I Don'T Need God If I Can Save Myself

I believe our denominations are in trouble and our churches have lost their influence upon society. I believe the church is a laughingstock today among millennials. I believe the church has lost its focus and in turn has lost its direction.

It mainly has become a self-absorbed entity focused upon its own comfort and survival. I believe the underpinnings of a society in moral chaos can be attributed to a powerless church. I believe I can point to our spiritual dullness and lack of authority in the pulpit and put my finger on the pulse beat of the problem.

It is this, friends. We have taken salvation out of the hands of God and placed it in the hands of men. I don't need God if I can save myself.

And that's the title of my message today, friends. My text can be found in the Book of Romans. You can turn in your Bibles there now, friends.

We will be in chapter 9 and in verses 11 through 16. This is a message on the doctrine of election. And this message will more than likely upset some folks who hold to a different opinion that they can turn to God anytime they want to and be saved.

That salvation is on their timetable and the power to be saved is in their hands. But my Bible says otherwise. I will preface my message with my own personal confession.

There was a time in my life where I absolutely hated the doctrine of election and I was suspicious of those who held to it. I remember years ago, many years ago, I hosted a prayer meeting for some Southern Baptist pastors in my community and we were all Armenians. One week, a local Reformed Baptist pastor showed up at the meeting and I looked at him like he had horns on his head.

What was this Calvinist going to do? Wreck our meeting? I thought the doctrine of election was divisive and that it divided churches. But do you know what, friends? The doctrine of election does divide, for it separates the sheep from the goats. How we got in this sad spiritual state in our churches goes back to a drift in our theology.

The New England theology of Jonathan Edwards gradually became watered down by his followers giving man more responsibility and salvation. I have a chapter which explains this in detail and I named the names of the ministers in that drift away in my biography of Azahel Nettleton. I want us to look today and stand face to face with the Word of God and what it says about sovereign grace because that's what grace is, friends.

It is given freely by a sovereign God to whom he has elected. God revealed to me his sovereign grace one Sunday morning as I was sitting in an Arminian Baptist church. I was led to read our chapter today, friends, and the Spirit of God plainly opened up his Word to my heart in regard to the doctrine of election.

If you are saved, friend, it's because God saved you. Salvation is in his hands. He is the one who gives saving faith.

Let us look now at our text in Romans chapter 9 beginning in verse 11. Here now is the Word of God and may the Spirit of the Lord attend the reading of his Holy Word. For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand.

Not of works, but of him that calleth. It was said unto her, the elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

Let me pause here, friends, because it is here where we get a bone of contention in our hearts against God and his Word. Regarding that he can save who he wants and damn the rest, this can be very upsetting to us as we see God as some kind of monster. But God is no monster, friend.

The monster is your heart. Verse 14 answers our accusations against God's sovereign mercy and salvation. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid, for he sayeth to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. I believe, friends, that many of our ills in our churches today lay at the door of our understanding as to how a sinner gets saved. The pastor who presents you a little, impotent Jesus who stands helplessly at the door of your heart, knocking with his hat in his hand like an insurance salesman would stand there knocking and knocking in the hope that you'll reply and answer the door and let him in, is a poor illustration of salvation and a misrepresentation of the blood-stained Christ of the Bible who sits on a throne of authority at the right hand of God, and he earned that right by way of a bloody cross.

If you get saved, friend, it's not because you heard this poor preacher's shaky voice, but that you're saved because you have heard his voice of authority, Christ the Redeemer. Salvation is Christ. Christ is hidden in the bosom of the Father, and he must be revealed to you by the preaching of the gospel and the attending power and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

You must receive a revealed Christ. If you think you can take Jesus anytime you want to, when you are good and ready, because the choice is in your hands, you are greatly deceived and in great danger of pride of a false profession and damnation in eternity by resting upon a false hope based on a false faith, based on a false perception of the Christ of the Bible. I want to take the time now to read you Jonathan Edwards' concern on this very subject.

Please listen carefully to his words. The longer I live, and the more I have to do with the souls of men in the work of the ministry, the more I see of this. Notions of this sort are one of the main hindrances of the success of the preaching of the word and other means of grace in the conversion of sinners.

With respect to self-flattery and presumption, nothing can possibly be conceived more directly tending to it than a notion of liberty, at all times possessed, consisting in a power to determine one's own will to good or evil, which implies a power men have, at all times, to determine them to repent and turn to God. And what can more effectually encourage the sinner, in present delays and neglects, and embolden him to go on in sin, in a presumption of having his own salvation, at all times, at his command? It destroys the very notion of conversion itself. There can probably be no such thing, or anything akin to what the scripture speaks of conversion, renovation of the heart, regeneration, etc., if growing good by a number of self-determined acts are all that is required or to be expected.

What I have seen of the dreadful consequences of these prevalent notions everywhere, and what I am convinced will still be their consequences so long as they will continue to prevail, fills me with concern. I will stop there, friends. I wonder what the old boy would say, what Jonathan Edwards would say to our church methodologies today, and how we work on the emotions, with a tender sob story, and get people to respond to our gospel invitations by walking an aisle, and repeating the prayer, and joining the church, without ever presenting credible evidence in their life of regeneration.

I don't need God if I can save myself, because I can get to heaven on my terms, when I'm good and ready. Let us pray.