Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

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Guest (Male): Tonight I'm going to speak on the topic of faith and repentance as gifts of God and gifts of regeneration. There's a very tiny—I think that's the word—thin line between what we as Calvinists believe and others believe, in particular Arminians and Pelagians.

I am so glad you're here, Adam and my mom. This division may be tiny and it may be as narrow as a razor's edge, but there's a million miles of difference between the two. There really is. So, I want to look at that tonight. I want you to turn, if you would, to the book of John, the third chapter. We're going to look at regeneration tonight. We're going to look at faith, repentance, and the order of these doctrines.

I got a lot of my theology when I first became Reformed from Arthur W. Pink. As a matter of fact, when I was pastoring the First Baptist Church in Turbeville, South Carolina, I read Arthur Pink's book, *The Sovereignty of God*. Six months later, I woke up one day, went to the mirror, and said, "Oh my goodness, I've become a dreaded Calvinist." It took six months for me to sort it all out, and God gave me the peace about the doctrines that I've never looked back since.

But John, as we're going to read, there's another John that's important in my life. He's not Baptist, he's Presbyterian, and his name is John Murray from way up in the Highlands in Scotland. He grew up in the mountains of Scotland. John Murray wrote a book called *Redemption Accomplished and Applied*, and it was one of the most important books in my theological pilgrimage toward understanding salvation. It's a fantastic book. I would recommend it for you.

The beautiful thing about that book was I read that book and for the first time as a Southern Baptist, I realized that there was such a thing as the effectual call. I'd never heard that terminology before in thirty-something years. I realized that there was a word "regeneration" and how it fit in the scheme of salvation. I understood other words in that book, but the most important thing that I learned in that book was that there was a systematic order of salvation in which one step led to the next step, which led to the next step, which led to the next step. I never knew that.

That's one thing I love about the doctrines of grace, that they're systematic in order, that God has a scheme that He's put together, and they're biblical. Every one of the doctrines that we teach is totally biblical from the word of God. So, let's look at John and what Jesus says about regeneration in the book of John, the third chapter, beginning with verse three: "Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

To begin with, most soul-winning manuals in our day will begin by telling you a lot of things in order to get you to make a decision. They will try to manipulate everything in every way they can in order to get you to agree to mentally assist that Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus here did everything that He could to discourage Nicodemus. He did everything He could to confuse Nicodemus. He did everything He could to not let Nicodemus make a little, small, shallow decision which would be totally ineffective.

He starts out by talking about not his soul, but the fact that he's got to be born again. Nicodemus, of course, being a lost person, took it to mean that he had to be physically born again. So, he went off on this tangent talking to Jesus about being physically born again. Then we look at verse four. Nicodemus saith unto Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born?"

Jesus answered, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is every one that is born of the Spirit."

Now, what Jesus is explaining here is what would be called today the new birth, being born again. That's exactly what He's talking about. He's trying to explain to Nicodemus that it's not a physical rebirth, but it is a spiritual rebirth. Nicodemus had trouble understanding that. Then He talked about the Holy Spirit. He said the wind blows whether it will, and the Holy Spirit is the same way. That's so true. We can preach sermon after sermon after sermon, and the Holy Spirit will come to those that He intends to save, and He will save those people.

We can't see Him. We can't feel the Holy Spirit. We don't know where He's at, but God knows where He is, and He knows where He is. So, Jesus tried to explain that to them. We see that faith and repentance are gifts of regeneration. What is regeneration? Brother Earl tonight talked about the word "atonement." I'm going to talk about another theological word: regeneration.

Regeneration is one of those words which will spell the difference between a Calvinist and those that do not believe as a Calvinist. It's a very crucial word, and it's a very important word. Turn over to Ephesians, if you will, the second chapter. In Ephesians, the second chapter, we see as we read in verse five: "Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, by grace are ye saved."

