Spiritual Inability and Christ’s ability

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry, my name is Mike Abenroth. I think my voice has gotten deeper over the years. Or maybe it's all the camel non-filters. The smoker's cough. No, I don't smoke camels.

When I was a kid, my friend's dad worked for whatever company owned cool cigarettes, K-O-O-L, menthol. And his dad had little four-packs for samples, because in those days you'd just hand out sample cigarettes to get people hooked,.

Get the cool menthol taste.

It was bad to have a friend like that. I remember one kid, we were young, his name was Mark. He came over once and he showed me how he could smoke matches. So he would get a match, the old style wooden match, with the red tip with the white dot on the very tip of it to strike.

I don't know if it was phosphorus or what is at the end of that. As a matter of fact, I now have my computer by me. I normally don't. I just say white tip end of match.

What is that?

What is a match head made out of? Sulfur-based matches appeared in the 1200s, and a way to strike them using phosphorus-soaked paper was devised in the 1600s. Modern matches date to 1827, when English chemist John Walker combined chemicals that would ignite when the match was drawn on sandpaper.

His matches contained antinomy trisulfide, but soon after this was replaced by phosphorus sulfide. Today you have your choice of regular or safety matches. They both take advantage of phosphorus compounds, but safety matches have to be drawn on a special surface to ignite.

Strike anywhere matches, the heads contain potassium chlorate, which is an oxidizing agent. All right, there you have it. Mike Abenroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. What in the world does that have to do with anything?

I don't know.

That's a good question. That's a really good question. I don't know how I got onto that, but we're just thinking about, oh, matches, my friend. So he would strike the match, the wooden match, blow it out, and then quickly put the head of the match in his mouth, and there would be smoke into his mouth, and then he would blow it out like he was smoking.

That's what we did in Nebraska. Crew cut kids, I can just see kids, you know, they've got their tough skin jeans on, they've got their Converse All-Stars, they've got some bratty old belt, crew cut, and like a little pocket knife, and then that kind of boy sweat, that 10-year-old boy sweat on the forehead.

We had no phones. We had nothing.

We had a ball.

We had BB guns and that type of thing. All right, on No Compromise Radio Ministry today, I'd like to talk to you about salvation and how it is God's work. You're like, oh, I already know all that. Give me something new.

Here's what I mean. When I was reading Jesus' healing on the Sabbath, and he said to the man with the withered right hand, when he looked around at the Pharisees and false teachers with anger grieved at the hardness of their heart, two emotions there shown by the God-man, anger and grief, he said to the man, stretch out his hand, and he stretched it out and his hand was restored.

And that just made me say to myself, Jesus is commanding what is physically impossible for that man. He's commanding the impossible. Stretch out your hand. He had no ability to stretch out his hand. He was unable to stretch out his hand.

He had no power to stretch out his hand. He probably didn't even have the muscles in his hand to stretch out his withered hand because they're all atrophied.

They're all dried up.

Think of a grape and then think of a raisin. That's the idea of this man's hand. It was his right hand. Of course, most people were right-handed back in those days, and it's hard to work. And here's this man who can't work, and the Pharisees do not want to show compassion and mercy.

But that's exactly what Matthew 12 states Jesus saying about mercy and compassion from God, of course, even on the Sabbath. Commanding the impossible. Stretch out your hand. And while the main point of the passage doesn't teach this, it does remind me, and of course, it in a small way reflects the truth from the lesser to the greater.

When God says believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, are people able to do it? Can people do it? Left to themselves, their own human ability, do they have such? How do people believe? God's commanding the impossible.

Believe. People are dead. The mind is set on flesh and it's hostile to God. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Ephesians 2, depravity. Ephesians 2, dead in trespasses and sins. Ephesians 2, course of the world, course of the power of the air.

Enemies of God. There's no ability of man. If man could save himself, then maybe Jesus just comes down and says all these other prophets, you know, they had sin in their lives and so maybe you don't want to believe them and listen to them.

Heed them, but I don't have any sin and therefore I want you to listen to me. I am the prophet. But there's more than that because Jesus has to die as a substantiary lamb. Galatians 2, Jesus died for no reason.

