Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: Making God's word plain. The alliance of confessing evangelicals presents God's eternal truths with Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse and the Bible.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. There is tragedy in connection with the self-deceit of this school of thinking. Such people believing that they have no old nature, they are forced to the conclusion that what they do is not sin. Therefore, they do not confess it to God for forgiveness and they remain in a state of unforgiveness and of self-delusion, a state which has no proper concept of the holiness of God or of the exceeding sinfulness of sin.

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: With his friendly manner, vivid analogies and faithful exposition of the scriptures, Dr. Barnhouse makes the Bible relevant to modern man. His sermons are just as applicable today as when they were first preached decades ago. In the great hymn Rock of Ages, we sing foul, I to the fountain fly. Wash me, Savior, or I die. When we are justified through faith in Jesus Christ, his blood cleanses us from sin once and for all. And as we grow in sanctification, his blood continues to provide cleansing for our individual particular sins. Have you been washed in the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

This week, we turn to 1 John chapter 1 and verses 8 through 10. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with his message cleansing part one.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto the our father and our God and in the Holy Spirit. We ask thee that thou shalt reach out across the nation this day and touch the hearts of many people that those who listen may be moved by thy Holy Spirit. If they do not know Jesus Christ to come to him, and if they do know him, to grow in grace and in the knowledge of thy truth that our lives may be transformed and that we may show in our daily living that he is indeed our Lord. We ask it in the name and for the sake of our Savior, the Lord Jesus.

Amen. We shall consider the question of sin in the life of the believer and God's means of dealing with that sin. There is a great difference between sin and sins. Individual sins are the evidence of the old nature of sin. They are like boils caused by poison in the bloodstream. Apply ointment at one spot, they'll break out elsewhere. The nature of the poison is such that it must break out. It can do nothing else. To form any other estimate of the nature of sin is to bring a serious charge against God who says that our hearts are deceitful above all things and incurably wicked, sick.

To hold any other view of sin is to call God's solemn word into question. It can readily be seen therefore that that we must consider both sin and sins if we are to know true victory in Christ. And it should be remarked and admitted that all human beings are on the same level so far as the existence and the potentialities of sin are concerned. In order to understand this difference, we must first of all remove from our minds the commonly held concept of sin. The laws and codes of conduct of the world are based on a philosophy far removed from God's concept of sin.

Human law does not judge a man to be a thief until he has actually stolen something. In other words, a man is not a criminal until he has committed a crime. God's declaration is quite different. The world says that men are not sinners until they have sin. God declares that men sin because they are sinners. The world looks only at the eruption of the boils and does not consider the virus of sin that is within. But God has declared all men to be sinners by nature and by choice and has written over them the divine decree that they are estranged, alienated from him because of their sin.

Now let us consider how God deals with any individual manifestation of sin. Let us take for our example two people brought up in the same environment. The best example would be brothers born of the same father and mother and born at the same time. These twins have had the same education and training and of course the same inheritance. They are equally endowed with intelligence and health so that outwardly they are equal. But one of them has seen himself in God's sight as a guilty lost sinner and he has turned away from any hope of salvation through himself.

He has put his faith in Christ alone. He can honestly sing my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus' name. On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. The other brother has never received the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior and he still stands in the sight of God, a lost sinner. Now we'll suppose for the sake of our argument that a great temptation has come to the Christian brother and he has succumbed. You can make that individual act of sin to be whatever you will, whether it be the sin that was committed by Moses, David, Peter or or you.

At the same time, the unsaved brother commits exactly the same sin. What is the difference in the sight of God between these two acts of sin precisely alike committed by two men with similar backgrounds, their only difference being the presence of saving faith in the life of one of them. We make bold to say that there is a vast difference between the two acts and that God treats each case differently. Let us first take the act of sin committed by the unsaved man. Let it be what you will. It has not changed his status before God in the slightest detail.

Although like David, he may have compounded sin to cover sin, murder to protect adultery, yet this unsaved man is still in the sight of God a lost soul without hope and without Christ. The individual act of sin, whether it were but an isolated outbreak or one in a lifelong series of crimes, makes no difference whatsoever in God's estimate of the lost soul as one who is dead in trespasses and sin and under the just condemnation of the broken law, deserving the wrath of God which comes upon all of the children of disobedience. After one such act or after 10,000 such acts, the mercy of God can come through to that soul.

