In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the need for redemption and justification for sinful men. He highlights the Latin term "status quo" to describe the fallen state of humanity and the desperate need for God's grace. The preacher emphasizes the importance of recognizing the condemning law of sin before offering the all-forgiving grace of God. He also addresses the issue of modern man's denial of original sin and emphasizes the reality of sin and the fallen nature of humanity. The sermon calls for a genuine understanding of salvation and the power of God's grace in transforming lives.

They all found the promise that there was a God, and that He was a living God, and that wonder of wonder, in ages till in time, He invaded the sea of mankind, and was manifest in the flesh, and that God came down and confronted sinful men with Himself in the form of a man, the man Christ Jesus. But not only did He condescend to reach down from the boat, but He condescended to come down on our level and identify Himself with sinful men. We understand that to be the grace of God, for grace came in and through and by the Lord Jesus Christ. And that, that was when we came to the close of the broadcast by asking this question, what then is the heart of Paul's thoughts over his thinking about God and about sinful men? And we closed by saying that the fundamental question that men face today and yesterday and tomorrow is, what must I do to be saved? And that Paul's whole message here, as it were, simply his thought for his good news, starts from this question. Paul faced the fact that man and his freedom had become alienated from God, and that man's direction instead of toward God was against him. And Paul frankly stated the fact that man needed to be saved to be recovered. And so this gospel tells you about what God has done and is doing towards this question, how can a man be saved? What must a man do to be saved? And then, of course, he talks about man's response. So we're not surprised that when the Apostle Paul will be on a preaching mission to the people over in Antioch of Bithynia, or when he writes to the Christian people in the pagan city of Rome, it is the word salvation which Paul uses. I'm talking to you, Paul will say about God's salvation offered to men. For instance, in Acts 13 and verse 26, as he preaches the people to the people in Antioch of Bithynia, he will say that to us is the word of this salvation, God's salvation sent forth. To us is the word of this salvation sent forth. Or when he's writing to the saints at Ephesus, according to Ephesians 1 and 13, he'll speak of the gospel of pure salvation. The one big, all-embracing, all-encompassing key word of all gospel was salvation. Salvation, that's the subject of all gospel. That's the heart of all gospel. The salvation of God in Jesus Christ, for he has offered the sinful man. Oh, as I pause now before this microphone, and as I think deep inside of my own heart, and as I close my eyes and picture America, and I picture the Piedmont section, and I picture the world, a world that can never be the same, because God Almighty came here as a man, and God's here now, and God has worked, and God is working, as I picture such a world. And I think of the glory of God's salvation, the wonder of it, and then how God sent us this almost so beautiful word today, salvation, salvation, people talking about being saved with no hole in it in their lives, people talking about being saved with no power in our ministry. My soul, how dead we are, how without divine life we are, how we must fight over creeds with different interpretations of passages of scripture, instead of how we ought to come to the morning speech and recognize how little we respect the grace of God that came down to man for us men. Oh, the powerlessness of your ministry and mine, my friends and brethren. You know that God's my judge. We ought to face this thing. There's no use worth the bargain about how many we'll have in Sunday school, or how many we'll have in training union, or how many of us will walk past, or how much we'll raise, or how big a building we'll build. I'm telling you, we're living in a pagan America, and the isms are about daughters, and we lack power. When we pick up Paul's gospel, we're relieved that he had power. God came in power and authenticated his glorious message by marvelous signs and wonders, and people said, This is of God. And I look you in the face now through this microphone and tell you that the one word we need to recover now and to begin to experience some of its holiness and its power and its zeal and its tears and its transformation of character is this word salvation, salvation, salvation. Paul preached about salvation. Oh, in America where everybody is a Christian, one wonders if anybody is. Oh, that's not just the words of a crank. I tell you there's some truth in that, and I bow my head and get out there on that old stump with Jeremiah and weep over America, and weep over Winston-Salem, and weep over this section. Oh, for the salvation of God in Christ Jesus, which was the heart of Paul's gospel, and which is the heart of God's gospel today. It's not a word that they like the hell