I draw your attention to the passage of scripture that I read to you in Matthew chapter 12 and verses 31 and 32. So I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven man, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. either in this age or in the age to come. We're looking at the Holy Spirit now, we've looked three or four times at the Old Testament, and now we're coming into the Synoptic Gospels and seeing what they say about the Holy Spirit and these familiar, awesome, awful words. The glory of the Gospel is the finished work of Jesus Christ. A full a total, a comprehensive atonement for the guilt of countless sinners. And so every preacher will love to say these words. I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven man. And in anticipation of that, the prophet says something like, come now, let's reason together. for your sins are like scarlet. They should be as white as snow, though they be as crimson. They should be like wool. Scarlet sins. As white as snow. It was like that for David's sins of adultery, dishonesty and murder. There's forgiveness. The Samaritan woman with a sequel of men that she'd lived with and married. Forgiveness. The prodigal son treating his father so cruelly and wasting his inheritance, blowing it all, forgives. Simon Peter's triple denial and his oaths and maybe blasphemies. The Jerusalem men who had taken the Son of God and shouted crucify him, nailed him until he was dead. hung him by his hands through nails. For Saul of Tarsus, and the cruelty he showed against Stephen, and against men and women, dragging them off to prison, forcing them to blaspheme. Forgiveness, whatever your sin, you firebombed Viet Cong, villages, women and children. Forgiveness, if you repent, you're a modernist minister, who led people astray for years, preaching another gospel, calling your humanist ideals, the Christian faith, forgiveness to you. If you turn from your sin to Jesus Christ, you abuse children. There's forgiveness. You bought out companies in the most ruthless way, acid-stripped. And then you put family businesses out. You broke them up. And so lots of little people were put out of work for your greed. Terrible sins like the son of Sam, that merciless serial killer committed in murdering young women in New York. That murderer has found forgiveness through the Saviour. And now he works in newness of life. in that jail from which he will never ever leave. I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven then. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin. People say, but that's not fair. It's not fair. It has nothing at all to do with fairness. It has everything to do with the vastness of the pity of God. Forgiveness freely offered to vile men and women. So may there be forgiveness for you and for me too, yes, for you and me in the Dennis the Menace cartoon. Dennis and his little friend Joey leave then Mrs Wilson's house and their hands are full of biscuits. And Joey says, I wonder what we did to deserve that? And then Dennis says, look Joey, Mrs Wilson gives us biscuits, not because we're nice, but because she is nice. And God gives pardon to unpleasant, inconsistent, miserable people like you and me. Not because we ever do anything to deserve it, but because God's mercy takes your breath away. Now, the hallmark of divine mercy is that it is immeasurable. Can you measure the distance between the East and the West? If you could do that, you can measure the mercy of God. Psalmist says, if thou, O Lord, shouldst mark iniquity, O Lord, who can stand that there is forgiveness with thee? Paul writes to Timothy and wants to assure Timothy that he needn't worry about ever out sinning the grace of God. But the Lord Jesus is never impatient, never frantic as he looks upon our behaviour. Paul had previously blasphemed and persecuted and insulted Christ himself, and yet he found mercy. Grace abounds to the chief of sins. So, two weeks after Wesley had his great experience of conversion in Aldersgate Street in the City of London the 24th of May in 1938, 1738, Wesley was invited to preach at Oxford University by the Vice-Chancellor. It was the official university service in St. Mary's Church and all the universities had to be there, you know, it was like fundamentalist universities in America where Everyone has to be in their place. There are tellers to check on it at the whole university. Now, this is a remarkable sermon, but you must realize he's in his mid-thirties and he just knows the Bible and he knows these different things. And what conversion has done for him is just to put them all in place and see them all in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the hub and all the spokes of the attributes of God and the way of salvation that he knew about. have all now been fitted together in that heartwarming experience. So Wesley goes there and he preaches on, by grace are ye saved. And he's talking about the sublime mercy of God in Jesus Christ covering all our sins. And that was the great message that he took to