The word "quickened" is used, and the word "quickened" really means regeneration. It means being born again, as Nicodemus was talking about. It means making something out of nothing and rebirthing something. That word "quicken" is the same as regeneration. R.C. Sproul wrote on the board—I think I learned some of my theology from some Baptists somewhere—but honestly, a lot of it was from R.C. Sproul, John Murray, Iain Murray, and some great men of God. Then there was Arthur Pink, Jonathan Edwards, and all those others.

I must give complete credit to R.C. Sproul. I didn't know what regeneration meant in my early ministry. I didn't know the depth of it. But R.C. Sproul in his book wrote, one time there was a professor that wrote on the blackboard to his students these words: he put "Faith = Regeneration; Faith causes Regeneration." Then the professor wrote under that, "Regeneration causes Faith." He put his chalk down and he walked out of the room and left that strange message on the blackboard.

There was dead silence in the room. After he left, they began to talk amongst themselves and they began to look at those two sentences and try to figure out what they meant. Those two sentences from R.C. Sproul have meant so much to me because it's the crux of the whole matter. It's the dividing line between that razor's edge difference between good theology and bad theology.

The first thing we'll say is, and the first question we ask is: does faith cause regeneration? Most people in our society today would say, of course it does. The Bible says that by faith you're saved. I believed that for years. But there's one major flaw with that sentence. The major flaw is that men are truly, really, actually dead in sin. Men are dead. They have no spiritual life.

They have absolutely no spiritual life which enables them to make a move toward God whatsoever. So, that disqualifies that sentence. The fact is, the sentence can't be true because a man cannot first have faith causing regeneration. A dead person cannot have faith. So, there's a problem with that sentence. The other sentence, however, makes perfect sense. If a man is dead in sin, has no spiritual life, and cannot regenerate himself or help in his regeneration, how does a man get undead?

Well, Jesus told Nicodemus, "You must be born again." How does a man be born again? A man cannot birth himself into a physical life, and a man cannot birth himself into a spiritual life. So, the options are narrowed down to one. The second sentence has to be the correct sentence: that regeneration must come first, creating and causing faith. Beloved, those two sentences are the difference between what we as Calvinists believe and everyone else differs by believing the other sentence.

Regeneration comes first. We were dead in sins in verse five, but He's quickened us. He's regenerated us. It's such a crucial, crucial difference. In regeneration, I want us to look at the book of Titus for a second, Titus 3:5. It says, "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost." The washing of regeneration.

Tonight, I want us to look at that for a few minutes. When I used to preach, I really believed that faith came first. But it didn't. When you see that a man is dead in sin, as Nicodemus, and you begin to see that regeneration is that thing which God uses to begin and to save you, you look at salvation entirely different, and you look at witnessing entirely differently.

The Apostle Paul talks about this. He talks about it in the book of Acts. Luke talks about it in Acts, the 13th chapter, the 48th verse, that says, "And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord, and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed." If you are ordained to eternal life, and if Jesus has died on the cross like Brother Earl just preached, and He dies specifically for specific people, and if His death and His atonement were real and effective, that means everyone for whom He died will be saved.

You tell people that sometimes, and you tell them that Jesus could not have failed, that He wasn't a failure, and they look at you and say, "What are you talking about?" What I'm talking about is if Jesus died for everyone in the world, everyone in the world is going to be saved because His death and His resurrection is effectual. It works. It's real. He really did that.

Then you ask them the question, "Is everyone in the world saved?" and they will say no. Then you tell them, "Hey, if Jesus had died for everyone, everyone would be saved because He cannot fail." He cannot fail. In regeneration, that's the work of God. You know, regeneration and justification are two works of God that are done instantaneously. They're done only once, and that's it.

Sanctification is something that begins at salvation, and it continues to glorification to our death. But regeneration is a one-time act. Regeneration is an act whereby Jesus told Nicodemus, "You will not see the wind blowing. You will not see the Holy Spirit coming, and you may not even know yourself when you are regenerated." It's an inward act by the Holy Spirit to impart spiritual life.

