(The Markstein) - Part 1, The Doctrine of Salvation — Dean Taylor

Okay, everyone, I'd like to thank you again for coming, and we've had an awesome morning. We're thanking the Lord for it, and we're now blessed to have Brother Dean here from Minnesota, who's now working for PENG, right?

Yeah. PENG is an organization that the conservative Mennonites use as a charity group that they go out all over the world helping people, and a lot of those conservative Anabaptist groups donate money.

In fact, the Hutterites have several drop-off points. There's one at Hodgeville where if you ever get tired of your dresses and whatever, you can drop it off there, and it goes to CAM, and those people appreciate it.

They love stuff that comes from Hodgeville. Well, anyway, Dean has offered to give us his time, and we really appreciate that because he only had today, actually. So we're very fortunate to have him, and we'll just have him tell us what he's planning to cover today and how it can help us to understand our culture better and also to appreciate what we have.

We must not forget, and I believe the Lord has preserved the Hutterites for over 400 years, and I do not believe that it's by accident. There's a reason for it, and we need to learn what that reason is and live up to it.

So thank you again for coming.

Thank you, Robert, very much. I do apologize. I have a lot of material to cover. It's really a mistake to give this much in one day, but I'm three weeks from planning on heading to Orientation with Christian Aid Ministry and then CAM and then head over to Lesbos Island working with the Syrian refugees that are coming there and setting up the discipleship school there.

And so I... Brother, Jake Fenton has been trying to do this for almost two years, and I've been trying to get it together with him, and it's not something... I have lots of different requests for something like this, and I'm like, okay, but this was something I really wanted to do.

And so even though we're in the midst of packing and doing these types of things, I really felt I wanted to come here. It is being recorded, so I'm going to be covering too much. I will admit, I apologized from the beginning.

Too much material that I'll be giving but will be recorded so you can be able to look back on some of those and review this. I tremble over a little bit of how I'm presenting this because I can be easily misunderstood.

My goal in you is actually to encourage you, and to encourage you that you have something very precious and very beautiful that the whole world needs. And so it can be said that, can we make too much of our heritage?

Can we praise it and make an idol of it? Yes, you absolutely can, and that is a serious fear. I think it is something to be concerned about. But on the other hand, I honestly do believe that there is something that God has prepared you for, God has preserved you for throughout these generations as we come into this next century with all the different things and the things that we have in front of us.

I do believe that you have been preserved for a reason. And some of the things that I'm going to cover, I'm hoping to cover three topics if we can today. They're both a little over an hour. The three topics are salvation, two kingdoms, and missions.

And all of those I would like to bring out of your Confession of Faith. I'm going to be quoting from the Confessions of Faith, the version, the Herald Press version translated in 1995. And so I'll try to make the coordination of these things.

In the salvation sermon, which will be the first, I'm going to try to show some differences that I consider to be very important with modern American Christianity, Evangelicalism. And that I honestly believe what you have in here is beautiful.

It's deep. It's rich. And to trade this for modern American Christianity would be to show. It would be to show. And so I really encourage you to hope to do that. But again, if there's anything, if there's anything that I hope to do in these three messages is to lift up Jesus Christ.

And I believe that is the theology that I see in Presser. That is the theology of why you exist today. And I know everybody says that, but I truly believe there's a theology of Christ followers, of Christ within us even, we'll get into, that I think is very important.

So, let's start out with a word of prayer. It's kind of tight here, so maybe we'll just pray it. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you, O God, for your mercy. I thank you, O God, that you have preserved your seed.

You have put your word into the hearts of men and women throughout these centuries. And dear Heavenly Father, as we come to this next generation and all the tests and trials that we have before us, I pray, O God, that you would truly just put your very presence here again.

Bring us a fear of God amongst us. Bring us, O Lord, appreciation to the word. And Father, I pray that you would be with my words. Let anything that I say out of just ignorance, out of my own ambition or whatever it is, fall to the ground and only let you let stand what you want to be said.

So, God, I pray for your grace, your mercy on all of us. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Okay, this is an interesting picture. This picture is Vitelligios, Romania, all events in the Chronicles. And this is where about almost every Hutterite today could trace their heritage into this very spot.

It ends up being during the golden years, the king of Transylvania went to the Hutterites and said, we want you to come down and bring some, your community down here in Hungary. And they're like, it's a trap, we're not doing it.