If you could save yourself, if all you needed was education, consecration, dedication, emancipation, whatever the ation is. Emancipation isn't a good one because we didn't need emancipation because we were slaves to sin.

But I was just trying to think of words. I usually tell you what I'm drinking and today it is purified drinking water with flavor enhancing minerals. So we've come to the point in life where we can't have even water that's just water.

Water. It has to be water that is flavored. And I don't mean like seltzer water or flavored water or Hint, that brand. This is ingredients. Purified water, calcium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, anthrax.

And it was purified by reverse osmosis. My dad would say, clean your room, son. And then I went for a while and he said, it's not going to get cleaned by osmosis. And maybe I should have said to my dad, you mean reverse osmosis, dad, or just osmosis?

You know what osmosis was.

He just said it all the time.

I just figured out you just clean your room. Osmosis means clean your room. You tough skin gene, bad belt, converse all-star, crew cut, sweaty head boy. Can you imagine I get paid to do this show?

Not.

But anyway, it is what it is. Vance Havner, which he was no card-carrying, five-point Calvinist, he said, what man needs, what unbelieving man needs is not a boost from below, but to be born from above.

That's true. And so my point is this, as Hebrews would say, the point in what I'm saying is this, Hebrews 8 .1. God commands the impossible. Here, physically, Jesus commands the man to stretch out his hand, and he couldn't do it.

He didn't even think he could do it. I mean, when God calls us to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and if you want, repent and believe, we probably think we can. We probably have a view about ourselves that's higher than what it should be.

But we can't do it. The inability of man, the depravity of man, total depravity means all areas of our lives are depraved. So we can make decisions, rational decisions, volitional decisions, but no decision spiritually to somehow rectify our situation.

Remember the old heretic Pelagius? Pelagius would say, if God says stretch out your hand, you're able to do it. If God said pick up your pallet and walk, then you'd have the ability to do it. Those are both physical examples.

The spiritual example is, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. If he said, here's an obligation to do that, repent and believe, then you have the ability to perform it. So they're denying total depravity, total inability, spiritual impotency.

Augustine, on the other hand, in the same time frame, said God sometimes tells us to do things that we might have to ask him for help. Of course, if you think about this theologically, God gives Adam the law and Adam's able to obey the law.

And after the fall of Adam, the law doesn't change and God's requirement for people to obey doesn't change. So you're going to need to have the last Adam so you can obey. So just because the fall happened, a man cannot respond and he's unable to do anything spiritually to bring himself into good graces and to God.

God didn't change anything. There's a real depravity, a real law. B .B. Warfield said, so here's a man who is hopelessly incapable of doing the things that Jesus Christ asked him to do. I think if I had been there, I would have said, well, that's the one thing I cannot do, Lord, and I might not have gotten healed.

B .B. is not helping me there. I think he goes on to say,.

Oh, you know what?

I think that was S. Lewis Johnson who said that. I think I'm mistaken. I think Warfield said this because that didn't sound like Warfield to me. Did it to you? I don't think so. I think it sounded like somebody else.

Here's what Warfield said. As a matter of fact, I'm just going to say up here in my notes,.

S .L .J.

Warfield. Benjamin Breckenfield Warfield. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, to be more precise. Breckenfield. We point out that the doctrine of inability does not affirm that we cannot believe, but only that we cannot believe in our own strength.

We do not say when a man is unable to do the will of God, when we say that he is guilty of inability, or that when he is afflicted with inability, we do not say thereby that he cannot believe. We say that he cannot believe in his own strength.

That much more sounds like B .B. Warfield. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield. You can go to Princeton Seminary even today and see the house that Benjamin Breckenfield, Breckenridge Warfield lived in, and you can go over to the cemetery and see his tombstone.

I appreciated Warfield because he had a servant's heart when it comes to his wife and her sickness and how he served her.

What a man.

Matter of fact, it makes me think of Wayne Grudem, who leaves a prominent place of teaching, goes to a smaller school at the time, which is bigger now, Phoenix Seminary, because I believe his wife needed to have a more arid, dry place to live in, in the desert.

And while I have some big disagreements with Wayne Grudem, I think that's manly and godly and epitomizes what the Bible says about husbands love your wife as Christ loved the church. And maybe it could be said that my theology is better than Wayne Grudem's, but his love is greater than mine.