Here is the key, here's why Dr. Sproul's illustration is so true. Because if a dead man is walking around in this life, he's never been saved. He has no desire for Jesus. He doesn't want Jesus. All of a sudden, like the Apostle Paul was struck down on the road to Damascus, the Lord comes and He quickens him and He regenerates him. That man may not know it at the moment, and that man may know it very much so, like the Apostle Paul.

But God has to make the first move in regeneration. After regeneration, God can begin to work. Because when a person is regenerated by the Holy Spirit, that means the deadness of the sinner has been attacked, and that God is imparting spiritual life to that sinner for the first time ever. He is opening the sinner's eyes. He is opening the sinner's ears. He's giving the sinner the sensitivity to know that now, finally, he can see that he's even a sinner.

When street preachers preach on the street and when we preach to our people at our churches and they're lost and God has not touched them yet, they don't even know they're sinners. They think they're all right. It takes a mighty working of God's power in regeneration to come into a sinner's life and to open his eyes and to cause him to begin to see that he is lost and be convicted.

You're not going to win a soul until that happens. Now, you may rack up a million so-called salvation experiences in the flesh, but they won't be real. That's what the problem is with our world today. There's a church in South Carolina called Washington Avenue Baptist Church. We were talking the other night sitting around about Washington Avenue Baptist Church and their pastor, Dan Greer, who's dead now and gone to be with the Lord.

That church is a perfect illustration of what I'm talking about tonight. You talk about shallow evangelism. It was two blocks from where I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, in the Judson Mill village. Every Halloween, they would have this big festival. They would have all these people who were lost come to the church, as many as they could get to come, and they did quite well usually.

They would bring them down this thing like a house of horrors, like all the other fright houses are on Halloween. They had these actors in there dressed up. The actors were dressed like people who were burning in hell. They would be screaming and they would be writhing around. The whole idea of the entire endeavor was to manipulate people into the kingdom of God.

It had nothing to do with real biblical evangelism. They would come through, the lost people would come through that thing, and they had a multitude of lost people that would come to that thing. They would scare them to death, have them horrified, and then as they went out, they had the personal workers there to win them to Jesus, to save their souls, to cause them to be born again, to get them to make a decision, to get them to accept Jesus, whatever that means. I haven't figured that out yet.

Somebody said the other day in a sermon, I think, "You don't need to accept Jesus. You better worry about Jesus accepting you." But what they did, they would pray over those people and say, "Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Do you believe that Jesus died on the cross?" The people were scared half out of their minds, and they'd say, "If you'll just say that you believe in Jesus and if you'll just repeat this prayer, you'll be saved and you won't have to go to this awful hell that you just saw."

There was a multitude of people who fell for that. They prayed and they said, "Yes, I believe Jesus intellectually is the Son of God, and I'll pray with you." Then they did the thing that I said last night I will never do: they pronounced those people saved. They were not saved. They were manipulated. They went out the door believing that they were saved. They went out the door believing that if they died that night and a car ran over them, they would go straight to heaven to be with Jesus.

They told them a lie about their soul, and this happens thousands of times every day across this world. I decided to go to church there on Sunday morning, even though it wasn't my church, because I wanted to see the results. By this time, I was older. I was already a Calvinist. I could see the difference.

I showed up at church the next morning very quietly, didn't say a thing, just sat there and observed. Listen to this. You won't believe it, but listen to it. I heard it. The preacher got up and said, "Praise God this weekend, we brought a multitude of people to the fright house and we had 500 people saved. Can you believe that? 500 people saved." Now, what you have to do is you have to analyze that statement and you have to understand what the word "saved" meant to him. To him, the word "saved" does not mean the same thing that it does to you and me.

Here's the kicker. He said, "All those people that were saved last night in the fright night, would you come down and sit on the front row and give yourself for baptism?" And they started to come down the aisle. They came down this aisle and they came down this aisle, and they kept coming. Then they stopped coming. You know how many there were standing in front of the church for baptism? If I counted correctly, it was 15. 15.