to joke about. It's the very heart of the whole business. And so the apostle Paul in his age did what we desperately need to do in our day. He preached God's salvation. He proclaimed God's salvation. He presented God's salvation. He explained God's salvation. He prophesied God's salvation. And the apostle Paul preached not simply salvation from sin, not simply salvation from Christ, not simply salvation from death, but he preached salvation through reconciliation and righteousness. And may I add, he lied all night. He had a full gospel and a whole gospel for sinful men. And I want us in the days ahead, and I'm going to be lifting up my voice with what little brain power and heart power I've got, crying in the wilderness whether anybody hears us or not, we need to get us a Bible. And on our faces before God, crying to the Holy Spirit to show us the truth of the Bible, frankly recognize that if what passes as salvation in western Salem today is so, then the Bible is not so. Oh, how we need some people to get saved, saved not only from, but saved to. And so the apostle Paul preaches the salvation that has a crisis to it. We call that past salvation. And then he preached the salvation that has a process to it, and we call that present salvation. And then he preached the salvation that has a future to it, and we call that the hope of glory. The apostle Paul will say in Romans 8 and 24, we were saved. We were saved. That's a crisis, that's past, that's fact. And then he'll say in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2, we are, b-e-i-n-g, being saved. That's something we don't pay much attention to now. And then he'll say in Romans 5 and 9, we shall be saved. Now, that's salvation. It has its past aspect, it has its present fact, it has its future glory. But there is one verse of scripture in the apostle Paul's writing that I think sums up all of this gospel and all of its theology about this glorious word, salvation, that we so desperately need to look at and experience in its power today. That verse of scripture is Romans 5 and verse 1. I want you to read it at your leisure. Romans 5 verse 1, Paul's whole doctrine of salvation is found, and I quote that verse. Paul says, Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into the grace wherein we stand and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. You see it? That's all thanks to salvation. He first looks back to the time when by faith the believer received God's forgiveness in Jesus Christ, and then he dwells on the believer's present blessedness. He uses the expression, the grace wherein we stand. And then in the third place, he looks forward to the time when with sin and death no more he, with all of God's redeemed ones, will see Christ as he is, with an undamned view of him, and praise God's delight in him. Did you get it? Salvation has a past aspect. There is a crisis. Salvation has a present aspect. It's day by day. Salvation has a future hope when with undamned view of Christ we shall see him as he is and we shall delight in him. Let me read that verse of scripture again, Romans 5 verse 1. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God as through our Lord Jesus Christ, that's our past salvation, through whom we also have access by faith into the grace wherein we stand, that's present salvation, and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, that future salvation. Now, my friends, I want to talk with the Lord today about the past. I want you to listen to me. Let Paul preach again. Let's listen to it and see whether or not we have experienced past salvation, or salvation in its past aspect. Paul preached salvation as a past event. It is something that was told. It was a fact. And in this aspect that Paul's presenting of God's salvation in Jesus Christ, he looks back to Christ Jesus, our Lord, as having come, and having lived, and having died, and having been raised, and having been ascended, and our sharing in his peace for us. He is coming for us and to us. He is living for us, he is dying for us, he is rising for us, and our sharing in his whole being, and what he did and what he was. That is salvation as a past event. And when we open the word of God and study Paul's epistles, we find that in the name he uses three great words to picture, to present past salvation. He uses the word reduction, he uses the word justification, he uses the word reconciliation. Now, because I recognize that we live in a day when Bible terms are not recognized, I want to break up these words, and line upon line, precept upon precept, and truth upon truth, I want as the days come ahead, come and go, I want to examine as the Holy Spirit shall give me them, these blessed words, redemption, justification, and reconciliation, all of which are Paul's efforts not to lay down some theology or prove a point, but to present the different aspects of the work in person of our blessed Lord, offered freely to men in what we call the gospel. Now, my friends, first the word redemption uses a noun. Paul uses the word as a noun, and he uses it as a verb. Let me just read perhaps one or two places where the word is used as a noun. In Romans 3-24, Paul says, "...being justified freely by his grace through the redemption." That's our word, that is in Christ Jesus. In Colossians 1-14, we have it as a noun again. It reads as follows, "...in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sin." And then sometimes Paul uses the word redeemed, or the word set free, for instance, as a verb. In Galatians 3-13, the word is used as a verb. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. Or in Galatians 4-5, we read these words, "...to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." Sometimes he uses the same Greek word in Colossians, set free or made free. For instance, in Romans 6-18, the apostle Paul says, "...being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness." Or one other scripture, Romans 8-2, "...for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free," that is our word, "...from the law of sin and death." Now, this word in its noun form, or in its verb form, signified originally the liberation of a slave or a prisoner by payment of a price in the scepter of good. I'll get that directly. The Old Testament translated into Greek was Paul used this word, the verb or the noun, for redemption. It is used to describe God's deliverance. That's from the Old Testament days. It's used to describe God's deliverance of his people from the Egyptian bondage. And the apostle Paul uses the word to express the deliverance of Christians from the bondage of first S.I. in sin, from the bondage of second S.L.E.S.H. flesh, and third from the bondage of the law, L.A.W. law. Christ, the apostle Paul tells us, has delivered us, that's believing sinners, from the cauldron of these sin, flesh, and the law, which together frames D.E.A.T.H. that eternal and spiritual. According to the apostle Paul, man is held in a three-pronged pit. He's broken the law of God, thus he needs redemption. He's a criminal. He lives an unrighteous life before God, and thus he needs justification. And he lost fellowship with God because of sin, and he needs to be reconciled and to be restored to fellowship with a holy God. And so Paul, from different directions, pictures past salvation as a man being delivered, being delivered from the bondage of sin, and flesh, and the law, and he tells us that as we have broken God's law, we need to be redeemed. We need the cause of our unrighteousness to be justified, and we need the cause, we are wanderers outside the terror ship of God, to be reconciled and restored within the favor of a holy God. So these three blessed words, redemption, and justification, and reconciliation, or reconciliation, are the three great Bible words that Paul uses to talk about past salvation. Now, Paul tells us that sin, and he personifies sin, sin uses flesh as its tool, and the law spurs the flesh off. Now, we'll look at that more and more from Sunday morning to Sunday morning. Sin, that one bondage we're in, bondage of sin, and sin uses the flesh, that man's sinful nature, as its tool. And the holy law of God comes to man in the bondage of sin, using the flesh as its tool, with its commands of thou shalt and thou shalt not. And the law serves to spur the flesh on to more rebellion, lawlessness, and effort. And therefore, according to the Apostle Paul, man needs to be redeemed as a reference to the broken law of God. Man needs to be justified with reference to his filthy garments. Man needs to be reconciled with reference to the fact that he's out of fellowship with God, and they describe Paul's wonderful gospel of salvation in its past as faith. But now, my friends, my time's already gone. Before I come to an analysis of these great words, I want to lay down this fact, and that'll have to do on this program. Man needs to be redeemed and justified and reconciled. But before we consider these three words that describe God's way of deliverance for sinful men, we desperately, in your dear mind, need to study on our faces before God, first the status quo of sinful men. Now, that's a Latin term which, in the words of an old country preacher, is the Latin word for the fix that sinful men and women are in all over this country. And there's a Latin word to describe the mess we're in, and to set the pattern and lay a condition and a foundation for somebody to be anxious to hear the truth and the answer to why men need to deceive and how they can deceive. My time's up. I'm going to start here next door. See, this is all for the message this morning. Good morning, friends. We'll roll this morning for the third in the series of messages on the general subject of salvation as preached by the Apostle Paul, and we've been saying that this must be the message of this hour, and that the desperateness of the days in which we live, and they are truly desperate, demand that we not only proclaim God's salvation in all of its fullness, but demand that men and women shall respond to God's proper and shall experience the salvation of Almighty God. Last Lord's Day, we stopped having established the fact that, according to Paul, salvation is the word of the gospel, or the gospel is the word of salvation, and that the Apostle Paul considered salvation as being a past crisis, a present experience, and a future hope. And we began to talk