let me put it this way, going back to Paul and Ephesians.

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You are born underneath the wrath of God. You don't become underneath the wrath of God once you sin.

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Just to reiterate what you're saying, John, in John's gospel, John 3 .36, John will talk about the wrath of God remaining on those who do not believe in Jesus.

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Even in John 3, earlier in the chapter, right after John 3 .16, it's like whoever does not believe in the

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Son is condemned already. It's quite clear that we are born into a state of not only being under the wrath of God, we're born into a state of condemnation, corruption, and real guilt.

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We're not born innocent. We are born guilty. That's the testimony of the Scripture universally through all 66 books.

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This is why, guys, I would argue that having this sort of framework, having this sort of reformation, reformed theological framework of Scripture is so helpful.

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Because even as you journey throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, where you see these places where God, through His prophets and God, through His pastors, is calling people to change.

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However, a divine command does not imply ability. Does that make sense?

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A divine command does not imply that the person is able to do so, because I can hear the objections.

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Well, then why would God do this? Why would God ask us to do this? Circumcise your heart, things like that.

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But even take circumcision, for example. Look at the physical act of circumcision in the

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Old Testament. It's an eight -day -old infant. An eight -day -old infant cannot circumcise himself.

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He needs somebody outside of himself to do it, which points ultimately to the

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Spirit having to circumcise the foreskin of our hearts to draw us unto

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Christ. And so just because we see the command there, we have to take in the broad narrative of Scripture that ultimately, as Calvin says, as Horton says, as Bobbing says, as all of Scripture points to, we need something alien.

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We need something outside of ourselves to change our hearts, because in and of ourselves, we do not have this ability to do so.

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The design of the gospel is that very truth, that if you see God's law and the absolute inability of man, the gospel comes in and says, well, this is the only hope.

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I have used this illustration in the past. If I were to walk up to you, Jimmy, and I know how much money in general that you make, and I say, you need a house.

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Your family doesn't have a house. Nothing, because I'm a church planter. Yeah, I do know that. I'm a church planter.

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I'd say, okay, Jimmy, you need a house. I have a house. Don't muzzle the ox, bro. And my house that is for sale,

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I'm offering it to you. You can buy it. It's available to you right now for $400 billion. Okay?

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$400 billion, it's yours. Now, let me ask you a question, Jimmy. Is that a legitimate offer? I mean, it's an offer.

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Yeah, it's a legitimate offer. If you come up with $400 billion, you can buy my house.

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Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. And the question is, can Jimmy, at this moment in time, right now, the offer is good for you right now.

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Just like, for instance, you have one life and then you die. You don't have multiple lifetimes to try out to be perfect. You have one lifetime.

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So right now, here's the offer. And so people say, well, that's ridiculous. He can't come up with that money. That is the point of the law, is that you look at it and say, that is ridiculous.

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And then Jesus comes in and says, okay, I'll pay for it. If you believe in me and you trust in me, I'll pay for it. And so this is where it's helpful.

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Guys, I want to change it a little bit, a different direction real quick. And Justin, if I'm taking a direction you don't want to go, you can change it.

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Did you have something you wanted to add on that? Yeah, I just really quickly. And then I think it's good for us to go in a different direction too.

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On this issue of God commanding things that we are unable to do in our own strength, it happens obviously all throughout

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Scripture. Augustine is helpful with maybe something that he said famously where he said,

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Lord God, commandeth what thou will and grant what thou commandeth. So God does command these various things for us to do and to believe and to trust and so on.

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We don't have the ability to do it, but then God is the one who gives us that ability.

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It's just like John 11 and the resurrection of Lazarus, when Jesus speaks to dead man

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Lazarus in the tomb and he says, Lazarus, come out. Well, what can dead Lazarus do?

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The answer to that is nothing. He's dead. And so the one, Jesus, who gave the command, come out, is the one who gave the life in order for Lazarus to respond.

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So that's all we're saying in this whole conversation about God commanding us to do things and believe things that we can't do by ourselves.

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That's all I wanted to say. John, go ahead and take it in a different direction. I think just another passage that is often used, and I know probably someone has in the back of their mind, so I thought it'd be helpful just to address common passages.

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We have an entire podcast series that we call Dazed and Confused where we handle these types of passages. So stay tuned for that.

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I think last week was the Dazed and Confused. Revelation 3 .20, gentlemen, very famously,

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Jesus says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me.