So, the representatives of the king said, well, our lord doesn't take no for an answer. So he kidnapped like a hundred and something from one community, 80 from the other, and dragged them down to here.

And put them in jail for a while, but then released them and they started a community. But interesting, years and years and years later after persecution, the plague, famine, compromise, this spot became the last remaining community.

It got down to 19 Hutterites left on earth around the year 1720s and 30s. A new revival broke out. People came into the, after they were kicked out of Germany, Austria, excuse me, and came into Romania and were said, we'll give you some property.

We'll let you have a farm out here, but you just need to do one thing. You must swear allegiance to Maria Teresa. Can't do this, we've had a revival in Jesus Christ. Where can I believe Jesus? So they couldn't do it.

And they went and were doing odd jobs and looking at everything. And they bumped into a works man, bumped into a whip girl, and asked for odd jobs that they could do. And they ended up discovering that the remnant of the Hutterites started looking through their old documents and saying, this is incredible.

Why aren't you doing this? And they said, well, it's been hard, you know, and all those different things. Well, the end of the revival got started back again. They began evangelizing again, began taking this seriously until it grew to what we have today.

It's cutting through a lot. But notice the passage here by Hebrews. It's the very last verse in the heroes, you know, of faith in Hebrews 11. A brother at church once preached this and it really hit me.

It says, God having provided something better for us, listen to this last part, that they, without us, should not be made perfect. What it means is that we, continuing faithful, we continuing on with this, they're not complete without you.

That's what it means. All right, so we talked about this for two years. Jake Fetto, we've been talking about this and we came up with the term Markstein. Sorry for my German, brother. But Markstein is what we have.

And this is the passage that we would like to look at. Proverbs 22, 28 says, remove not the ancient landmarks which thy fathers have set. Again, I really don't want to try to lift up anything other than Jesus Christ.

But God did something in a living group of people. And we, they, without us, are not complete. I believe that God did this for a reason. And that these ancient landmarks, these ancient Marksteins that were placed, are important every now and then for us to look at these.

Another way that this meeting got started was, I do these with several other brothers, Anabaptists, identity conferences. We get German Baptists, Amish, conservative Mennonites and things, we meet together.

And it's a nice environment where we're not trying to convert each other or whatever, but to appreciate and to encourage. To strengthen that which remains. And I just thought, again, it was a shame that if we don't also bring this into the picture.

So that's kind of what we're doing. Why I'm looking into the statement of faith a lot today in every topic, it's for this. Let's remember what this Markstein was and why they did some of the things that they did and how they acted like that.

Okay, so I was going to put this as the last sermon, but I thought, you know, we should put the cart before the horse. Let's talk about salvation. It's the most theologically based one out of all of them.

So if it gets a little bit theological, stay with me and we'll get to some more practical things with missions in two kingdoms. But this one is incredibly important. It's incredibly important and I believe it really shaped the revival and when you look at salvation.

All right, a little, oh, those are my disclaimers. Yeah, I don't want to lift up a denomination. Even, you know, the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, he rebukes the church for, some say they're Apollos and some say they're Paul.

But he also says some say they're of Christ. You can be contentious in any, you know, I'm just a Christian and I use the term Anabaptist. You'll hear me use that term a lot. I don't do it to lift up any denominations.

As a matter of fact, there's not a denomination, a church of go join the Anabaptists. It's more of a way you interpret the scripture. It's a fancy word called a hermeneutic, which means a Bible interpretation.

And that's what you'll see in your statement of faith. And that's why, but popularly, what you're getting from the radios, what you're getting from modern American Christianity is not what you read in here.

And I'd like to talk about some of those differences right from the beginning here. Okay, so, as you know, some of you know my testimony. My wife and I were in the military. This is us back in probably 1989 or so, in Germany.

And this is us just a few years ago, as we went back with Anabaptist Heritage Tour. We found the same place. And God has given us quite a journey through those times. Now we're about to head to Greece.

This is our family. I have one, of course, older son that's also... And we're about to head to Greece, Lord willing. And there's still many things, pray for us, still many obstacles to get there. But it's very much of a blessing, working with the refugees there.

So I grew up as a modern American Christian. I read white and blue, joined the army. And it shaped me. I was always very patriotic. I'll get more into this in the two kingdoms. But I embraced the army.

I enjoyed that. And I liked the idea of being a soldier in the United States Army. It was... It meant something to me. My wife also ended up joining the army. I sent her off to basic training. And she came back.

