NO SALVATION WITHOUT A PERSONAL APPROPRIATION OF JESUS CHRIST

The bible says that there is something so radically wrong with us that we must be born again. There is no way we can avoid producing the hell that we are beginning to have here on earth. Look at Jeremiah.17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?" The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, and education does not solve it. Education helps us to see the headlessness of our situation but education doesn't solve it. Education just gives us the reckons of science so that we have a more extended ability to impose our will on everybody else whatever it costs.

We think, "Oh no, if we can only know what is right and what is wrong, that will cure it". Look, the problem isn't that. Sure at times a person might not be sure what is right and what is wrong but the problem is they have to be changed so that they can do what is right. Actually knowing what is right and knowing what is wrong, doesn't even solve it, that just feeds our desire to prove that we're right and everybody else is wrong. In fact, there is only one thing to do with this human nature that we see so plainly before our eyes is, for it to be utterly and absolutely destroyed and started again in the fresh spirit of God. That's the only thing that will change it.

You have to be utterly and completely destroyed and recreated again in the fresh Spirit of God and that's what the Gospel is, that's what the Gospel is. A lot of us have the feeling, "Oh no, the Gospel is forgiveness". The truth is that we need to be changed. We don't need to be forgiven, we need to be changed and the Gospel is, you remember Second Corinthians 5:14, "Christ has died for all, therefore all have died". The Gospel is that every one of us have been destroyed in Jesus and raised up in Him and made new. The moment we believe that, the moment that miracle will be done in us by God's Spirit.

Now, we say we are born again, but we say we are born again because we agree with the facts of the Bible. You might say, "Look, I see things differently now, I really see what other Christians are saying, I see what the church is saying, I see what the Bible is saying, I see what God is after, I see how Jesus is my Savior, I see how He died for my sins, I see how God has forgiven me for my sins, I see all that, and agree with that. I really believe all that so I have been born again."

We think and say, "Of course I believe all those things and I have faith." The problem is that isn't what faith is. Belief is part of faith but belief itself is not faith. Belief in that sense of a mental ascent, of a grasping of an idea in your head, that itself is not faith. This belief is primarily a mental change for us, it's primarily us a liberal change.

We say to ourselves or others, "Well yes I am a Christian but I really do not spend a lot of time in His word. Well I sometimes read the Bible and sometimes I don't. When I need help or I am in trouble I read the Bible. I sometimes look up the verses that might help me in my sickness, or help me in my financial trouble. I read it like that but I don't have a personal love of God's word. I pray at times but I don't pray everyday."

The real issue is that there has not been done a work in our hearts by God that has given us a new motivation, a new love of God, a new love of others, and the new love of Jesus, a loyalty to Jesus a personal loyalty to Jesus, and a love of His word, and a love of prayer day by day.

What is the essence of faith? Hebrews and Chapter 11:6; "And without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for whoever would draw near to God, must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him."

So, belief is an essential element of faith. You need to believe that God exists and that He rewards those who seek Him. So that's one essential of faith. Faith is, believing certain things that are true. So, you believe that 2+2 equals 4, or you believe that the world is round, or you believe that your car is where you left it. In other words faith is to some extent an idea, it's an idea in your head, it's a concept that your mind grasps. It's something that you think; it's something that you can tie down as existing as a thought in your mind. Faith is at least that, it's at least a thought or an idea.

Now, even in the New Testament, faith went further than that. It referred not only to believing those things but it referred to the things that you believed. So, it began to be known as "The Faith," or the "Christian Faith," and that's even in the New Testament, you get in that little book called Jude and verse 3, "The loved, being very eager to write to you of our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you, to contend for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the Saints."

Even in the New Testament, faith went further than just believing certain things are true and it began to refer to the things that you believed were true. Of course that was because in the early centuries people were interpreting Jesus in all kinds of ways. You remember in the first and second century they disagreed about, in what sense He was the Son of God? Some said, "Oh, He is just an ordinary human being, upon whom the Logos came when He was conceived in Mary's womb." Others said, "No, no He was existent from the very beginning. So, they had to state, what they believed about Him and they stated this in forms of words, which they called Creeds. So, for instance, the Apostles' Creed tells you the things that the Apostles believed. The Athanasian Creed tries to deal with that issue of, "Is God really in Jesus and is Jesus really God?" It's the Creed you remember that says, "He is very God, a very God." Begotten not made, and so what makes it very clear, that He is divine. So, the faith began to refer to the things that people believed.

Those of you who have joined a church or who went through some type confirmation class, know about this because in these classes we tended to concentrate on what we were to believe. We may have been taught what Luther believed about salvation, or what the conference believed about adult baptism, or what Wessely believed about Faith. The emphasis of these teachings was on what we believed. All of us know that, "Yes, it's very easy to say that, faith is what you believe." The disastrous tendency of this is to think you are a child of God because you believe the right things about God. I think many people are now caught in that type of thinking.