last Lord's Day about salvation as a past event, noting over and over again the scriptures talk about people as having been saved. We closed the broadcast last Lord's Day by suggesting that we need desperately, before we offer a remedy, to pronounce the proper diagnosis, and to show this generation who have lost sight of it, that they are in God's sight, standing tremendously in the need of being delivered, and being justified, and being reconciled to a holy God. We said that we need to study the status quo, and we quoted the fact that an old country preacher said the status quo are the two Latin words to describe the fix men are in today. In other words, they set the foundation and provide the occasion for preaching the gospel that men do need to be saved, and that man may be saved because of what God has done, and what God is doing. In other words, we want to look this morning at this fact. Why does man need to be saved? Why does man need to be redeemed? Why does man need to be justified? Why does man need to be reconciled? There's no use talking about present salvation unless a man has experienced salvation in his past aspect. Now, this is tremendously important, and as we open the word of God, and we study what Paul taught, and what Paul preached, we are dead certain that if he's right about the condition men are in, then we may well give heed to the remedy Paul says is provided in the gospel. If he's right about the condition, then it stands to reason he'll be right about the remedy. Now, this proffers to us today something that we must not neglect. For the Bible is crystal clear that there's something radically wrong with men, and that that something radically wrong with men is of such a nature that unless that condition is corrected, and men themselves and all of their attitudes and actions are changed inside and outside, that there is no hope for them in this life or the life to come. Men need, according to the Bible, to be altered. They need to be radically altered and radically changed. When men, according to the Bible, have used their free will to become, in the language of the Bible, very bad. Now, when the apostle Paul and the other apostles preached, they could assume that even the pagan hearers who listened to them as they preached on the street or somewhere, that even the pagan hearers were deeply conscious of deserving the divine anger. In Paul's day, men felt that they were under God's condemnation, and thus against such a background, the gospel as Paul would preach it, appeared as God's good news. It brought news of possible healing to men who knew they were mortally ill. Now, that isn't the condition today. We're running around here trying to get people to receive a savior, but they do not need a savior. They say, well, I'm all right. My heart's in the right place. I've never done anything against God. I do the best I can. Of course, I'm not perfect, but I think that I'll make it. I'm not disturbed. Now, when Paul preached, and you can bet this is sure, they preached against the background of men and women who knew, brother, they knew that they were mortally ill. Now, I say that's changed today, and now the diagnosis must be preached. By that, I mean that before we preach Christ in all of His saving, glory, and work, that we must do once again the job of taking the surgeon's instruments and opening up to sinners their truthful condition. In other words, western Salem and surrounding territory is not full of men and women running around begging doctors to operate on them for cancer, but because they do not believe they got cancer. And this section's not full of men and women running and catching hold of the coattails of some child of God, and saying, say, do you know any way on earth that I could have peace for all the misery I have, and I could have the sense of my sins forgiven, and I could go about my daily duties feeling that I've been made righteous in the sight of God, and that God has accepted me in the Lord Jesus Christ. That isn't happening, is it? And the reason it isn't happening is that people today do not know, like they did in Paul's day, that they are mortally ill, and we have to preach what is called the bad news. It's not good news to open up the word of God, and let God tell us the truth about ourselves, that we're hateful in His sight, that from our mother's womb we'll go about telling lies, speaking lies and hypocrisy, that our feet are stripped to shed blood, that if we open our mouths it's full of venomous snakes, that there is none righteous, no, not one, there's none that seek it good. Now, that isn't good news, is it? But that is the truth that must be accepted, for if a man has no sin and no sense of sin, he'll not feel any need or any desire to be forgiven. If a man thinks that his garments are all right, he'll have no desire to have those garments replaced by the garments of the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore, before we open up Paul's gospel of how men can be saved, we need to tell what Paul especially in this hour was the bad news of the condition of men, of the desperate condition of men, for I say to you, the gospel will not have a hearing among men unless those