And both of us changed the role also. But this scene changed me. Anybody know what this is? That's the Berlin Wall of 1989. November. I was there a year earlier with my mother. And as we were there, it was very intimidating with the Russians and the East Germans and all that type of a thing.

And with all the machine guns. And they're the enemy. And you get all these warnings and everything. But here now in the midst of this incredible scene, I'm standing there. And everybody's just knocking holes in this wall.

And this East German or economist, looks like maybe he's an East German guard, puts his hand through and says, Bruder, Frieden. And after I left that moment, I left it and I said, Why could last year I be called on to kill this guy?

And now he's my friend. What changed? And I realized that the change, because a few political leaders made some differences, and now my enemy is my friend. But this troubled me. It laid seeds to me to be thinking.

So following in my life, get back from the army, we got a really nice apartment. An apartment that didn't have television for the first time in my life. And for the first time in my life, I started to read.

And we started to read the Bible. And we started to say, Wow, listen to this and listen to that. And God changes. One of my jobs, one of my main jobs in the army, was to be in a rock band. We were musicians.

And so, first thing God did was challenge us. And as I looked at my Christianity, I was going to the Evangelical church in Germany. It was a big area in those days, of Americans in that time. And I felt like my Christianity was just entirely superficial.

I made a profession in my lips. I said a sinner's prayer. I was sincere. But the concept of being a follower of Jesus was frankly, not something that I even had a thought about. But God was convicting us.

And in a hotel in North Germany, finally one day, at the midst of this terrible concert thing that we were going to play for, my wife and I kneeled in a hotel room. And we said, we're going to either completely follow Christ, or we're going to completely give this up.

This messing around halfway stuff is just nonsense. And so, thanks be to God, we kneeled in that hotel room, and we said, Lord, we give ourselves completely over to you. We got it from there. There wasn't like a lot of rockets, a lot of explosions or whatever that was going on.

But there was a settled feeling in our hearts, no compromise. We're going to take the word of God, and we're going to follow it. We quickly then went and got out of the rock band. And that was easy. But then we also then started to looking at some things about the Jesus following teachings.

And I'll get more into that a little bit into the two kingdoms on the next session. But this has been something, has been sort of a motto for me. It has shaped my theology of pondering, what if Jesus really meant every word he said?

What if Jesus' dream for humanity and his cure for us is really the way he wants us to live our lives? And as we began to look at those things, it's changed me, and it's still changing me. And I hope it does for you too.

Because this, this focus on Jesus Christ was what caused this movement to start. And it's what God wants, I believe, for this generation, again for this age. Okay. It's been a journey, a long journey ever since.

It's like around, more of my neck of the woods than yours, I guess. You have mountains at least. Okay. So now what I would like to do is to look at salvation, and I'm sitting in here as taught by Peter Rittman in the Hutterite Statement of Faith.

Now, let me just say a real quick thing about the Hutterite Statement of Faith. It's kind of a shame that it says Hutterite Confessions of Faith on it. Because people don't tend to read denominational booklets.

You know, if you saw the Church of Christ Statement of Faith, the Baptist Statement of Faith, or something, oh yeah, whatever. But this was actually the very first complete work of the Anabaptists. It is a gem.

And I read a lot of things just for its academic reasons. You know, I want to know what Minow thought, or what someone, and honestly a lot of it's pretty dry. But let me just tell you something, that when you read this, there's something different.

There's a spirituality, there's a depth there, that you realize that the South Germans, the Austrians, during the beginning part of the 1525 Revival, it was meaty. And I'm hoping to show you some of that.

And what I believe is what you're getting in American Christianity today is something different. And here's my concern. A lot of times I'll get an email, or a text, or something from an ex-Hun, or an ex-Amish, ex-Mennonite or something, or someone who's struggling.

And sometimes I don't know what to say. Most of the times I don't. I'm excited that they're excited about God, but I hear, what I usually hear coming from it is modern American Christianity. And this Protestant kind of theology, and I say, oh that's great that you're in love with Christ, but then with this comes a package.

And my burden for you this day is that you can get a hold of a faith. A faith that, frankly, your forefathers were revived with, and get a hold of this faith in a very genuine way. It is quite different than modern American Christianity.

And it's not like you can just add on works, or add on community, or add on this. There's an entire frame of mind that focuses on Jesus Christ. It's just the cross of Jesus Christ, which is entirely important.

