gb I want to speak with you this morning on the sin of unbelief. Just to doubt God is a great sin. And I want to kind of look at it this morning. I want to look at what the Bible says about faith. Faith is believing God. Faith is believing what God says about you. And the Bible tells us a lot. But it's believing God's Word. It's believing that Jesus Christ died to save you from the penalty of sin. And that penalty is eternal death in hell. And Christ came, lived a perfect, righteous life, shed His blood to save you from that eternal death. That's what God's Word tells us, but we doubt God's Word. We want to try and do something ourself. Just the fact that Christ says, come to me and believe and be saved; and we want to say, oh, well, I've got to be good, and I've got to clean my life up, and I've got to do this, and I've got to do that, and then I'll be saved. No, that's not what the Bible says. And that is you expressing your unbelief. You're trying to do something instead of believing that Christ died for you. Unbelief is to doubt God. It's to doubt God's intentions towards you. It is to doubt the things that God has said. It is to doubt that God will put away your sin. You just don't believe that God will do it. Now to put it plain and simple, unbelief is to call God a liar. Unbelief is to call a holy and a righteous God a liar. How awful is it? John Gill says unbelief is a source of sin and a cause of judgment and it's greatly provoking to God. Think about it. Charles Finney says, the things that are implied in unbelief show that it must be one of the most provoking abominations to God in all the universe. Unbelief. It is the perfection of all that is unreasonable, unjust, and ruinous. It is infinitely slanderous and dishonorable to God and destructive to man and to all the interests of the kingdom of God. Unbelief. Unbelief. Think about what unbelief is. Think about what you're doing when you doubt God. Lord, give us grace to believe. Now I want to just look at a couple of scriptures to show faith and unbelief. Number one, Mark 1:15, the Bible says, repent ye and believe the gospel. Repent; repent of your unbelief and begin to believe God. Stop calling God a liar. Mark 9:23, Jesus said unto him, if thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. Salvation is possible to everyone that believes. John 6:29, it says, Jesus answered and said unto them, this is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent. That's the primary purpose of every person born into this world. That ye believe on him whom he hath sent. Believe on Christ. Believe him. John 8:46, Christ says, Which of you convinceth me of sin? If I say the truth, why do you not believe me? That's Christ Speaking to the Jews and the Pharisees. Every unsaved person is living in unbelief, and Jesus Christ says, who can convince me of sin? That is to say, I come here, I stand before you without sin. Now to be without sin has to be of God. There can be no deception, there can be no lies, there can be no wickedness at all in the heart of one who is without sin. And without lies and deception, whenever he speaks, why don't you believe? And that's what he is saying, which of you convinces me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do you not believe me? Why do you not believe? Why do you continue to call God a liar? Then John 16:9. Speaking of the Holy Spirit coming and convincing of sin, he says of sin because they believe not on me. One of the greatest sins there is, is the sin of unbelief. This is a plain indication that sin that unbelief is a great sin. Now in John verse 20 chapter 20 verse 31, we find that John said there's many things that Jesus did that's not written. But it says in that 31st verse, but these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name. These things are written, God's word is written, that you might believe; and you won't have it. You refuse it, you go on in unbelief. And then one more, Acts chapter 16 verse 31, and they said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved and thy house. Unbelief holds you back. Unbelief is that one sin that will send you to hell. Unbelief. Here is the one, I guess you could say the grand thought of unbelief. We have all the promises of God, everything that God has given us, and I've read a few of them to you about believing God. We have all these things, and you won't believe. In your unbelief you're calling God a liar. You are insulting God to his face in your unbelief. What do you expect a holy and a righteous God to do with somebody with such a defiant attitude? Now you think about that. You think about how God sees you and how he continues to say, come unto me. How he continues to say, come and let's reason together. how He continues to say, let the unrighteous man turn from his wicked ways, and you will not. You continue in unbelief. Is it any wonder that God had to create hell? Think about what it means. Such a great sin and a great offense towards God cannot continue to go unpunished. Now that's just simple, I guess you could say carnal reasoning, that sin must be punished. You don't need spiritual understanding to realize that. Unbelief is an awful sin against God and God will punish it. Now I want to look at the Apostle Paul. In First Timothy, he says that his persecution of the church was done ignorantly and in unbelief. The Apostle Paul truly did not know that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. He didn't know. He was ignorant of that fact and his ignorance gave power to his unbelief and he persecuted the church, the Christians. He put them to death. He had them cast into prison. The Apostle Paul never met Jesus until he was on the road to Damascus where the Lord appeared to him. All that he knew was that the Christians were teaching something that was opposed or different to the Law of Moses and Paul felt obligated to stop it, to put an end to it. He didn't know. His unbelief was born from ignorance. Where does your unbelief come from? You can't say that you're ignorant. You can't plead ignorance. You have all of God's Word before