men that need the cure that is in Christ Jesus. In other words, what I'm saying is, my preacher brother, you listen to me now, we need, and the preachers must take the we need a recovery of the old sense of sin, and the recovery of the sense of sin is essential to the ongoing of the gospel. Now, the Lord Jesus Christ, when he was here, clearly took it for granted that men are bad. He, until we really feel that Christ's assumption that our condition is desperate and our character is bad, until we really feel that he was right in his assumption of this and that he was true, though we are part of the world he came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom his words are addressed. Now, we need to cap here. There's a good deal of friction now in what we call evangelism, and I would lift up a note again and say that in God's name, and for Christ's sake, and for soul's sake, and for our home's sake, and for America's sake, and for sinners' sake, we need to quit skipping over so lightly the desperate character and condition men are in before we try to put a poultice on something to ease wounds that men do not feel. We need desperately to take the word of God in the power of a holy spirit and lay open to this generation again its awful putrid stickiness in the sight of a holy God. You know, this generation, I know I speak the truth, lacks the first condition for understanding what my Lord is talking about, for that first condition of understanding the gospel is the fact that we have come to the place of despair of any of our efforts, and that we feel that we are actually Lord. C.S. Lewis, that great, challenging, provocative writer of England, has this to say. He said, God may be more than moral goodness. He is not less. The road to the promised land runs right past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended, but there is no transcending the law for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all of their strength to meet that claim, and then fairly and squarely have faced the fact that they have signaled a fail as they face the claims of almighty God. In other words, we need to take the holy Lord God again and wield it in the might of the holy spirit that the slain of the Lord may be many, and that once again in America we may hear the cries of men and women, What must I do to be saved? Now this is important, and I tell you when we come to Paul preaching, we find out that there's something present here in this world, and that something is S-I-N, sin. Men are sinners. Men are sinners. It's here. Sin is a fact. It's here. It's here on this earth. It's here in our homes. It's here in the atmosphere. Sin, S-I-N, sin with the hiss of the serpent has corrupted this world. Tell us that Frederick the Great, the great Prussian emperor, commented as he listened to a preacher who was discounting on the natural goodness of man, and the great emperor said, That preacher does not know the perishing human race. That's right, my friends. He's not talking about how good people are now. He doesn't know people. I say to you, man is a sinner. Man is a sinner. Man breaks God's law. Man doesn't break God's law involuntarily, merely, but man deliberately seeks to break God's law, and so he incurs God Almighty's condemnation. We are told by the apostle Paul that mankind is sold unto sin, S-O-L-D, sold unto sin, and that sin, like slavery, is a state. It's not simply an incident without cause and result. It's a radical wrongness in our lives. It's a turning away from the one true and righteous God. It's a depravity. It's not merely a series of wrong choices or moral missteps which a man may stop if he's aligned to. My friends, it's a positive and a destructive principle in Paul and man. Sin is here. Sin is here. Now, when the apostle Paul comes to talk about how sin came to be, or rather the origin of sin, we may get into some difficulty. At least two ways are used by the apostle Paul to talk about how sin came to be. The classic passage of scripture in the apostle Paul's writings and preaching of what we call original sin is in chapter 5 of Romans, beginning at verse 12. And there, in some ways that we may not be able to understand, our condition and our depravity and our awful heritage is linked up with the first man Adam. In the first chapter of Romans, verses 18 to 32, in that awful indictment of mankind, in that catalogue of the progress of sin, the apostle Paul seems to see the sin as its root in man's turning away from the true knowledge of God as revealed to him. I'm not here to go into those passages this morning. I know that there are a thousand different interpretations of them. I simply say that whatever your view, as you seek to interpret these passages, the fact remains that whether we can understand clearly how sin got started and how it made its appearance and all of that, there's one thing dead certain, and saying that is that sin is here. The apostle Paul, one concerned so much in trying to tell us how it came to be as in telling us that it's here and proving his point, and then when the point was proven and accepted by him, he preached the wonderful salvation that a redeeming God has provided in the Lord Jesus