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So is that not an offer where Jesus is saying, If you are willing to open up your heart to me, then

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I will come in. And so it is the decision of the person to open up their heart to God. Is that what

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John is referencing Jesus' words in Revelation 3 .20? I want to turn to the text, but I'm just going to answer it on a biblical level.

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You can't take one verse in isolation and lob it against the rest of the biblical witness.

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The Scripture is not schizophrenic in terms of contradicting itself. What I'm going to say is, and I'll answer it real quickly.

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I'm happy to say a few things too. Jesus is speaking about a church who has pushed him out.

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A church which sounds very familiar today. A church that should be in communion with Christ, in common union.

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Where everyone who is in Christ, and he is speaking to this church that they are so far from the truth of the gospel that he is outside the church.

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That he is no longer in communion with this body of believers. It is almost one of those far side comedy pictures where Jesus is knocking on his own home door.

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Hello, this is actually my house, and I'm supposed to be inside. If you open the door,

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I'll actually come back into my own home. He is not speaking of the believer's heart, saying I'd like to come and live in your heart.

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He is talking about how the church has actually abandoned Jesus. Even if we were talking about this idea from the perspective of the individual, in terms of choosing to believe in Jesus.

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People make decisions to follow Jesus every day. In one sense, the three of us this morning as we got up, and we're getting ready for this podcast, and going about our mornings and things, we are making a decision at some level each day of our lives to follow

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Christ. The question is not do you make a choice? The question is why do you choose what you choose? There's something underneath our choosing of Jesus that the

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Scripture speaks to quite clearly. When we take verses out of context and isolate them, and then say, see, he's saying clearly, implying here that we can make a choice.

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We're like, yeah, we haven't said that you can't make a choice. We're just saying that you by yourself and your own strength will not choose

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Christ. We always hear this is the 500 -year -old debate. If it had been settled, people would not still be debating it.

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My encouragement to you, if you still hold that perspective, that this is just a perspective. There's a freewill perspective, and there is a

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Reformed or Calvinistic perspective. My encouragement to you would be to go to our resource page that's connected to this podcast and look at all the passages that we put there.

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Read them for yourself. There's some books that are there that we will also make available. Before I close it down, though,

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I think Justin had one more thing for us. Well, I realize that we're out of time, and I just want to make a brief statement that our contemplation of our depravity is not meant to cause us to just despair in total.

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I mean, it is to cause us to despair in ourselves and our own ability, but it is actually to drive us.

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This contemplation of how wrecked we are drives us to the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

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It actually makes the gospel more clear, and it makes the work of God not only more clear, but it makes it and it demonstrates it to be more excellent and wonderful.

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I just want to at least say that and acknowledge that, and maybe we'll get to that more in the members' podcast. But lest the hearer misunderstand us to just be all doom and gloom here, it actually drives us to contemplate the depths of the mercy and grace of God.

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That's good. I think something I want to throw out, and perhaps we will offer this as the carrot on the stick for the members' podcast.

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So if you're not a member, come check us out. But something I would like to perhaps discuss is, well, what happens when we deny this in preaching?

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What happens if our church denies this? Sure. Or even, what about this?

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What happens when we, with our mouths, acknowledge total depravity, and yet preach in such a way where we don't really acknowledge it, or we don't really affirm and believe it?

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I think that's the bigger problem, Jimmy, is when people acknowledge this truth, they give assent to it.

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They say, hey, I'm a Calvinist or whatever, but then functionally they deny it. I think we absolutely, in the members' area, will talk about that.

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All the time. I will say for all three of us, if you do not understand this foundational doctrine, which is point one, total depravity, the rest of them will not work for you.

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They will not make any logical sense. They all hang together. But once you embrace total depravity, the next podcast, which is

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Unconditional Election, becomes that moment of assurance that Justin is speaking of, where you look to the sovereignty of God who saves you, who holds you and keeps you, and you find an absolute haven of rest because your standing before God is never based upon your performance or your will or your desires, thankfully.

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And so stay tuned. Please come back next week. But as they said, we are not done. We have another 20 minutes to go with lots more thoughts.

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So if you would like to join us, it's called Total Access. It's our membership podcast, and you can find that at theocast .org.

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And we'd love to see you over there. Please go check out our show notes. It's in your podcast app or on our website.

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And we have lots of links to books we'd recommend and verses that we have used in quotes. So we will see you next week.