you. You have that righteous testimony telling you all the great things of Christ and what he has done and why he has done it and he calls you to believe it and come to him and you will not. Where does that leave you? The Bible tells you that the scriptures will make you wise unto salvation, but you won't believe it. You have all of God's promises, all the works that Jesus Christ has done, and you won't believe it. You think, yeah, yeah, well, I believe he did that, and you go on. You just accept what Christ has done. You don't really truly believe it. You don't truly in your heart believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. You can make a mental assent and mentally say, well, yeah, I believe, but that doesn't sink down into the heart. God's Word tells you that the scriptures can make you wise unto salvation. You study them, you read them, you plead and pray and ask the Lord to give you understanding and he will open your understanding and he will make God's word real to you. All of God's word shows forth the holiness and the righteousness of God. You don't need a spiritual awakening to understand that God is holy and righteous. Just read the Bible. It's plain. It's simple. Whenever you read God's Word, you study it, you understand it, you're going to have to come to one of two conclusions. You can either say the Bible is full of lies and deception and I don't believe it, or you can say the Bible is God's holy word and it has no error in it. Now the two are mutually exclusive. You can't take them both. You take one or the other. Which one are you taking? The Apostle Paul, he didn't have the New Testament of the Bible that tells us of Jesus Christ. He didn't know all the works, the great works that Christ did. I'm sure he had heard of some of it, but the works that show beyond a doubt that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The Apostle Paul could plead ignorance. You cannot plead ignorance. You have all of God's Word before you. Now you can say, well I didn't know all this and I didn't know all that. Well that's still on you because God's Word is there if you'll read it; if you'll study it. All, you have all of God's Word, all of His promises, His promises to send you a Savior, His promises to forgive your sin, His promises to save those that will believe. Will you believe? You have a record here in God's Word of all the great works that Christ did. All the things that he did in his life, not everything that he did, but like John says, these were written so that you might believe. Do you believe? Do you want to continue on in your unbelief? Do you want to reject it? Do you not believe the Bible when it says all have sinned? Do you not believe where it says there's none that doeth good? No, not one. These are the things that you take issue with. You won't have it. You don't like where the Bible says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. You don't like that. You don't like it where the Bible says the imaginations and the thoughts are evil continually. You don't like those things. Why do we need a Savior? It's because of what we are. We are sinners. We are sinners. There is nothing good in any man. The Bible says there's none good. No, not one. Only God. God is the only one that is good. Christ did enough great works and we have the record of his great works and they are enough that you can believe. You don't need something different. You have what you need here in God's Word. God gave it to you. He said, these things were written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name. John 20:31. You have all you need right here in God's word. You don't need anything else. You see, that's one of the reasons why There's no hearing of God's voice. There's no seeing images of God or dreams and voices and visions and all these things that many people think a lot of. There is none of that. Why? It's because God has given us his word. He's given us all that we need for salvation. You don't need voices or visions or dreams. The Bible, when the Lord closed it up, he says, don't let no man add to it and no man take from it. And you want to add your voices and visions and dreams to what God has given you. You want to say what God's given is not enough. Your unbelief keeps spilling over. You just won't have what the Lord has given you. Look at the life of Judas Iscariot, one of the disciples. Jesus called Judas, drew him to him, just like he did all the other disciples. Judas came, just like all the other disciples, but Judas was never saved. Think about that. He walked with the Lord. He saw all the miracles. He knew all about everything that happened. He was right there with it. The Lord, I believe the Lord even gave him the power when he sent him out to cast out devils and all those things. He was right there with them. But he was never saved. Judas loved money. He wasn't interested in salvation. He was so close, but so far away. What about you? You that want to be saved. God has drawn you this far. He has brought you here. He's given you his word, his promises. Why will you doubt his goodness to you? Why do you go about as if to say, well, he's not going to save me. He won't save me. What has he ever done to cause you to not believe? What has he done? Look back over all of God's Word. Look back over your life and tell me what has God done to cause you to not believe. If you're not saved, you need to beg the Lord that he'll not let you turn back like Judas did. You're no different than Judas. Judas was just another sinner. But the Lord didn't hold him. And if left to yourself, you'll end up just like Judas. You'll go back. You'll turn away. That evil heart of unbelief, it's in all of us. You need to plead with the Lord. Man by nature won't believe God, that depraved nature of every one of us, it's in every one of us and it rejects all of God's goodness to us, and by nature every unregenerate soul thinks evil of God. We think evil, we think the worst of God, and God has never done anything to give you a reason to feel that way. Look at the results of unbelief. Unbelief is expressed in how