We think, "Oh yes, I believe the right things about God, therefore I am a child of God." Believing the right things is not all that faith is, and believing the right thing does not necessarily make you a Child of God. James chapter 2:19, "You believe that God is one? You do well. Even the demons believe and shudder." So, even the devils in the hell believe the right things about God, and you know that it's very easy to regard yourself as a Christian simply because you believe the orthodox things that all other Christians believe. Indeed there is a great tendency in our day, isn't there to regard faith as just that? We think that faith is believing the right things about God and that's what makes you a Child of God. Then we think the only way to grow in maturity is to absorb more and more teaching about the right things to believe about God. Many of us think that growing deeper in faith is just getting more and more information about God and being able to explain more and more difficult questions that come up to us about revelation, or about the end times or about baptism, or about the fullness of the Spirit, or about new birth.

Indeed, we can carry it even further, we are told, "Oh yes, you need to know about the behavior that results from this belief. You need to know all about that, you need to know for instance, what kind of attitude a Christian should take to abortion; what kind of attitude a Christian should take to nuclear disarmament. That's all faith and if you have all that, and you get more and more of that, then you are growing in maturity."

That's not what faith is. You can see that even the demons believe the right things and yet they shudder, because they are not children of God. It is in our day, when Christianity is so popular, its very easy, to go to church Sunday after Sunday and to feel, "Well, I believe all the right things and I know all the answers, so I must be a child of God." Even the devils know the right answers, but that doesn't make them children of God. What more is faith then? If it isn't simply believing the right things, or it isn't the right things that are believed. If it's more than that, what more is it? It is a personal deep confidence in Christ and His character and abilities. That's what faith is. Faith is a confidence and trust in your Jesus. It's a deep confidence that you have in Jesus. Jesus becomes your own personal friend.

Faith is a close intimate confidence, with a person whom you have got to know day after day, through your prayer and your Bible study. You have begun to know Him and have confidence in Him, that's what faith is. Faith is not an "I-it" relationship. It's not a faith in beliefs or a faith in certain knowledge about God. Faith is a close intimacy with your Savior, that's it. It's a confidence in Jesus; it's a trust in Jesus, that's what faith is. It's a personal relationship with the Son of God. It starts with you, believing that He is there and you speak to Him in prayer, as if He is there, but it continues as He begins to speak back to you, through your thoughts at times and sometimes apart from your thoughts. As you wait before Him and spend time with Him, you begin to get to know Him. I think some of you have real troubles with faith, because you don't actually spend much time praying you know, and I don't blame you in a way, I mean it gets kind of boring if nothing is happening. Yet, you have to stay there long enough for your own thoughts to run out, do you see that?

God is trying to get through to you but there is so much interference, so much crackling, so much high frequency noises out of your own head. You have so many thoughts and so many ideas in your own mind, that His stuff is hitting all like that shrapnel as it comes towards you. You have to stay before Him long enough for all that to run down. So there is a real need, to be prepared to wait in quietness before Him. To be quiet before God, to be still and know that He is God and then to begin to say, "Jesus if You are there, please somehow try to get through to me, I need to know You, myself. I need to know You for myself, not what the Pastor says about you, not what somebody else says about You, but I need to know You myself. Jesus, will you somehow come through it to me, I need you badly."

It's rare that you begin to develop a confidence and a trust in Jesus Himself. Faith, in the new covenant meaning is a belief that you have been completely changed in Jesus, that God has destroyed all the evil in you and all the evil in your life, circumstances in Jesus. Then secondly, it is a life filled with actions that are based on that faith. So, if all your old desires have been destroyed, then you no longer want those desires, so your actions show that. You don't want those desires, you simply don't want them, you have no time for them. If you really do believe that all the evil in your circumstances have been destroyed, then you don't face this weak with fear, you face it with confidence. Then you do that not because you have worked yourself up into it, not because you want to prove to yourself that you have faith, but because you have confidence in Jesus. You know Him, and you that He is going to come through in this particular issue. Finally, faith is confidence in Jesus, confidence in that person whom you know intimately, because you spend time with Him day by day. That's for all of us, whether we have, suffered the old confirmation classes or whatever we had been through, that's for all of us. You can get to know Jesus because He is alive today and He is the same yesterday, today and forever and He'll start right back at 'A,' right back at square one with you, never fear, He'll start right back at the beginning with you, if that's where you have to start.