Everything. Jesus is what we see. Alright. So to be part of this new kingdom, Jesus came to give us a new kingdom. Jesus said that we must be born again. He talks about a new humanity. Riddleman uses this phrase, new humanity, in the statement of faith.

Born of the Spirit. John 1 .12 says, but as many as received Him, as received this Christ in me, to them gave He power to become the sons of God. Even to them that believe on His name, which were born, watch this now, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

One of the things that I think we have to watch out for in very strong communities. The Mennonites would have the same risk the Amish would have this and we would certainly have this. It's because community does tend to, and I mean this community in a broad sense, these strong communities tend to keep people in, and I mean in a good way.

It's a healthy society. Because of that, there can be a tendency just to kind of, you know, I want to get married, I want to join the church, so I just join the church and become a good boy, and we end up with sort of a Catholic kind of concept of Christianity.

This is not what you'll find in your statement of faith. And so this is something that we have to watch out for, that this need to be born again, this need to have Christ within us, is essential from the beginning.

I mean Redmond hits this hard, we're going to see it. John 3, but here's an emphasis though. The emphasis that Jesus is giving this is the entirety of His kingdom. John 3 says, Jesus answered and said of them, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

So in other words, being born again is not an end in itself. Let me repeat that. Being born again is not an end to itself. It's the entry into the door. But the door is supposed to take you somewhere.

It's supposed to take you to His kingdom, and the life in Christ, the life in His kingdom, His teachings and His way. From my background, you get saved, and you stop at the door, and that's it. You never enter in.

The purpose of being born again, is to experience it. But if you're not born again, you know what? You're not going to get it. You're not going to understand Jesus. It's going to be nonsense to you. You want me to die?

When we start talking about two kingdoms, when we start talking about these different things, you want me to be on the cross? Unless you're born again, you're not going to see it. Alright. The difference also that I see, the whole entire word of God is absolutely true.

Every word of God is true. The problem that I see sometimes, is where the starting point is. With the Protestants, they start with the Apostle Paul, and the Roman's Road, and these types of ways of salvation, and then try to squeeze in a little bit of Jesus here and there.

And this is wrong. Jesus is the priority. Jesus is the way. And when we start with Christ, and then how do we do this, Lord? Then we come to Paul, for his teachings on grace, on how to live Christ. But Jesus is our essence.

And you know, if we start, I wrote here, when you read something the wrong way, you end up with the wrong questions. And the problem is, that with a little work, we actually get the right answers to the wrong questions.

And we don't want the right answers to the wrong questions, we want the right questions. Now, let me narrow Anabaptism. It's not a denomination. You can't go join the Anabaptists. I'd like here to convert you to join the Anabaptists.

There's not one. It's a way of Biblical interpretation. But Conrad Grebel, when he, at the very beginning part of the Revival, in 1525, wrote a letter to his friend who was starting to differ with him, and he said, these two points he put in are the essence of Anabaptism.

He said this, I believe the Word of God without a complicated interpretation, and out of this belief I speak. That's an essence. So it's simple. The Bible is easy to understand. The next thing he said is also profound.

The teachings of the Lord has been given for the purpose of being put into practice. It's simple to read, it's simple to understand, and the teachings of Jesus are for today. We'll talk about a little bit more of that in Two Kingdoms.

Alright. Jesus gave us the concept of the kingdom. To demonstrate this, John D. Martin has a beautiful thing, he says, what is the kingdom supposed to be? It's to show the whole world what the whole world would look like if it would only follow its king.

Alright, my background. My background came with the sinner's prayer kind of concept, which is really dangerous. And this is probably a joke, but it's not funny. Here's a card. Someone says, read the sinner's prayer and be saved.

God, I'm pretty rotten. I don't want to go to hell. I want to go to heaven, so I invite Jesus into my heart. Thanks for that. Amen. Congratulations. Please help me. Email me your testimony. It's probably an exaggeration, but not far.

What I call sometimes, with my background, evangelical salvation is a broken clock. If you talk about the lost sinful nature of man, and the glory of God, and His righteousness on the cross, that's all good.

But you know, even a clock, bashed and broken, is perfectly right twice a day. As a matter of fact, it's completely right twice a day, but it's broken. Our faith must be alive, it must be working, it must be continual.

Let me give you a quick story. It's tough, but it'll illustrate the point of just how bad it can get. On August 4th, 1909, there was a terrible massacre here. This deranged man came in and put the end of the life of 25 or so ladies that were working in this gym.