And for that, I would take second place. See? Aren't we nice on No Compromise Radio? We are kind. We are nice. It is. God has to do the working. But man, the man did stretch out his hand, right? Did you stretch out your hand?

Uh, duh. I stretched out my hand. He healed me. I stretched out my hand. Uh, did you do it by yourself? Did you do it of your own power? Could you have done it any time you wanted, but you just decided to do it now?

No. I've been trying to stretch out my hand day after day after day after day.

But I stretched it out today.

I don't know what happened, but Jesus gave me the ability to stretch out my hand. He gave me power. He gave me the help. I don't know how it transferred over. I don't know what happened. I don't know how things are damaged organically and they're completely healed.

And then muscles, too, that were just, you know, if you just heal the problem, what about the muscles? They haven't been used for so long. How do they just come back to regular muscles exactly like my left hand, which would be all the muscles working?

He can't do it, but he did it. And that's just a good picture of salvation. We can't do it. But do we? Okay. Did you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Yes, you did. God didn't believe for you. Satan didn't believe for you.

CNN didn't believe for you. But did you do it of your own power? That's the question. Yay. Now we're getting it. Now we're understanding. Now you get it. Of course God did the saving. Of course we responded with faith.

And of course we believed by the power of God. Do we have a will? Yeah, it's tied to our nature. When our nature's changed, we're able to do certain things. God is the cause. We're not the cause. Create in me a clean heart, O God.

We don't tell you to make yourself clean before God, and then he might save you. There's responsibility for people to stretch out their hand, this man. And there's ability. He didn't have the ability.

But God did the work. Unbelievers are responsible to love God, love neighbor, keep all their commands. They don't have the ability to do it. This is just similar to Jesus cries out with a loud voice and said, Lazarus, come forth.

And he who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. And Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go. And in some sense, this is the foolishness of preaching.

We're preaching when we're preaching to unbelievers, and we're telling them to do things they can't do. They can't even bear themselves again. You must be born again. It's just a fact, and they can't do it.

If they will not believe, they will stand before God, and they're not going to say, You didn't elect me. You didn't give me power. They will have to bite their tongue and say, I disobeyed. We believe that God saves spiritually dead, hardened, polluted rebels who are unable to come to Christ, Romans 6, excuse me, John 6, until he brings them.

He brings them to the Father. We're not Pelagians. We're not saying, you know what? Adam was a bad example. Don't follow his example. Oh, we followed his example. We're not Arminians. You know, man is in a state of sin, and there's some type of prevenient or preceding grace to all, and now your own will decides to, with free choice, receive or reject.

We believe that we've been so affected by sin. We can't choose good or evil. We can't choose God. We have no initiative. We have no ability. We have no resources to receive Christ Jesus by faith as he's proclaimed to us as the sin bearer and the risen Savior victorious and the king that's going to return soon.

God has to do the work, and we believe that what John Bunyan said is true. The Savior's eternal words to all sinners are come and be welcome. Pretty good, huh? I don't mean my message. I just mean these truths.

Faith unites us, but even the faith is a gift. Remember? Yes, so stretch out your hand. Okay, let's put it this way. When you're preaching the gospel to unbelievers, you're evangelizing your child, your friend, your husband.

You're telling him or her to do things that they can't do, but you're required to preach the gospel and tell them what the response is,.

Right, to talk about the law,.

Show them their sin, give them the remedy, tell them to believe, gospel imperative, believe, repent and believe, gospel imperatives, but you know they can't do anything until the Lord works, and good news is he regularly works.

If I could put it this way, he loves to work in people's hearts who are unbelievers as they hear the gospel. Regularly, often, promiscuously, he saves people. Now sometimes he doesn't save our loved ones as fast as we want them to be saved yesterday, and I don't blame you, but he regularly saves, and if he doesn't save, he gives you the mercy and grace to live day by day and even have a good relationship with your spouse even if they're not a Christian.

That can happen. You can certainly have joy even if your spouse is a Christian. Even if it's hard in your marriage to an unbeliever, you can still have joy because joy comes from not circumstances but comes from the Lord.