them. Deliverance from guilt, deliverance from shame. Comprehensive deliverance. And then he paused and he envisaged some of the objections going on in the crowds of people that were there. Ah, some of you will say this is an uncomfortable doctrine. Nay, it's very full of comfort to all sinners that whosoever believeth in him shall not be ashamed. The same Lord over all is rich in mercy unto all that shall call upon him. Here is comfort, high as heaven, strong as death. What, mercy for all? For Zacchaeus, a public robber? For Mary Magdalene, a common harlot? I can hear someone saying, then even I may hope for mercy. And so you may. You who are afflicted, whom none has comforted, God won't reject your prayer. No, perhaps He will say this next hour, be of good cheer. Thousands are forgiven thee, so forgiven that they shall reign over thee no more. Yea, and the Holy Spirit shall bear witness with thy spirit, that thou art a child of God. O glad tidings, tidings of great joy, which are to all people, for every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. Come ye, buy money without price, without money, whatsoever your sins are, though red like crimson. Though they be as numerous as the hairs on your head, return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy on you, and to our God, and he will abundantly pardon." That must be the foundation of all our preaching. That is, forgiveness must be preached to all. Now, that's what he said. I think it's the first of the 53 sermons then that Wesleyan ministers had. and sometimes would read, and an elder would read it to the congregation if there were no preachers about. The theme of divine forgiveness is at the very heart of the good news, isn't it? If some people are obsessed by one sin, we want to say far greater than all your sins, and everyone like that one sin, is the infinite, measureless mercy of God. It's like a grain of sand on the hand of Almighty God. Well then, what is Jesus speaking about here when he says, blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven? Why is that warning in such urgent tones? Why is it repeated twice here? Is there some luxurious heinous sin among the roster of sins which we have committed? Well, which one is it? Is it one of the Ten Commandments which, if you break that commandment, brings terrible judgment upon you? Is it the violation of One of those sins that plunges a sinner into unforgiveness. The Lord tells us that there is an unforgiven sin. The Lord Jesus speaks of it. And what's recorded here in Matthew twice is twice in Mark 3 and twice in Luke 12. All three refer to these words about eternal sin. So they're here in the Bible, I would imagine, so emphatically to warn against this very pervasive error that you find in the professing church today and in the land, the error of universalism. That all of us are going to go to heaven. Everybody will be in heaven. And here is this verse, the great door. the bars, six of them, that are there that are a hindrance to anyone presuming about that. They're here in the Bible to help us fight against sin, to give us some strength to resist it. They're not my words, remember. They're not man's words. They are the words of the incarnate God that Jesus was sent into the world to bring this message from God to us. Now, let me say, I know immediately what the identity of this sin is that can never be forgiven. And many of you do. In other words, there's no mystery about what the unforgiving sin is so that we should all the time be frustrated, be saying to ourselves, perhaps I have forgiven it. I want you all to know by the end of this sermon, for those of you who don't know, I want you to know what it is. We have biblical data here and that's the comfort and the assurance. The first point I want to make is that what blaspheming or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not. Let's clear away some of the confusion and the rubble there. There are many gross sins which, like all sins, are sins against the Holy Spirit. Every sin is a sin against the holiness of the third person of the Godhead. And yet they're not this particular sin of blasphemy against Him which is unpardonable. And the first point I want to make is that the unpardonable sin is not blasphemy. You might think that it is, because he says, the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. But just go back from 31, go back to the beginning of that verse and read the preceding eight words. Every sin and blasphemy, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men. It's a categorical imperative. forgiveness for the blasphemer. And so, we can't take it to be blasphemy. The Heidelberg Catechism judges in question 100, no sin is greater or more provoking to God than profaning His name. Well, maybe that is true. But for that great sin of blasphemy, there is great forgiveness. Remember Saul of Tarsus, in his rage against the first generation of Christians when he was trying to strangle the infant church in its crib, he tried to force them to blaspheme. Acts 26.11, and