we treat God In our life. It's how the natural heart of every man treats God. Look at the children of Israel coming out of Egypt when the Lord delivered them there. That journey there is symbolic of a lost sinner in this life. God had worked miracle after miracle in the presence of all these people, starting with the plagues there in Egypt, And then he parted the waters of the Red Sea and they went across on dry ground, miracle after miracle. Then he closed the Red Sea up on all the soldiers. He took them through the desert and he provided them food and manna and quails and water from the rock. All these miracles that the Lord did for them. The pillar of fire by day and The pillar of cloud by night, or vice versa, I forget. But either way, they were miracles before the people and the people saw them, these miracles, they all knew them to be miracles of God and they would not believe. They all died there in the wilderness in unbelief. They were constantly tempting the Lord and rebelling against him and that's just an expression of unbelief. Forty years that went on. How long has unbelief reigned in your life? How long? Just like the children of Israel, they all died in the wilderness. They all died in their unbelief. They died without Christ and without hope. There is coming a time when your opportunities will cease. You will go out of this life. And if you are still in your unbelief, you'll go out without Christ and without hope, just like they did. If you continue in unbelief, you'll be no different. Now, the Bible tells us that saving faith is a gift. It's a gift of God. That means by nature, you're unable to believe. But what does God's Word say? It says that faith is a gift. It says to ask and ye shall receive. It says come unto me. It says come and reason together. It says all these things. And knowing that saving faith is something that only God can give, you must flee to Christ. You must go to the only place where you can receive that gift. No man can give you that gift, only God. And you're going to have to come to him. Do you think that you can believe? You think, well, I can kind of believe and I think I'm good enough. If you think you can believe, If you think you have power to believe, I have nothing for you. You've got all you need. God has said that you cannot believe unless he imparts that saving faith to you. Now that's God's word. If you think you can believe, if you think you can believe apart from Christ, then that's just another expression of your unbelief, calling God a liar. Beg the Lord. John 6:44 says, no man can come to me except the Father which hath sent me draw him. What you gonna do with that? This is Jesus Christ telling you that the Holy Spirit must come upon you in mighty power and draw you to Christ. Christ said, if I be lifted up from the earth, I'll draw all men to me. This is the general call, and it goes out to all. It goes out here every day, every week, every month, over and over. Come to Christ. Come. And that's the general call. You're commanded to come. And that general call, you resist. You resist. You throw it off. Every one of you. Every one of you. You're called to come, but you resist. In your naturally depraved state, you resist God's call. And you'll continue in your unbelief until you die and drop into hell, apart from the grace of God. But God sends the Holy Spirit, and that effectual call is given by the Holy Spirit, and that call can't be resisted, and God sends it to his people. And you say, oh, I'm not his people, so forget it. Well, if that's the way you feel, then go on out. I can't help you. But that general call that says come, that call that goes out to every person. The Holy Spirit will come and He will take that call and He will empower it and He will use it and He will cause you through that call to be concerned about your soul. And you need to seize the moment. When the Lord prick your heart, begin to plead with him. Lord, don't leave me. When he pricks your heart, Lord, don't leave me. And this goes to that same verse, John 16:8. It says, when he has come, he'll reprove the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. It's the same thing. The Holy Spirit comes to the lost sinner and reproves or convinces him of his sin. of sin. What sin? The sin of unbelief. This reproving, convincing work is part of there in John 6:45 where he says, all thy children shall be taught of God. They'll be taught. Then he says, every man that hath heard and learned through that teaching of the Holy Spirit, every man that has heard and learned of the Father cometh unto me. That reproving work of the Holy Spirit, it awakens, it convicts, it convinces, and the Father draws by the working of the Spirit. And he teaches, and you learn, and you begin to seek the Lord, and you begin to come. You can't help yourself. You're not content with the world anymore. And the Bible says to forsake all, and you say, oh, well, all these things. But when the Lord pricks that heart, convicts you of sin, and convinces you of what you are, you won't have no problem turning loose of everything that you've got in your hand. You'll turn loose of everything. When the Lord sends the Holy Spirit to work in you, there's many things that the Spirit teaches. But the three things that Jesus tells us of, that's sin, and righteousness, and judgment; and the first one being sin, the sin of unbelief. When the Holy Spirit teaches us, every lost sinner will learn these things. You'll learn them in addition to the particular things that the Lord teaches you individually. Every person learns. But there are some things that are general, like sin and righteousness and judgment. And some things are more specific to the individual. And that will vary. But every lost sinner learns these three things specifically. And they're taught of God. They're taught of God, the Holy Spirit. No man can teach these things to you. And these things that the Lord teaches you, they will break your unbelief and give you grace to seek the Lord. Now these things, these are how the Lord uses, what the Lord uses to bring salvation. If a man