Call him out of darkness into light. Translate him from the power of Satan into the kingdom of the son of God's love. God can deal with him even though he be a murderer who has come to die on the cross beside Jesus Christ. But until the moment of that regeneration comes, the individual is a lost soul. If he dies in his sins, the word of Christ stands formally to attest it whether I go, you cannot come. Now the brother who is now a believer was once like the unsaved brother. It can truly be said of him, you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience among whom also we all had our manner of life in times past in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature the children of wrath even as others.

But now in him, the moment of regeneration has come. Sin is dealt with once for all and forever. The poisonous nature of the corruption is put to the account of Christ who bears the stroke of its judgment and who frees us from its penalty forever. Thus we can say in as in Acts 13:39 by Christ, all who believe are justified from all things from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses. This is the positive cleansing of the believer from all sin. And do not think for a moment that all that we receive at the moment of our new birth is the remission of sins that have been committed up to the moment of salvation.

For God's word declares by Christ, all who believe are justified from all things. And again, we read the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. The Greek is keeps on cleansing us. We sing it in one of our hymns, my sin. Oh, the bliss of this glorious thought. My sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to his cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, oh my soul. But we must realize that although God looks at the unbeliever in only one way, he looks at the believer in two ways.

Perhaps I can illustrate it this way. Suppose a baseball comes crashing through your window. What do you do to the boy that throws the ball? Well, it depends upon whether he's junior or the boy next door. If he's the boy next door, you may admonish him, you may speak to his father about it, but you don't touch him. Your own boy, you may chastise him. Well, thus it is. God Almighty treats the unsaved man and the saved man in two different ways. It is not to be supposed that the sin committed by the believing brother will go unnoticed any more than a good parent would fail to chastise their own son.

God must certainly deal with sin, every sin committed by a believer. And there can be no fellowship, no victory until sin has been sternly dealt with in a way that does no violence to the holiness of God. Faithfulness to the whole council of God forces me to add a statement that I would like to leave out. Sometimes a Christian gets out of the will of God. Sin enters his life and remains unconfessed and unforgiven like a splinter in the flesh. It festers. It can poison the whole life and even cause physical death, a sin. For one unconfessed sin brings others in its train.

Abraham's lie followed his leaving Palestine where God had told him to stay. David's remaining at home from battle was followed by one sin and then another. It is possible that these mounting sins may bring the believer to instant judgment. For there is a sin that is unto death, not unto spiritual death but unto physical death. Paul told the Corinthian believers to deliver one brother over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord. Again, he told them that their commission of one particular sin in connection with not discerning the Lord's body in the communion service had brought forth sickness and death.

We read in 1 Corinthians 11 for this cause many are weak and sickly among you and many sleep. Oh, let us fear God, Christian brethren, not fright but godly fear. Remember that he is a God of holiness who demands holiness in his people. God does look at the believer through Jesus Christ, seeing him perfect in the Savior. But God also looks at the believer as he is in his condition and has provided a series of measures whereby the believer's condition may be lifted toward his position in Christ. Before looking at these measures of cleansing in detail, it's necessary for us to pause a moment in order to dispose of two false ideas.

First of all, some Christians teach that the old nature is entirely eradicated when the soul is born again. And hence forth that the Christian is in a state of sinless perfection. They base their doctrine on a few passages of scripture without regard to the whole body of biblical teaching on the subject. Their principal rallying point is in the King James translation of 1 John 3:9 which states, whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin for his seed remaineth in him and he cannot sin because he is born of God. Now we know of course that the revised version renders it correctly, whosoever is born of God doeth no sin.

But even if we take the authorized version, I believe the passage can be rightly interpreted with due reference to all other passages that bear on the subject. We must place it beside Paul's estimate of himself long after he was saved. He said in Romans 7:18, for I know that in me, that is in my flesh dwelleth no good thing. What the Bible teaches is that every believer has two distinct natures which we may name Saul and Paul, the old and the new name of the great apostle. The teaching of the word then is that Saul can do nothing that is good in the sight of God and that Paul can do nothing that is bad.

Since it is no longer anything of him but of Christ that dwelleth in him, Saul has one nature that cannot possibly do righteousness under God's definition of the term and a new nature that cannot possibly commit sin. Since it is the very life of the sinless Christ, the difficulty with those who hold the doctrine of sinless perfection is that they have looked at only one side of Bible truth. It should be noted that the Bible says that the one who believes that he does not have his old nature anymore deceives himself. I once talked with a young woman who was in spiritual difficulties.