you understand what he did, he brought awful tortures to bear against them. What a terrible thing to do, to get them to curse the name of Jesus. but the God who pities his children will pity those who are under terrible pressure of the uttered God's name, Jesus' name, in blasphemy. Now, spiritual depression, it's worth reading it. It's written by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. He talks about an incident there that occurred in Bethlehem forward movement, the forward. as they call it down there in Aberavon when he first went there. There was a man, this is the late 20s, early 30s, a man there had lived a very evil life. There was scarcely anything he hadn't done at some time or another and then at 77 years of age he was converted. He was received into membership in the church and he came to the first communion he'd ever been to with great joy. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. And yet, these are the words of Dr. Lloyd-Jones, next morning, even before I was up, that poor man had arrived at my house, was knocking at the door, and was looking a picture of misery and dejection, weeping uncontrollably. I was amazed and astounded, especially in view of what had happened the previous night, the greatest night of his life. the climax of everything that had happened to him. I eventually succeeded in controlling him in a physical sense, and I asked him what was the matter. His trouble was this. After going home from the communion service, he'd suddenly remembered something that had happened thirty years ago. He was with a group of men drinking in a public house and arguing about religion. On that occasion, he had said in contempt and derision that Jesus Christ was a bastard. And it had all come back to him suddenly, and there was, he felt sure, no forgiveness for that. It's one thing. He was quite happy to forget about the drinking and the gambling and the immorality. That was all right. That was forgiven. He understood that clearly, but the thing that he had said about the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, then he couldn't be comforted, couldn't be consoled. The one thing cast him down to utter hopelessness. The doctor says, I thank God that by the application of the Scriptures I was able to restore his joy to him. But that's the kind of thing I'm referring to, to something a man once said or did that haunts him and comes back to him and makes his life miserable and wretched, though he still subscribes to the full Christian faith. A student came to me, a little truster came at a certain time, and he was troubled with blasphemous thoughts that came through his mind. He was so distressed. And they were rather similar to this man, the same sort of phrases. And we looked how John Bunyan then has it, and John Bunyan speaks of it in Pilgrim's Fergus. You know, you and I are reading Pilgrim's Fergus together this last week and we've come across this incident, a fiend is whispering as he goes through the valley of the shadow of death, blasphemous thoughts and he thinks he is saying them. So we looked at those scriptures together and prayed together a couple of times He was delivered from that. Drop thy still dues of quietness till all our striving cease. That wasn't the unpardonable sin. I don't know whether Peter's swearing at the fireside that night, whether there was blasphemy in that. There's forgiveness in it. Blasphemy is not the sin that can't be forgiven. Be cheered, those of you who have blasphemed. There scarcely can be anyone who's not blasphemed here. And there's mercy and there's forgiveness for us through Jesus Christ. And then secondly, it's not any sexual sin. And there are all sorts of sexual aberrations spoken of today. The laughter of fools, so hideous and trivialized. It hurts. It hurts personhood. It hurts peace, it hurts purity, it hurts families, it spreads disease. It's not the unpardonable sin, is it? It's not that. And then thirdly, suicide. Suicide is not the unforgivable sin. I spent all day with a man who lived for the first thirty years of his life without Christ. He lived for the world Money was his great object. He really wanted to make a million. He wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 30 and he'd attained it. He had a terrific house. We went up a long drive to get there and you went in through the door and you walked across a beam of light, I suppose, and he had a suit of armour standing there and a voice came out of the suit of armour welcoming you when he came in. Well, these were remnants, you see, of what he'd been. He'd made his million and he was still a bitter man and a hard man and an unhappy man. He contemplated suicide but he'd been raised a Roman Catholic and he'd gone to a Jesuit school and the Jesuits had told him that he would go to hell if he committed suicide. So he would be even bleaker then than his life at the present time. And the fear of hell kept him from suicide. And that was good, but didn't tell him about a saviour who loved him. And then he met my friend