I was at work when I heard about this, and something caught my attention, and what really caught my attention was that this man was saying that he was an American Christian. And so as I looked at this, I said, actually he had his journal, they began to publish his journal in the newspaper.

So right in a year before the murders, this man wrote in his journal about his involvement in church. Speaking about the pastor of the church he attended for 13 years, he said this, this guy teaches and convinces me that you can commit mass murder and still go to heaven.

Skipping up to a year the day before the murder, he left what I consider to be the most terrible thing that he wrote, and why I think it was so terrible is because it exhausts so much modern American evangelical Christianity.

Here's the quote, all the emphasis, all the capitals are directly from him. He wrote this hours before he went and made the crime. The journal text. Maybe soon I will see God in Jesus. At least that's what I was told.

Eternal life does not depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for every sin, so how can I or you be judged by God for a sin when the penalty was already paid? People judge, but that doesn't matter.

I'm going to read the Bible in this book called The Integrity of God, beginning yesterday, because soon I will see Him. And he went and did the crime. Now, let me ask you this. At least that's what I was told.

Who told this deranged man that you could kill someone and not lose your salvation? Who told him that faith existed in a mental belief? Who told him that it did not matter, actions don't matter? Who told him that grace was some kind of blanket forgiveness policy?

Who came up with these strong doctrines? It came from our differences right from the beginning of the Reformation. Who? It started with Luther. Luther, although he did us many favors with bringing us the Bible, the Word of God, for lifting up God and faith, but his understanding of faith became something, a mental idea.

Now let me give you this quote that he wrote that really says a lot. Writing to his friend, Luther wrote, If you're a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary, but a true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin.

God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner. And let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger. And rejoice in Christ, who is the victor over sin, death, and the world.

It suffices that God, it suffices that through God's glory, we have recognized the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or to commit adultery thousands of times each day.

Now no self-respecting evangelical is going to say that today, and I'm assuming that Luther is exaggerating. He tended to be kind of a man that would, you know, want to try to get his point across hyperbole.

However, this is more my point than his terrible last statement. It's this. It suffices that through God's glory, we have recognized this concept that thinking of a doctrine of the atonement or the doctrine of faith somehow makes you a Christian.

This is a problem. And granted, this is an exaggerated case. This guy's a deranged murder dean. You're making, okay, you're taking this way too far. You're using this murder, and you're losing Luther.

Okay, granted, these are exaggerated cases, but I'm giving them to you so that you can understand the differences and why they are, because these are the exaggerated case, but in a subtle way, they're affecting every one of us, including me.

Every one of us. All right, follow me, is what Jesus said. Follow me. Jesus said it this way. These are his words, not Luther's, not Peter Riddemann, Jesus. Enter ye at the straight gate. That's not straight like this.

That's like a straight jacket. That means narrow. There's a Martyr's Mirror quote that said the early martyrs forced into a gate so narrow that they left flesh on the post of the gate. All right, Jesus said, enter ye in at the straight gate.

For wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leads to destruction. And many there be which go in there, because straight is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth them to life, and few there are that find it.

That's Jesus. Not every one that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in heaven. That's Jesus. And why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?

Years ago, I did a Bible school, and I brought some little girls. I brought the two biggest smarty-pant guys in the Bible school, you know, the scholarly type, and I had them come up, and I brought up my two, my daughters were really young, and I brought them up, and I said, okay, tomorrow I want you to come, and I printed out the explanation of a pearl.

So here's the definition of the pearl, all the things, the pearl is this dynamic, and this molecular weight, and all this, and I handed it to the smart guys, and I said, tomorrow I want you to come back and bring to me a pearl from that description.

To my little daughters, I said, okay, to you, and I opened up, you could buy it on the internet, you could get a pearl, like a clam, they opened it up there in front of everybody, pulled out this pearl, and I said, tomorrow I want you to come, and I want you to write the best you can, and describe what you have in your hand.

This is the difference. Those guys come back the next day, and the best that they could come up with, with all their thinking, they still have what? A counterfeit pearl. But my little girls, as they came up, and they could say, well, it's wet, brown, you know, no matter what they said, they were dealing with the genuine.

Do you get the difference? It's either Christ within us that is real, or it's just a theological trip. It's a nonsense thing, and it's always going to be a counterfeit. The emphasis that you're going to see in this, is an emphasis on reality.