So, there is a heartless Christian faith abroad in the land, there is a heartless Christian faith in America that believes all the right things about God and then is pretty well independent of any personal trust in Jesus. Many people believe certain things about abortion, they believe certain things about honesty, they believe certain things about filling in your income tax properly, they believe certain things about fornication, but actually there's no dynamic cause effect relationship between their belief and their action. Indeed you could say they are both just beliefs and the tragedy of that faith is, it is a heartless faith and a lifeless faith. It's so often ends up in legalism; it is a mental ascent to certain things being true on the one side, and a mental ascent and a volitional commitment to certain ethical behavior but the two are not actually related to each other dynamically. In other words, faith is not just belief, it's not just belief plus action, but faith is personal trust in Jesus.

Now faith is confidence in Him. So, what is faith? It's trust in that person called Jesus. Faith is a personal trust in Jesus, its not this hard thing about, I believe God is this, or I believe in creation as opposed to evolution. I mean those are the things that you believe. Now the Bible does not say "Whosoever believeth in creation, or whosoever believeth in salvation, shall be saved but whosoever believeth in the Lord Jesus." Believing in Jesus is a personal faith in Him, and that's when you see Him as living and real to you.

Some of us think, "if only my faith were stronger, the reality of Jesus would be stronger to me". This is not true because actually we do not have week faith like we think. The real problem is we have NO TRUE FAITH at all. Many of us have a purely mental assent to the beliefs of Christianity and together with that we have a strong willpower by which we follow what are called the ethical behavior that Christianity demands. We feel we have the two parts that make up faith belief and action except that it's not real belief, it's mental assent and the action is just a set of standards that we keep trying to live up to. In actual fact we have no personal sense of Jesus in our own lives and the reason is that we have not personally appropriated Him and what Jesus has done for us on Calvary. We haven't entered into a personal trust with Him. We simply have an acceptance of Him in our minds and we try to follow Him in our lives and we try to keep company with the people who respect Him but we ourselves have not personally appropriated Him by personal faith into our own lives and our own hearts. Therefore we have not actually received anything from God. The truth is we haven't actually received anything from God, we haven't actually been regenerated, we haven't received the New Birth in the Spirit that God alone can do, we haven't actually received through the working of the Holy Spirit that life changing, and heart warming experience that is called the new birth.

This explains why so many of us are Christians in name only, but not really Christians in reality at all. Some of us are mental believers who are not really born of God. Some of us are just kind of camp followers we have not experienced the work of regeneration in our hearts and our spirits one great reason looms above all others has loomed above all others, has loomed above all others throughout the centuries and looms further above all others in this society of ours today, and the reason is you don't take sin seriously that's it. You, we don't take sin seriously, and so we don't really see the need of our Savior that we receive by personal appropriation. We don't take sin seriously; we don't bother it.

Many think they are saved and on their way to heaven but they are only comforted with a false Gospel. They have no real fear of God. The reasons, so many of us are caught in mental assent rather than in a real new birth; is we don't take sin seriously. Now, what is sin; and how serious does God regard it?

We keep having the attitude, "yeah sometimes I get angry with my brother, sometimes I criticize, sometimes I gossip, sometimes I steal, sometimes I worry but the Gospel surely is that I am forgiven and that regardless all those sins somehow because of Jesus' death. I know I will still go heaven regardless of my sins."

God gives gifts to men but we often pervert them by using the gifts that God has given us for ourselves, Now the Gospel is what God has done is to change us in His Son Jesus. If God hasn't changed you from being what you are, there's no hope for you.

If God has not changed you from what you have become into what He originally wanted you to be, you can't do anything about it with all your religious exercises, with all your techniques, with all your training, with all your church-going, with all your bible-reading, with all your praying, you can't put into yourself what God has left out. If you are still a miserable self-centered creature that God has not changed, then you won't be able to change that.

If God has not put purity into you, you cannot become pure. If God has not put Jesus' love into you, you cannot become loving but this dear word says that you have died and your life is hid with Christ in God. God has put you into His Son and has remade you and has changed you completely. He says this, "I have sent you My Holy Spirit, a counselor who can reveal to you the changes that I have made to you in My Son and He will begin to show you how to manifest those changes in your day-by-day life".

Are you going to turn heaven into hell? Are you going to get in as a gossiper and a worrier and an angry person and a striker of parents and a curser? Do you think that you are somehow going to live in heaven with the other people who allowed Jesus' death to operate upon? Your only hope is when you and I see sin inside us, as a blinding, deep rooted, hopelessly overpowering force within us that makes us distrust God and trust only ourselves. Our sinfulness makes us independent of God and dependant only on ourselves and the world. We need to see that sin is an integral part of us and that there is only one way to be freed from it and that is to be destroyed with Jesus and we may remade completely new and be born again. While you and I keep seeing sins as little human normal traits or tendencies, that we ought to try to get rid of to make our entry into heaven more appropriate. While we keep taking that attitude to sin, we will never grasp Jesus with all our hearts in desperation. The fact is that, Jesus bare for you the pain of utter destruction and utter death to your simple self. Only He can manifest that in your life and that's what you need. You are so bad and I am so bad, that our Father knows the only thing to be done is to wipe this out and start over again. Now, only when you come to Jesus with that kind of attitude can the Holy Spirit do anything for you.