Dave and Dave wisely and gently befriended him and they did things together. And a group of men from the church, he was brought in. They went hunting, things you do in America. And then he started to come to church and to men's meetings. And he came to know the Lord. And his darkness turned to light. And the darkness of his wife turned to light. obsession about suicide. It went. Do yourself no harm, Paul says to the jailer. And that's our message. We have good tidings of great joy. We have a saviour. We have abundant life. In Saul of Tarsus, his activity was to encourage people to behave like that. What a monster. And yet his sins were forgiven. There's no grounds for us to believe that it's the unforgivable sin. I don't believe it. Well, no, there are three cases. Blasphemy isn't the unforgivable sin. Sexual sin, suicide, you know, the unforgivable sin. People might think it's apostasy. I think of Solomon. taking wife after wife after wife, sometimes two or three a day, it seems to me, and erecting temples and idols in the precincts of Jerusalem. But even that, even that wickedness wasn't unforgivable blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Well, there's hope for you. You've not sinned like Solomon. You've not sinned like David. You've not sinned like Paul or like Peter. Even if you have, There was mercy for them, and so there will be mercy and forgiveness for you. Okay, certainly what then is blasphemy against the Spirit? And you look at the context then of these words of our Lord Jesus. He's beginning His public ministry here in Matthew 12. He's beginning to set the nation on fire. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, He's working so that every kind of sickness is being healed. Not a failure. Not one who comes to Him is He baffled. Not one temporary recovery. He's preached sweeter and more powerfully than an archangel could preach. He's delivered people from demons. They go flying back to the pit from whence they came. Tens of thousands come out and listen to him and pay heed to what he said. They want to just touch him. A mighty work, an extraordinary work of God is going on in Galilee at this time. By the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom of God has come. It has been established in Capernaum by the King from Heaven. So, that's the background and then the opposition emerges, doesn't it? the leading theologians of the land, the teachers of the law. They've been informed there in Jerusalem about what's happening. And they go up north, they travel up to the Jordan Valley, to Galilee, to just examine what Jehovah Jesus is doing and saying. And they see, an interview, people raised from the dead. A leader of this synagogue, his daughter, They quiz, they question. They talk to Lazarus and to his sisters. They see the majesty. They listen to that preaching. And this is the conclusion they come to, verse 24. It's only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons. And it's answering that accusation. that our Lord speaks. In the words of our text, anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. So the satting is one of the mighty accomplishments of the Spirit, evident in abundance, much praise and joy in deliverance But these people pervert the Spirit's work. They deny what is divine and they display hellish rage against Christ and the work of the Spirit. It's in that context then that specifically this phrase, this reference to the unforgivable sin is found. It obviously has to do with attributing to the devil the wonderful work that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has done. That's the context, that's the essence of it. So let's look firstly at blasphemy against the Spirit during the earthly ministry of our Lord. Our text says anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Now, what can that mean? Blasphemy against Jesus is forgiven. But blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, never forgiven. Well, let me explain to you. I don't think it's too difficult for you to grasp. I hope it won't be difficult for me to explain it to you. That that distinction between blasphemy against Jesus and blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was only relevant before Calvary, before the resurrection from the dead. That distinction doesn't apply now to us and hasn't applied to the Church since the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You don't find that distinction anywhere in the New Testament letters because it was only during the earthly ministry of our Lord that Jesus could make a distinction like that. If you're puzzled, well now let me explain it again to you like this. During the ministry of our Lord, Jesus veiled his identity as the eternal Son of God. While he walked amongst men, he He kept a damper and he clamped down on demons saying who he was. And he himself, speaking outside of the circle of just these twelve men, he didn't go out and proclaim and reveal himself. He wasn't like Superman saying, here am I, and showing his extraordinary powers. He