We feel sin as unbelievers as the Spirit lets us understand that, and he, the Spirit, has us feel this sense of heavy laden burden when we begin to have thoughts of hell and heaven and sin and death and the afterlife and all these other things.

That's just all the mercy of God working in our lives. Sirs, what must I do to be saved? Answer, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, but I'm telling you, here's the point, that you just didn't believe all by yourself.

So therefore, dear Christian, you have to be thankful. I know you are. You're a listener to No Compromise Radio Ministry, duplex gratia radio, and you say to yourself, oh, I should be reminded again of my salvation.

Grace alone. I've been graced. It's amazing grace. I know what I was, I know what I am, I know where I'm going, and God, thank you for being gracious. Thank you for even being gracious to me, a Christian who sins.

Do you sin, Christian? Of course you do. And so we want to run from it and repent and not wallow in it, not think we're better than other people. That's one of the reasons I think we're not immediately glorified.

Oh, I don't know if that would really fit in there. I mean, that's a good question. Why does God not immediately glorify us when we believe? Oh, he has all his purposes. I mean, one is we are to preach the gospel and Romans 10, and beautiful the feet of those who proclaim good news so that we might depend on the Lord, trust in him.

I think those are good. I don't know, what would Churton say about that? I've been reading through Churton, volume one, Lentic theology. I'm page 350-ish, but that's like 600 for the first volume, so 1 ,800 pages.

Even if I read 10 pages a day, that's, how many days is that? Well, 1 ,800 divided by 10 is 180. So could I read that in six months? Wow, that'd be pretty good, but some of this stuff is so intense. I have to go slowly.

Isaiah 50, verse four, thinking about rest from yesterday's show, the Lord has given me the tongue of disciples that I may know how to sustain the weary one.

With a word.

He awakens me, morning by morning, he awakens my ear to listen as a disciple, sustaining the weary with a word. Maybe like te telestai, one word. It is finished in English, three words. Remember, Christian, you didn't earn your salvation, and you don't keep your salvation, right?

Sometimes I think we think we do. We listen to these preachers, and you gotta have enough works to measure up, right? You have enough works to measure up to actually prove you're saved. The Christian life is not always up, up, up, up, up in a chart graph that's like California real estate or the stock market these days, just shooting up.

42 ,000, I think it hit yesterday.

No.

Sadly for us, but it's true, there are ups and downs. The ups aren't sad, but the downs are. And one day we will be glorified, but we have to be careful how we work through all that. Well, I'm just rambling now.

Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. What else do I want to say? Just a few house cleaning things that I would say, and that is American Gospel has the new Cancer series. Cancer's Not Your Shepherd.

It ends up in intro and then 16 parts, each about seven to 10 minutes. We do have books, some no-code books on Amazon. If you want more than 10 of them, three here, four here, three here, or 10 of one, email me, Mike, at No Compromise Radio, because I can get you 40 off drop ship to your house.

It takes two weeks, though. If you need them overnight, that's Amazon. You've got to pay full price. Don't forget the pactum. My brother and Mike Grimes do that. I will be going to Oman, Nebraska, Lord willing.

Two years ago, three years ago, I was supposed to go, didn't go. Last year, and did I go two years ago?

I don't know.

Maybe I didn't. Maybe I was still sick, recovering. Last year, I went to the pactum conference, and it was D .G. Hart, Michael Beck, Pat, and myself, maybe one other person, can't remember. And then this year, it's Fesco and Van Droenen and the two Abendroths.

And I prefer not to get the Abendroth brothers involved. And so that's coming up. I think there's a few seats left, October 9th, 10th, 11th, somewhere in there, Omaha Bible Church. I'm excited. My daughter's going to be there.

My other daughter's going to be there. I think my son's going to be there. And it'll be a mini Abendroth reunion. My sister and her husband and daughter live near Nebraska, and so that should be really fun.

So I think that's it for my announcements. We've got some other ideas for No Compromise Radio, so you can pray for me. My health is a little bit better, so thank you for praying. And as Pink says in his Attributes of God book, in his Mercy of God section, unto his own, God is the father of mercies.

When all thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul surveys, transported with the view I'm lost, in wonder, love, and praise. Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry.