Damnable Nature of the Natural Condition of Christless Soul — E.A. Johnston

The Church’s Spiritual Declension and Need for Repentance

I have a solemn message for you today, friends, and the burden of it is so heavy upon my heart. The only way I'm gonna be able to get through it without breaking down into uncontrollable tears is by the help of God's Spirit.

I have a burden for your souls that's too heavy for man. As a research scholar of revival, I am deeply familiar with the sermons that have been preached preceding and during times of historic revival.

And I can assure you, friends, that we live in a day where few genuine conversions are taking place. There's such a deplorable spiritual declension in the church that it does not even realize or recognize the danger she is in or the true need that she has.

The danger is God's judgment upon us. The need is for heartfelt repentance toward God. But the church in America today is too far away from the heart of God to see these things. She is drunk with pride, shackled by self-preservation, blinded by conformity and compromise with a sinful world.

She lost her voice of authority years ago when she got into the entertainment business. If a George Whitefield or a Jonathan Edwards or a D .L. Moody or an Evan Roberts came back to earth today and they looked at the modern church in its condition, they would stand in disbelief and horror and throw back their heads and weep like little children who've just lost both their parents.

The risen Christ lamented over his church in Laodicea. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou was cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

If the lukewarm Christians in Laodicea were making Christ sick to his stomach with their brand of Christianity, how much more nauseating we must be to him at this tragic hour. He goes on to tell them, although they see themselves one way, he sees them in an entirely different light.

To him, they are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Jesus referred to the religious leaders of his day as snakes crawling to hell. He told them, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

But we don't preach much on hell anymore, much less the terribleness of damnation. We just teach nice little messages that don't offend anybody. The trouble is they don't save anybody either. Listen, friends, in these last days, if we don't repent of our sins and get serious with God, he won't visit us with revival but with destruction.

The cold-hearted religious leaders in Christ's day believe themselves to be beyond any reproach and they crucified the Prince of Glory. We need revival because we need to live lives of holiness unto a thrice holy God who declares, be ye holy for I am holy.

Revival, Holiness, and the God-Centered Gospel

Isaiah's call began with a vision of God's holiness. The church today needs a fresh vision of the holiness of God. We need revival because our young people are going to the devil. They are addicted to sex and perversion and drugs and alcohol and they're blinded by the devil and they don't believe in God.

We need a spiritual awakening to save this younger generation that is hell-bound. We need revival because our communities have become killing grounds. It's not safe to go outdoors anymore without the risk of being gunned down by a madman.

This in itself is a great judgment of God upon a society that has rejected him. We need revival because standing in our pulpits are more teachers than preachers and more entertainers than prophets. Few are saved today in a church atmosphere that greaves away the spirit of God with jokes and laughter and loud rock music.

We need to return to a God-centered gospel that proclaims the great doctrines of ruin, redemption, repentance, and regeneration. We must preach hard against the evils of sin and warn folks about the terrors of hell and prepare them for a future judgment that awaits all mankind.

The Natural Condition and the Need for Regeneration

Oh, well, that's my little introduction to my sermon, which is entitled Damnable Nature of the Natural Condition of a Christless Soul. Please give me, friend, your undivided attention. Sit up straight and get the wax out of your ears, for I'm gonna preach the unvarnished gospel without diluting it to make it more palatable to sinful man.

My object is to awaken you to your natural condition and show you the dangers of it and then point you to a bloodstained savior for sin in the person of Christ Jesus. I can't save you, friend, and you can't save yourself.

Salvation is in the hands of God and not men. If you are truly born again, it's because God has given you saving faith. Saving faith isn't the same as some evangelists tell us. They say that faith is like trusting in the chair you are sitting in to support you, but an atheist has that kind of faith.

No, friend, salvation isn't in a decision you make, but in the regenerating work of the spirit of God in you. For many of you, this may be the first true gospel message you have ever heard because you've only been exposed to easy believism.

My text can be found in the book of Isaiah in chapter 33. You can turn in your Bibles there now, friends. We will be in verse 14. Here now is the word of God, and may the spirit of the Lord attend the reading of his holy word.

And it is my prayer that God's spirit will come and disturb someone here, show them they're heading to a devil's hell unless they repent and have faith in Christ Jesus. Jesus says we must be born again.

Isaiah 33 and the Sinners in Zion

Our text today is jam-packed with warnings to the Christless soul and the terribleness of damnation. The sinners in Zion are afraid. Fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with a devouring fire?

Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? Our text is dealing with those individuals who are outside of Christ's blood. They are in a natural condition. A natural condition is the state which speaks of our physical birth.

We each are born with a ruined nature and bent towards sin. We are all sons of fallen Adam. When I was born in the flesh, I was born of my father who bequeathed to me what he was in the flesh, in the likeness of Adam, through my father in the natural birth.

And this is my natural condition before God. In our natural condition is cursed because of Adam's curse. We're exposed to God's condemnation for the penalty of sin. So when our text speaks of sinners in Zion who is being addressed here, why, you dear friend, if you are yet a unconverted church member who are these sinners in Zion, there are two kinds of individuals in a natural condition.

Those who openly are godless, they live like the devil. They don't believe in the God of the Bible. They just want to grab as much of the world they can and drink iniquity like water, meaning they can't get enough of sin.

Then there is the religiously lost person. They cling to their religion as a hope of heaven. Whether they be a Buddhist or Muslim, Mormon or Catholic, Baptist or Presbyterian, they are in a Christless state because they are not born again, Jesus said, except a man be born again.

He cannot see the kingdom of God. So the sinner in Zion spoken of here is a religious lost person, a member of a church, a somebody who missed their church membership for salvation. He may be serving on a deacon board.

He may be a Sunday school teacher or even a pastor, but he's yet an unconverted individual who's a stranger to a work of grace upon the heart. He or she is in a natural condition among the visible people of God.

False Assurance and the Religious Hypocrite

Now our text says that these sinners in Zion are afraid. Why are they afraid? Because they are eventually found out like the guest at the king's banquet who has no wedding garment. He is found out as a hypocrite.

The fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. When they died, they busted hell wide open. They thought they had a guaranteed ticket to heaven, but it just got burned up and now they're in shock. They're surprised, fears taken hold of them.

They're filled with dread. He was the chairman of the deacons, but he was never born again. He died in his natural, cursed condition. He died a Christless soul, exposed to the wrath of God. Now he is lost for eternity.

He is now beyond God. God can't help him now. The sad thing is, friends, is that this type of individual is the hardest to save. They sit on the rotten planks of a public profession. Somewhere back yonder, they can point to a time in their life where they responded to an emotional appeal by an evangelist and they walked in now and repeated a prayer and joined the church and were baptized.

In their mind, they don't need your Jesus. They feel they've already done that. And every time they hear a sermon, they get more gospel-hardened in sin because they reject their need for it. The dangerous peril of a person in a natural condition is the blindness that person suffers.

They are spiritually deceived. They go to church but live in the kingdom of darkness because they've never been washed in the blood or born from above. They are strangers to repentance, strangers to regeneration.

Oh, they will tell you that you need to know Jesus but Jesus doesn't know them. They will hear someday his frightful words, depart from me, ye workers of iniquity. I never knew you. Yet the time will come when they'll be awakened to their lost condition, but it'll be too late to do anything about it.

That's why they are afraid. That's why they are in a state of surprise and they are filled with fearfulness. They never gave much thought to the reality of hell because they thought they'd never have to go there.

I wonder how many good Baptists in the long history of your church who died holding what they thought was a free ticket to heaven only to die and open their eyes in a burning hell. You better believe they'll be surprised with fear and alarm that the greatness of their fear is tied directly to the degree of their horror in hell.

The Departed Soul and the Reality of Hell

What's it like to break out of the bounds of our body and death and have our soul go out into eternity? What happens to a departed soul that does not make it to heaven? Does it go to a place called purgatory as our Catholic friends believe?

The apostle Paul argues against that teaching by saying to be absent in the body is to be present with Christ. If you're a born again believer, you go straight to heaven to be with Jesus. But if you are deceived and you die outside of Christ's blood then demons drag your soul down to a devil's hell.

I want to talk about now friends what happens when the departed soul of a sinner is carried into hell. In Job we read, he should be driven from light into darkness and chased out of the world. That's vivid imagery.

Jesus referred to hell as a place of outer darkness, a bottomless pit where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. Weeping speaks of great grief and loss and gnashing of teeth signifies great anger and regret.

The damned in hell are in constant torment and misery. It's a region of devils, a region of intense darkness. Have you ever been in a room friend where there isn't any light or in a cave with no light at all where it's so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face?

Hell is like that. It's a creepy dark place, a region of outer darkness strewn with dark caverns and its inhabitants. Mordecai Ham always spoke of an incident in his life that made the hair stand on the back of his neck because it was so terrifying.

He spoke of Lulu in many of his sermons. Listen friends to Mordecai Ham's words. God caused me to witness the horrible death of one eternally lost. The mother met me at the door of the little log cabin and begged me to hasten in and do something.

Lulu is dying, the mother sobbed. I hurried to the girl's bedside and tried to talk to her about her need of salvation. I played with her for a long time, but to no avail, she refused to hearken. Then she closed her eyes in death.

I called to her, Lulu, how is it? A voice came back, not the voice of one living, but that of one who was in another world. It was a voice that came up from the depths without any sign of movement of the dead girl's lips or throat muscles.

A voice that I've heard only once in my life and a voice I've never been able to forget. The disembodied words of a soul in hell.

Lost, lost, oh, oh, so dark, so dark.

Hell as the Dwelling Place of Demons

Well, that story of Mordecai Ham, friends, gives me chills even when I relate it, but even worse than the darkness of that region is the fact that hell is inhabited by demons. The apostle Peter declares, for if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, in the hell you'll be surrounded by demon entities.

You'll not be able to get away from them. They will brush up against you. There will be no one to help you or protect you. You will be at their perverse mercy. That hell is inhabited by demons, is seen from the words of Christ.

Then shall he say, also unto them on the left hand, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and the angels. I don't know about you, friends, but that thought terrifies me.

A Personal Story About Demonic Fear

Are you afraid of demons? I wanna share a personal story with you. When I was a teenager, my family moved into a haunted house. There was an evil presence in that house. Right after we moved in, my parents and I were sitting in the living room and upstairs above us, we heard very strong footsteps walking down the hall.

We looked at each other alarmed. My father tried to laugh it off by saying spooks, but it was no laughing matter, for it occurred time and time again. One night, as we were sitting downstairs in the living room, we heard those heavy footsteps walking slowly up and down the hall, plop, plop, plop.

I ran upstairs to see if there was an intruder up there, but there was no one there. At least no one I could see with my eyes. It was a eerie feeling. We came to accept the fact that our house was haunted, but as unnerving as listening to those disembodied footsteps would they paled in comparison to a thing that would occur all of a sudden and without warning, and it would stop you dead in your tracks and fill you with dread.

There was a door. Beneath the stairwell, one that could be used as a storm closet for a family to hide in a bad thunderstorm, as some of you know, of which I speak, well, this house had one of those, and once in a while, and all of a sudden, a violent pounding would begin on that door.

I'll never forget it, as long as I remember anything. It was a hot summer day in August, and our AC window unit was on the blank. It was 100 degrees outside, and it felt like 110 inside that little house.

All of a sudden, the pounding on the door began, and out of desperation, I reached for the crystal doorknob and yanked the door open. I stood there in disbelief as a cold chill came out upon me like I was standing in front of an open freezer door, even though it was a hot summer day.

There's no physical explanation for that kind of experience, but that a demon was in there, and it didn't like me opening that door. Demons inhabited that house. I was sure glad when we finally moved away.

Everlasting Burnings and the Final Judgment

The next sentence in our text is the cry of the tortured soul in hell, who among us should dwell with the devouring fire? This brings vivid imagery to my mind of a house fire in my neighborhood when I was a little boy, a house caught fire by faulty electrical wires, and it burned to the ground.

My parents would tell me to be careful as we walked past the chort and burned out remains of that blackened house. The smell of it was awful. That strong smell of smoky wood lingered in the air. Thankfully, no one was killed in that fire.

The family got out alive, but imagine, friend, what it would be like to be in a house fire like that, and you can't get out. Raging flames are all around you. The smell of smoke is suffocating. Your skin is on fire.

That's the imagery here in Isaiah of the Christless soul in eternity, stuck in the devil's hell. Listen to their piercing cry. Who among us, among us here in these flames, who shall dwell with the devouring fire?

The image of the terrorist attacks in New York City on 9 -11 are stuck on my mind, the images of bodies tumbling from windows, from the twin towers, men in suits who jumped out the window 100 stories up, leaping to their death to avoid being burned alive in that towering inferno.

The fear of being burned alive was greater than the fear of leaping to their death. When I was in high school, I worked summers at a local grocery store, and one of my duties was to take the cardboard boxes that the produce came in and break them down with a metal box cutter, then stack them flat on a two-wheeler and wheel them to the back of the store where there was a room with a cast iron furnace.

I had to open that heavy cast iron door and throw those boxes in there and burn them. The heat and intensity of those white hot flames would singe my face every time I pulled open that door. I saw firsthand how fierce a fire in a furnace can be, so hot it can melt gold.

That's a picture, friend, of how hot it is in hell. Trust me when I tell ya, you don't wanna go there. The torments of hell are never-ending. The last part of our verse in Isaiah is to me the most terrifying.

Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? This signifies the last judgment and the terribleness of that day where all the departed souls inhabit their body once more to stand at the final roundup of mankind.

That's where Peter speaks of angels and chains reserved unto judgment. This is spoken of in the book of Revelation in chapter 20, beginning in verse 11. And I saw a great white throne and him that sat on it from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away and there was found no place for them.

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God and the books were opened and another book was opened which is the book of life and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books according to their works.

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them and they were judged every man according to their works and death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.

This is the second death and whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. Look at that long line of characters from every generation from the antediluvians whose violence and wickedness drowned them in the flood.

There stands the rulers from every civilization. There stand the Caesars, the pharaohs, kings and queens, presidents and dictators. We recognize some of them who were famous in our lifetime. We see others like Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler who are now shrinking before that great white throne and the judge who sits there.

There are the rich and famous, the rock stars, movie stars, supermodels, the who's who and has-beens of every generation. All are held accountable to the strictness and severity of God's unbending law and the sentencing of the law must be carried out upon all guilty lawbreakers for God declares, I wanna know wise, clear the guilty.

If you stand there in your own merits, you will fail that test for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. You must stand there friend in the merits of another, the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen friend, I know I am a sinner and I need a sin substitute in the person of Christ Jesus and so do you friend, so do you.

The Gospel Call to Repentance and Faith

This is a giant courtroom scene. John Wesley called it the last of size. Evidence will be presented, books will be opened, cases will be reviewed and sentences carried out. Notice our text, who can dwell with everlasting burnings points to the lake of fire, a strong angel stand by ready to pitch in individuals who are not found written in the book of life and their last words before they're thrown into the cracklings of that lake is who shall dwell with everlasting burnings?

Here we see the process of a Christless soul departure from the body of death, detention in the devil's hell, damnation in a lake of fire. How horrible, how regrettable all the proud God haters, men like Voltaire who viewed religion as a crutch who now have nothing to lean on when they need it most.

How about you friend? Are you dead certain that you are born again? Do you know the reality of God in your life? Do others see the reality of God in you? You must repent of your sins and trust in Jesus and own them as your savior and Lord.

Oh, what can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. You must feel your need of him. When blind Bartimaeus heard that Jesus was passing by, he couldn't see Jesus because he was blind, but he got all in a lather crying out to him.

And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me. And we see the disciples tried to shut him up, but it just made him yell more and more.

He cried a great deal, thou son of David, have mercy on me. And then four words in black ink on white paper, my Bible, stand out and Jesus stood still. This man's need and his faith stopped God in his tracks.

We know the rest of the story. The blind man received his sight. Like the old hymn says, I was blind, but now I see. Can you see Jesus, friend? Look at that man on the cross, friend. See him there with his arms outstretched, beckoning you to come to him and believe on him.

Look at that bloodstained savior for sin hanging there. He loved me and gave himself for me. Turn to Jesus, friend. Surrender all you are to all he is, and he is Lord. John 3 .36 declares, he that believeth on the son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.

We've seen the damned old nature of a natural condition of a Christless soul. Don't let that be you, friend. Repent before it's too late. Listen to this gospel call. And the spirit and the bride say, come.

And let him that heareth say, come. And let him that is a thirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.