perplexed people, didn't he? Who is he? Well, perhaps he's Jeremiah. He's John the Baptist. He's one of the prophets. Is he the Messiah? Is he the prophet? His own brothers and sisters? Well, he's our older brother. That's who he is. He's developed some religious delusions about himself. He's one brick short of a load. Pharisee said, no, he's a devil. The spirit of Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, is in him. And so there was this confusion because Jesus at this time was deliberately hiding his identity because he needed to teach and explain for a year or two to his disciples who he was. He was deliberately hiding His glory from men. Who would have thought that Jehovah Jesus could have been born in a stable? That that baby was the incarnate God? Who could believe that? Or what veiling of His glory to be hanging on a cross, suspended by nails between two common criminals? He heals some men. Don't tell anyone that I've healed you. Thirty years of obscurity are followed by three years of humiliation. He has nowhere to lay his head. What a strange son of King David this is. He calls himself the son of man. That's the title he uses. He's the hidden Messiah. And when he rides into Jerusalem, the end, and he's beginning to open the veil a little, it's on a donkey, he enters Jerusalem, and people are still saying, is this the Messiah? He makes elusive applications to himself of Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah. And his disciples say to one another, what does this parable mean? Why doesn't he speak straight to us? What is he saying? So that before his resurrection, he prevented man from coming to a full knowledge of who he was. The whole life and death needed to be rounded off and completed. His nature needed to be hidden from the eyes of men from his baptism until resurrection morning. And for that reason then, blasphemies against him when he was in this world, they could be forgiven. They thought they were blaspheming a man. He kept his identity under wraps during this time. So blasphemies against this man, they could be forgiven because he deliberately hid his identity. But then you look at Galilee and what's happening in Galilee and there's no hiddenness in Galilee, is there? People are being given such an unveiled view of the mighty power of the Holy Spirit that this world had never seen before. The Spirit is teaching, illuminating. The Spirit is healing. The Spirit is resurrecting. The Spirit is regenerating and transforming proud tax collectors, lepers, demoniacs, the glorious person and work of the Holy Spirit. He's there. You see him in Galilee of the Gentiles. How mighty. Every kind of illness. being healed, tens of thousands pressing to come in on him. And look, the mighty work, the Spirit is there. He never preaches dry, boring sermons. There's life, there's spirit, there's power. In all, he says, spirit isn't incognito. It's poured out abundantly on Galilee. He is in his coming. They see the Spirit coming upon him in the form of a dove. They know the Spirit is in him. and the teachers of the law who come down from Jerusalem. My friends, under the old shadows of the law, there in the temple in Jerusalem, they never had anything, any experience like the experience that they got if they went to one of Jesus' meetings, if they were in a house where He was, if they met Him. And yet, this is what they are going against. They're saying, It's not by the power of the Holy Spirit, but it's by the Prince of Demons. These things are done. Beelzebub is at work. He couldn't be the Messiah. So they are blaspheming the work of the Holy Spirit. So the unforgiving, the unforgivable sin is not some general antagonism towards Jesus. It's not the fact that people were perplexed. that he came to his own and his own didn't receive him. The unforgivable sin during the life of Jesus of Nazareth was to experience something of the life of heaven. The power of God convicting, persuading, drawing, convicting, giving the rationale for why you should trust him. why you should bow before Him, why you should say, my Lord and my God. And saying, rather, it's all of the devil. It's all of the Prince of Darkness. And sentencing Jesus to death and nailing Him to a cross and mocking Him as He hangs there, taunting Him Now you've come with me so far, I've explained to you that during the ministry of Jesus, before his cross and before his resurrection, the unforgivable sin could have been committed just by you or by me. If we'd lived in Galilee and we'd been moved and strengthened and helped enlightened and convicted, and we knew this was the Son of God, but oh, what a cost it will be for me from now on to follow Him and serve Him and do His will. Oh, what will it mean for me and my family if I confess Him and start to live a godly, God-fearing, holy life following Jesus? So we display a defiant attitude and say, of the devil, that's who he is. It's of the devil. And Jesus answers, doesn't he? Remember the reading we had about if it's of the devil, that I'm casting of