Christ. Whether then we can understand the origin of sin, we dead sure know that it's here. It's everywhere. It's a universal state. It's something which affects every man. If without the fact of the disease, men are sick with sin. Men are sick with sin. Sin is in man. Sin is in the human race. Sin is in the world. Man is wrong. The race is wrong. The world is wrong. And all are under the divine condemnation of a holy God and need to be saved. Thank God man can be saved. We praise God for that. I say to you that sin is not just ignorance to be erased or cured by education. I say to you that sin is not acquisitiveness. That's the communist view that's sweeping the world, and therefore that sin as acquisitiveness can be cured by the abolition of private property. I say that sin is not good in disguise or the soul's growing pains to be remedied by wise doses of sweetness and light. I say that sin is evil. It's evil. And all of these that I've mentioned have been suggested in your day and life, and they've been tried and found wanting. No, sir. Sin is malignantly evil. It's evil. It is as to its nature. Sin enslaves men and women. Evil is not due simply to external causes. Evil is not a mere negation. Evil is not a not yet or a hangover from our so-called animal ancestor. No, sir. Evil is not humanity's growing pains all destined to pass away as man goes upward. And all that we've heard so much about that in a day gone by. No, sir. None of these, with their suggested remedies, have been able to make bad men good. And that's exactly what the gospel talks about, how God makes bad men good in his sight. No, sir. Sin and evil are in the human heart, and man does evil because he is evil. In a gospel, therefore, that just puts mustard plasters or poultices on the wrong actions of men and leaves the man still evil, is not the gospel of God's great salvation. My friends, I wish you'd believe me, not for your neighbor but for yourself, that there is a radical wrongness present in the very structure of our individual and corporate lives. And judgment, that's what Paul calls the wrath of God, God's holy love reacting against evil. That judgment, that wrath, falls on all—that's you and me—who forsake the living God to live according to the world's self-deifying pride and egoism. And if we'd have preached Paul's gospel today, we must begin with the reality of sin and the fact of a fallen world. Dr. Alexander White of glorious vivid memory said, if a Pauline preacher in our own day were preached to all men's hearts the all-forgiving grace of God, he must first bring home to all men's consciences the all-condemning law of God. If he would offer alike the gift of God, he must charge home the wages of sin, aye, and that not in a large and general and rhetorical way, but in a close and a personal and a homecoming way. Some writer has said that one of the five things which is scandalous to modern man is original sin. But whether we understand it or not, it's so. We are fallen creatures, whether we like it or not. Sin is here. We can put our heads under the sand like the ostrich, but it's still here. We are fallen creatures. Sin is everywhere. Sin is crime. Sin is rebellion against God, and it'll not do to try to hide our faces. Sin is very much a fact. We are sinners. Men must be faced with this fact—the fact of indwelling sin, the fact of the corruption of man's heart. That is what is wrong in this whole world. And thus before the Apostle Paul, we'll talk about the grace of God and God's remedy. Salvation—wonderful, wonderful thing. For he talks about that. He deals with the fact of sin and the fact that God Almighty is not indifferent about sin. Sixteen times the Apostle Paul refers to the wrath of God. He shows wrath, Paul says. Wrath is being revealed, Paul tells us. Some people are vessels of wrath, Paul tells us. He speaks of the day of wrath. Christ is our deliverer, according to Paul, of the wrath to come. Wrath, God's wrath. In the Bible, wrath is a personal activity of God. Paul found the divine reaction to evil, an awful reality. It is God's holy displeasure at sin. It is the eternal wrath reaction of a holy God against evil with which God would not be the moral governor of the world. It is both present and future. It is that divine aversion to evil which, although active now, will reach its climax at the judgment of a holy God. According to Paul, when men rebel against God, God gives them up, even in this life, to their sins, to the suffering of the body, to the hardening of their hearts, to the dulling of their spirits. God gives them up, and this goes on today. Oh, sin is everywhere. Sin is in man. The awful fruits and results of sin. Go out, John, and look at a graveyard. Sin is that. Sin is back of sickness. Sin is back of heartache. Sin is back of all the tragedy in this whole world. That sin is sucked into me. And sin is the reason my Savior hung on a cross. Men with sin in them, with evil hands and evil hearts, met the Lord God in Christ, by with wicked hands, laying hands on the Son of God, and doing Him to a murderous wickedness on Calvary's tree. That's what sin in action. Sin with its gloves on. Purity, sin, murder, and the Son of God.