You see that's where we make the mistake, we have been taught to come - oh, come and receive Jesus, receive Jesus. Well you know its true you have to receive Jesus but this receiving is not just mental agreement. We must grab Him and cling to Him and say, "Lord Jesus, I have no life by side you, I am dead, I am a condemned man to death. All the signs that I have of guilt, of worry, of anxiety they are like the marks of Cancer in me. Sin is within me and right through me and out the other side, I am a dead man apart from you. Lord Jesus, I have life in you and you alone Savior I pull you to myself and I hold to you and I praise you night and day, morning by morning moment by moment."

That's living personal appropriation of Jesus but you don't do that, unless you see the trouble you are in. What we need to see sin really is. We need to stop this game we are playing with the Old Testament and this game we are playing with the New Testament. We need to stop listening to the false prophets. You remember the Old Testament prophesied that there would be false prophets who would say, "Peace, peace when there is no peace." And who would heal my people my people lightly. That is people who would smooth it over and say, "Just believe in Jesus and you can do what you like, just believe in Jesus and you will get into heaven." Believing in Jesus, means grasping Jesus with every ounce of your strength. It means embracing Him with your heart, and your will and your whole being. It means a desperate grabbing for the Savior and hugging Him to yourself and saying, "Lord, Lord I was with you on Calvary when you died. Savior what in me did you destroy that I am not free from. Show me, show me Lord Jesus, personally show me."

Only then Lord Jesus is able through the power of the Holy Spirit to speak out of eternity into you here in time and tell you. He will say to you, "you're my pain" was partly caused by your desired to be well thought off and the tendency you have to boost that caused me more pain than you can think. That caused me part of what made me cry out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?". I have destroyed that now, it's destroyed, it no longer exists. What you are expressing there it is the fantasy of it, or the shadow of it, or the memory of it, or the lie of it, that Satan is trying to persuade you are still there. Then you have to say then, "Lord, you have done that's enough for me."

So it is like an eternal miracle that is continually appropriate at moment by moment by moment. ONLY as you do that you are delivered from sin and your life becomes renewed and born again with new life in Jesus. Now, of course God, graciously looks at you and He can tell how radically you are ready to commit yourself to that. He Knows how radically you are ready to commit yourself to that. In the light of that, He gives you perfect and absolute peace in your conscience, do you see that? So, you'll say to me, "Oh, well then God can only accept me when it is all through?" No, God can read you; God can read you like a book. He knows how radically committed you are to total repentance. Total repentance is not repentance for just this sin and that sin, it is total turning away from yourself, a total rejection from the evil within you and a total acceptance of Jesus. God will manifest to you a peace in your conscience and that's how you know you are forgiven. That's why a person can never know true forgiveness over a superficial confession or over an incomplede surrender or over a partially committed life. They can't. You can never know true forgiveness and the true peace of God's acceptance of you in your conscience unless you have actually repented completely and turned against yourself and turned utterly towards the Savior.

Now, you can see, that's a pretty radical thing. That's a real appreciation of sin and that's radical repentance. If you do that, you will have a devotion to Jesus, that will outdistance your devotion to your mom or dad; or your husband or your wife; or your mother your father; or your son or your daughter. You will have a personal devotion to Jesus that will live through thick and thin and that what salvation is. The Savior has born you in Himself in a way that He did not bare me. He bore me in some terrible ways but He bore you in some drastic ways. You cut his heart open, you caused Him pain that cannot be described. You caused Him agonies of forsakenness in His father relationship, but nobody can explain through a few words; "like my God, My God why Has Thou of all people forsaken Me?" You caused Him pain that none of the rest of us did. You have a personal repentance and a personal receiving of Him to do that none of us can do for you. When you do that, at last true peace is manifested in your conscience and you at last stand with peace even with the world because you are at peace with the Creator of the world. There is nothing like that peace.

I would suggest, that you do make that peace if you haven't done it. If you have lived with a mental assent then I would suggest to you that you make that peace this morning, and that you do it definitely and deliberately. I would think that you are better to put your all on the alter, you are better to come up here, you are better to kneel down and you are better to say Lord Jesus and confess to Him your sins and repent of them. Explain to Him that you didn't know that at all. If you want Him in your heart and you want Him to live in you from this day forward and that you will devote yourself first and foremost to Him because you owe Him everything. I think really, if you lived in that unreality for years, I think you should make a definite commitment and turn your life over to Him in a definite way. So that other people can see, so that above all you know on such and such a day I did that. I made my commitment to you Lord Jesus and I will stand by that until I see You face to face.