500 people were saved and then all lost their religion in one night? 485 of them lost their religion in one night. Can you see the absurdity of that shallow, manipulative evangelism? There was no regeneration. There was no change of nature. Regeneration is crucially important in evangelism.

I want to read you in Ephesians to tie together with this, Ephesians 2:8: "For by grace are ye saved through faith." I like that word "through" faith. If you say "by" faith, people might think you're talking about their faith, that they can save themselves or help. But "through" faith means faith is an instrument that gets you to Christ. "And that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God." Faith is a gift of God.

It is a gift that cannot be refused. It cannot be turned down because when God gives a sinner the gift of faith, he will eventually accept, believe, and have salvation through the power of God. I read today in Spurgeon's book, *The Forgotten Spurgeon*, that regeneration never fails to bring about faith and salvation. Because when God regenerates a sinner, He has a purpose in mind.

The purpose is that God intends to save that sinner. I like the way the old Puritans put it. The old Puritans said that God will work faith and repentance in the sinner. God will give the sinner faith as a gift and a fruit of salvation. A person can't save himself by his own faith. He's dead. Regeneration is that tool, that instrument, that doctrine that God uses to open a sinner's eyes and to begin to convict him and lovingly draw him to the Savior.

It's not like being a robot. God breaks the heart of stone and makes it a heart of flesh and lovingly draws that sinner to Himself to be saved. You know, as I read John Murray, I understood things that I never understood before, that regeneration comes first, and then you begin to see God begin to work. Now, I don't like to put God in a box. I believe that there are those times that God can perform regeneration, the effectual call, faith, and repentance in an instant. That happens.

But Spurgeon also used to say, what happened to the fallow ground that is dug up after regeneration? Now, you guys don't have to agree with me on this. This is just from 34 years of my life I've observed this. But I've observed that it appears to me, and from other great men of God, that at times God will regenerate a sinner and begin to work with him. Some people seem to experience a period of conviction that may last anywhere from one minute to one hour to one day to one month or for years.

I've heard so many testimonies of that. So, that's a topic that you have to decide for yourself. But Spurgeon said it took him years after he was regenerated and God worked with him and convicted him until really God had worked the faith and repentance in him and given the faith and repentance. If you believe that happens all at one time, I've got no problem with that.

But I know this: I know that regeneration has to come first, and that faith and repentance issue forth from that through the working of the Holy Spirit. I've learned this also, and this is scriptural: I've learned that we are not the author of our faith. If we're regenerated and God has His eye on us and He's given us to Jesus before the foundation of the world, we will eventually have faith, we will eventually repent.

That's the difference between Calvinistic evangelism and man-centered evangelism. There is a faith that they have, there is a saving faith that the Bible teaches. There's a difference between a person having faith in the flesh and being able to say that they have a God-given gift of faith that the Holy Spirit has given them and worked in them.

It makes all the difference in the world when you do evangelism. You won't be going around telling people lies and telling people they're saved when they've never been regenerated. You will respect the person more. You'll respect their soul more, and you will be more gentle. You will realize, if you realize that regeneration comes first, you will begin to recognize the holiness and the importance that God puts upon a soul. It must be handled delicately and with holiness.

The effectual call is a part of all that. You're regenerated. All these things are subjective. You could either be regenerated and God could effectually begin to call you. I don't really see how the effectual call could come first, because I don't know how you call a person effectually who is dead. That's just my opinion, but I think that regeneration needs to make the sinner alive spiritually before he can be effectually called.

I'm not going to be dogmatic about that. A lot of things I'm not going to be dogmatic about, but I've tried to reason that out over the years as an evangelist and a pastor. It doesn't really matter. God's going to do it His way ultimately. But praise God for these doctrines. As we go and witness and as we preach the gospel, let us remember that salvation is not of man, that we have nothing to do with it as preachers other than proclaim the gospel and witness.