Okay, let me keep going. A .W. Tozer has an excellent quote. A .W. Tozer said, to escape the errors of salvation by works, we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. This is what we have in modern American Christianity.

So let's look at salvation. After Pentecost came, if you have your Bibles, you can open to Acts 2 .38, and we're going to look at this, and now I'm going to start getting into some of the nitty-gritty of what's in the Statement of Faith.

Acts 2 .38. Acts 2 .38 says, starting at 36, Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made the same Jesus, whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ. The Messiah, the Lord, which means the King, He has made Him Lord and Christ.

So He's preaching to them. And when they heard this, they were pricked in the heart. What does that mean? Thank you, brother. Okay, yeah, pain. They felt this. They were pricked in the heart and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, men and brethren, what shall we do?

Then Peter said unto them, watch now, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. So let's look at it.

Again, I'm going to be using the page numbers, so now I'm going to get into some of the... Pull out your statement of faith, and I'm going to try to show you some of this. This is page 174. Okay, I'm going to still move relatively quickly.

I do apologize for that, but I really want to get this stuff in. I really like your faces. You're very attentive, and I appreciate that. I do keep going, but a brother just encouraged me earlier, if I say a big word or something, you want clarification, you can go ahead and do that.

I might tell you, we'll talk about it later, but we'll try, okay? I'll try to do that. All right. Excuse me, Dean. I've got this one, probably a page difference. Yeah, I'm afraid it's going to be a page difference.

Yeah. I have the... You have the... Under what heavy? I... What do you have? Let me see it. Yeah, you have it, and I'll give these sources to you. I'll leave a PDF for y 'all also to look at all these.

You can find it. You just have to read, do a study, and find it in there some places. All right. Coming to all these quotes, most of them come from the statement of faith. Okay. So, speaking on how the Spirit prepares the heart, what you read there in Acts 2 .38, Peter Redmond says, What does the Lord say?

Listen now. No human shall see me and live. Therefore, when God starts to speak to us, something must begin to die. We must hear, see, taste, and feel the Lord God in the countenance of Jesus Christ. All of this must happen before such construction can begin.

This is that time when God begins to preach to you, and He says, You've got to feel it. You've got to have it inside of you. It must be genuine. And that's what Redmond keeps hitting through. It's got to be real.

Watch what he says next. Under the chapter, How People Again May Find God and His Grace, he starts concerning about the remorse. Remember when Peter preached, he says, They were pricked to the heart. Peter Redmond makes a big point of God speaking to us and giving us a fear of God.

He says this, Those who want to repent with all their heart must first feel genuine remorse for their sins. Remorse, however, means first recognizing how wrong, evil, harmful, and destructive sins actually are.

Otherwise, repentance cannot endure. It means you'll start for a little bit, but you won't last. And still less can a sinner receive grace. True remorse must follow the recognition of sin and is the basis on which people feel repugnance and horror of their sins.

Yes, they even loathe themselves for being guided and controlled by sin for so long. Wow. This is remorse work. He says, To give a scripture base for this, he's quoting this, and I quote it also. In 2 Corinthians 7 -11.

Powerful passage on being serious with sin in your life. Paul writing says,. But behold this self-saying thing, that you sorrowed after a godly sore. What carefulness it wrought in you. Yea, what clearing of yourself.

Yea, what indignation. Yea, what fear. Yea, what vehement desire. Yea, what zeal. Yea, what revenge. In all things you have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter. Paul, through the Holy Spirit, wants us to take sin very seriously.

Peter would have been, wants you to take sin very seriously and he got a hold of this spirit. And he says,. This is an important spot for us to start with. And so. Alright. And he's not alone. Several of the deeper thinkers of the preachers through the age have said the same thing.

Here's Paris Reedhead. Oh, if you've ever heard the sermon Ten Shekels and a Shirt, you can hear it on Sermon Index. Excellent, excellent sermon. And he says this,. He says, No one can savingly receive Christ until they have repented.

And no one can repent until they have been convicted. And conviction is the work of the Holy Ghost that helps the sinner to see that he is a criminal before a holy God and deserves all of God's wrath.

And if God were to send him to the lowest corners of the devil's hell forever and ten eternities, he deserved it all and a hundred for more because he has seen his crimes. Later, Paris Reedhead said,.

A person repents when he comes to the place where he discovers that the will of God is the government of his life and the glory of God is the reason for his life. He only has repented who can change his mind about his reason.