After a little conversation, it developed that she'd been brought up in the home of a father who took her to prayer meeting every Wednesday night along with her brothers and sisters. Each Wednesday night, he got up and gave a testimony something like this. I thank God that I have not sinned for 11 years, 3 months and 5 days. Then the next week, it was I thank God I've not sinned for 11 years, 3 months and 12 days. And the next week, 19 days. The girl told me that she and her brothers and sisters had learned to calculate all of the days by sevens and knew the short months and the long months and would know in advance what their father was going to say that he had lived without sin.

And then she said to me, but at home life was hell for mother. Now you see the man deceived himself. He did not deceive his wife. He did not deceive his children. The terrible thing about the doctrine of the eradication of the old nature is that ultimately those who believe in it come to the place where they say what I do is not sin. And this can be very very terrible and can lead to the blasphemy of living in sin and describing it as holiness. It is a very dangerous doctrine. How foolish then to teach that the old nature has been eradicated.

One teacher boasted of using a stronger word. He said that he followed Romans 6 where we read of the body of sin being destroyed. But the same Greek word destroyed is used in Hebrews 2:14 where Christ is said to have destroyed the devil. But the devil is very active still even though destroyed. And so is our old nature Saul. In Romans 7, Paul found that this body of death was far from being destroyed. It was still actively working. But fortunately, God has left us in no doubt about this matter for we have a formal statement from him covering the whole doctrine.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. There is tragedy in connection with the self-deceit of this school of thinking. I cannot help but emphasizing and repeating this important fact that such people believing that they have no old nature and believing that they cannot sin, they are forced to the conclusion that what they do is not sin. Therefore, they do not confess it to God for forgiveness and they remain in a state of unforgiveness and of self-delusion, a state which has no proper concept of the holiness of God or of the exceeding sinfulness of sin.

Still another school of theological thought has seen the error involved in this first delusion and yet in seeking to escape it has fallen into a more grievous error, teaching that the old nature of sin remains within the believer but that it does not operate anymore because of the presence of the new life. For any man to say at the close of the day that nothing in his life that day has displeased God is to ignore the character of the old nature of sin that dwells within. And it is to ignore the character of that nature in the face of God's definite declaration about it.

Thus we read in 1 John 1:10, if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. I make so bold as to say that if any man be he the most saintly believer whoever lived at the close of any evening in his life should say that he has lived that day entirely without sin of omission or commission would be guilty according to this verse of making God a liar. But between these two errors, eradication on the one side and nullification on the other, lies one of the most glorious truths of all scripture.

God, knowing that there was a fountain of evil within us which could never do anything but pour forth pollution, made provision in advance for our daily, hourly, momentary cleansing from sin so that the old life can be held in check. In 1 John 1:9 we read, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That is the truth which makes our fellowship with God a continuing possibility and which opens our eyes to a true walk with God. The Lord willing, we shall see how God provides for the believer's cleansing.

And our father, we pray thee that the Holy Spirit shall take this message to each heart and use it to thy glory in Jesus' name. Amen.

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc: The precious blood of Jesus Christ is the double cure that cleanses every believer from the guilt and power of sin. You are listening to Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. Today's message is entitled cleansing part one. Satan has many tools to entice people to commit sin. He is our great enemy and he has many devious tactics. Dr. Barnhouse shows us how we can employ scripture and the power of the Holy Spirit to defeat the evil one. Dr. Barnhouse's booklet Temptation and how to meet it is our free gift to you. Simply call 1-800-488-1888 or visit alliancenet.org.

God's ways defy man's wisdom. But in order for the world to learn God's ways, they must be presented logically and lovingly. And that's what Dr. Barnhouse's messages are all about. Would you help us to share his teaching with a needy generation? You can make a one-time gift or become a monthly donor by visiting our website at alliancenet.org or call 1-800-488-1888. And our mailing address is 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania 17601. We are pleased that you have listened to today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. When you reach out to us, please mention the call letters or dial position of the radio station to which you are listening.

If you listen online, take note of the website address. Knowing how you connect with us will make us better stewards of the resources God has entrusted to us. Contact us at alliancenet.org. And once again, if you would like to receive our free gift offer, Dr. Barnhouse's booklet Temptation and how to meet it, call us at 1-800-488-1888. Confession is good for the soul is not just a familiar saying. It is a biblical principle as well. Join us again next week as Dr. Barnhouse points out through confession according to God 's word. That's next week on Dr.

Barnhouse and the Bible.