could teach these things to you, then salvation would be by the power of man. Man would have the power to decide who will be saved. But these things can't be taught of man, they must be taught of God. And that leaves the power of God in God's hands. If you could teach, if I could teach, If I could make you to know sin and your sin of unbelief, that would make God inferior to me. That would lift me up. That would put me in a place higher up than God. But I can't teach it. I can't do it. I can't. All of this shows that great unbelief that reigns in every heart. Man is just a worm of the dust. That's all that we are in the sight of God. But man don't believe God. We don't believe it. Man says or wants to say, he believes, I can do something. I can clean up my life. I can stop doing all this crazy stuff I've been doing, my drinking and my smoking and all this, and I can believe the Lord and I can be saved. And you certainly need to do those things. But you cannot believe unto salvation apart from the power of God working in you. Unbelief leaves you, apart from God, it leaves you just a sinner, a wicked sinner, an evil sinner. That's how we all are. Every one of us, by nature, we're born that way. We don't have to be taught that. That's our natural condition before God. Unbelief must be broken in the heart, and God is long-suffering. He puts up with us a long time. He gives you opportunity after opportunity to come to Him and to plead with Him that He'll break your unbelief. He calls you to come. He's made a way for you to come. He holds out the scepter of grace. He tells you to come and believe, but you won't come. You won't come. You won't come. Look at it from God's point of view. All of this unbelief is just a sinner, which is God's creation, A sinner trying to throw God off his own throne and take his place. That's what you're doing in unbelief. What's God supposed to do with you? Say, oh, well, he just don't know. Just leave him alone. Let him sit on my throne and let him rule the universe and I'll just sit over here on the side. Do you think the Lord's going to do that? Man has a natural enmity towards God. And when God looks at man, he can see all that man is. He can see that enmity and that hatred. He sees all the thoughts of unbelief in the heart, the wickedness. He knows and understands the thoughts that we have toward him. And those thoughts of unbelief, I believe, are a marvel to God. The Bible says, there is none that doeth good, no not one. This means that you don't have even one good thought towards God by nature. You don't have it. Your thoughts are evil continuously. From a humanly perspective, humanly speaking, if I saw, if I looked at you and I saw what God sees, and I had that power, I think I would have destroyed the whole world long ago, way back before Noah. When God destroyed the world with a flood there in Noah's time, he was merciful, long-suffering in leaving Noah there to repopulate the earth. Noah, the Lord redeemed Noah, the Lord saved Noah, but Noah was still just a sinner, a saved sinner. But if I saw; If I could look at the heart and see all that God saw, the unbelief, the wickedness, the evil, all that, the evil continuously the Bible says, I wouldn't have left Noah. I would have got rid of him too. I would have wiped the whole earth out of existence. But God is not like man. When you read the account of the children of Israel leaving out of Egypt, you should read it with a thought of unbelief in mind. Think about what they did and how much the Lord had to put up with them. Think about it. The only reason he put up with them is because he loved his elect. There was a purpose. God loved his people. He still loves his people, and he looks down through time, and he sees each one of us in our time, and he loves us, and he endured, the Bible says, Romans 9:22, he endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction. He puts up with the wicked a lot, just for the sake of his elect. Are you concerned about your soul? Are you? Do you want to be saved? Look around you, at this life, this world. It'll soon be over. You'll soon be in eternity where there will be no coming back. When you enter eternity, everything will be fixed, permanently, forever. You have opportunity now to seek the Lord, to call on Him, to reason with Him, beg and plead. But once you die, once you leave out of this life, it'll be over. All the opportunities to plead with the Lord will be gone, no more. If you leave out of this life as a redeemed sinner, you'll be redeemed forever. But if you go out without Christ, you'll be lost without Christ forever. The Bible tells us nothing of any hope for any person that goes out lost. No hope. The Bible tells us, It says, the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever. No hope, no hope of having hope. I urge you, if you're not saved, to plead with the Lord, to call on Him, to reason with Him. All these things that the Bible tells us. Beg the Lord that he'll save you. He said he would. Christ came to save sinners. Reason with the Lord. Call on him. Plead with him. Admit that you're a sinner. If you can't see that you're a sinner, and I was there, ask the Lord to make you to see. Ask the Lord. Nobody can help you but the Lord. Nobody can do anything for you but the Lord. If he has pricked your heart, if he's made you concerned, then go to him. Call on him. Beg and plead with him. There's no hope once you go out of this life. It's all fixed, permanent, forever. Think about it. Has the Lord pricked your heart? Has He given you a concern for your soul? That's why we come here, to tell you what God's Word says, to try and put away your unbelief and plead with the Lord. He says, as many as received them, to them He gave power to be sons of God, even them that believe on His name. Plead with the Lord. Stop doubting. Believe that the Lord will save you. He said he would. But what about election and predestination and all those things? Don't worry, that's God's business. That ain't for you to worry about. He says come. He says ask. He says believe. That's your duty. Lord, help us.