I think the big thing that's so important with we who call ourselves Calvinists is that we preach as hard or as harder than the other guys. We witness as hard or harder than the other guys. But we realize that after we preach and after we witness, the Holy Spirit needs to do His ministry and His work. All I say to you is, let Him do His work. After you preach to a person, Jeff said last week in Camden, they were preaching and preaching hard.

All of a sudden, a big black guy walked by and he just stopped. When he walked in front of the words that Jeff was preaching, he said the guy just stopped dead in his tracks, as if God arrested him, as if God had arrested him on the road to Damascus. But He arrested him on the road in Camden. He turned around and he came back and he began to ask Jeff what he was talking about, and he witnessed to him. He had to get somebody else, I think, to come up and preach, and he talked to that guy about Jesus for the longest time.

God arrested that man. Now, can I tell you if that man was regenerated at that moment? Absolutely not. I don't know, but God knows. Thank God that Jeff didn't immediately that second say, "Well, let's pray, brother, and you repeat after me and then you're going to be saved." He didn't do that. I'm sure he's going to let the Holy Spirit work with the man, and he may have prayed with him on the spot before the day was over. I don't even know.

But I know that you combine my sermon with Brother Earl's sermon tonight. Once Jesus has atoned for a sinner—and let me begin at the beginning and start over—once as I preached on the Everlasting Covenant last night, once that the Trinity before time began met and decided on the plan of salvation and they made the Everlasting Covenant. I forgot to tell you last night, but the main reason the Everlasting Covenant is so important as I close is because of this.

Now, listen to this. It is the only covenant that was not made between God and man. All the other covenants were made between God and man with God as initiator setting the conditions. That's why the Everlasting Covenant is so important, because it was made between the members of the Godhead, the infinite Trinity which cannot fail and can never fail.

They had to agree because they are all always on the same page, always thinking the same things. The only thing they had to decide was who was going to go and die on the cross, who was going to do the giving. It was the Father that would give the bride to Jesus. Isn't that a beautiful scenario? The Father before time began gave Jesus His bride, which is us. Then the Holy Spirit would do what we're talking about tonight. He would complete the plan of salvation by regenerating, working, and giving as a gift to the sinner faith and repentance and bringing him to salvation that he would confess his salvation and pray to Jesus and confess his sins openly and willingly after the Holy Spirit made his heart tender.

What a beautiful, beautiful plan. So, tonight, thank God for regeneration. Thank God for the Atonement. Thank God most of all for the Lord Jesus, who volunteered to leave the riches of glory and come and enter into our wretched human bodies and hang upon that tree and shed His precious blood for us, His bride. Thank God for the Lord Jesus.

I pray Brother Earl will try to combine both of these together, but I want to thank you all for being so patient the last couple of days. I know the days have been long, and I know that you're tired. I know I'm tired. Continue to pray for Brother Earl. One reason we're having so many preachers on one day, the conference was planned for four days.

There were complications and financial obligations that we just simply couldn't meet, so we made a new arrangement to just rent this building for three days. Consequently, logically, we had to put those sermons somewhere and we had to move it back, so we had to just cram them in to make them all fit. It wasn't devised as a torture device, although you probably feel that way by now.

Just remember tonight, definite Atonement is a crucial doctrine to the Christian faith, and regeneration is an essential doctrine to the Christian faith as well. Shall we pray? Lord Jesus, we thank You tonight for loving us, Lord. We thank You, Father, for loving us and giving us to Jesus. Lord Jesus, we thank You that You loved us so much that we can be a part of Your bride and that You've come down from heaven and You've died on the cross for our sins and shed Your precious blood.

We thank You, Holy Spirit, that You've come and applied that salvation and that work, that atoning, vicarious, substitutionary atonement to we who were given to Jesus by the Father and that we now can go to heaven to be with You, Lord, for all eternity. Amen.

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