the devil, then the whole house is divided and split and destroyed. And how he argues that so logically. And then let me say something about the unforgivable sin since the resurrection of Christ. So we move on to Easter morning and the message that starts to go out to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the outermost parts of the earth and then greatly harroped by the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost, a new era. And now no hiddenness is there. They don't say It's a mystery cult. Come along and we whisper the answer to you. They proclaim it everywhere. They go to synagogues. They tell everyone that Jesus is the Messiah that's come and why he died and that he's risen and God has exalted him and he is incarnate God. They write in their letters and everything is in your face from the early church. So there's no distinction now between blaspheming against the Holy Spirit and blaspheming against Jesus Christ. The Lord is the Spirit from now on as he is until the present day. And then there's a famous passage in the letter to the Hebrews that talks about a sin that can't be forgiven. So it's still there. It's still there. There is not forgiveness. for everything that you do. Hebrews 6, 4-6, all right, that famous passage, it's impossible for those who've been enlightened, right, who've tasted the heavenly gift, right, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God, right, and the powers of the coming age, all that they've tasted, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because they're crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. So that has all the echoes of Galilee and Matthew 12, doesn't it? The people who are tasting. seeing something of the Spirit of God in the age to come, are just surrounded by the glories of what Jesus is and what Jesus does, His character, His teaching, and His great claims. And these people, again, as the Spirit accompanies them, the Spirit of Jesus Christ as they go, people are being drawn to Him. The wonderful outpouring of the Holy Spirit And many people have had a foretaste of heaven and God's blessings. And for a number of them, it lasted for a while. It was great for months or years. And then, well, they were under such pressure. Cut off from their families because they said Jesus was the Messiah. Excommunicated. Lonely. settled persecution, couldn't get jobs, longing for the old days, the Jerusalem feasts and thinking back as you get nostalgic about childhood and going with mum and dad on the journey to Jerusalem and the fun you had there with other boys that you met, like hop-picking in Kent where you met every year families and what a great time you had there and so it was on the They missed going to Jerusalem to the feasts and missed the whole ceremony, the gorgeously arrayed high priest and the sacrifice for sins. They missed it all. They were meeting in a little house somewhere and the doors were locked because they were being persecuted. And they didn't always have eloquent preachers to inspire them. And so they went back. That's Hebrews 6. They're going back. We understand it. We see people going back, don't we? And these people were saying, we tried Jesus. We tried him. It's a big mistake that we made. Biggest mistake of our lives. We thought he was the Messiah. Nah, he was a fake. We know now. We know better. He was a charlatan. And what they were doing was really crucifying the Son of God all over again. Weren't they? They were subjecting him to public disgrace. They were disgracing him. He got what was coming to him. He deserved the crucifixion for pretending that he was the Messiah. And so here are people who are tasted and known and felt and all known something of the power of the world to come and been enlightened. and now have come into locked-in resistance to Jesus Christ, that He's a cheat and a liar. They can never know a reconciled God. They can never know pardon for their sins if they say, He's not the Lamb of God, the fulfillment of all those things, and they're going back to the blood of heifers and pigeons. to forgive them their sins when Jesus has died? There's no forgiveness outside of Jesus. They're in an unforgiven state. So that's the unforgiving, unforgivable sin today to just go on determined that Christ isn't the Messiah, the Saviour, and living in defiance of Him, there is no forgiveness. There is no forgiveness for that. Forgiveness for the worst people, the worst sins. If they just cast themselves and take their sins to the Lord Jesus. But if they say, there is no Lord Jesus, the Great Lamb, the Great High Priest, the Great Forgiver. You are carrying it yourself, brother. You're taking that to the throne, to the great white throne. Ichabod Spencer, he dealt with a young woman for a whole summer who told him she believed she had committed the unpardonable sin. Whenever he went there, she was downcast and brooding over her condition. After many visits, he said, I shall speak very plainly. You'll understand every word of it. Some of the things which I shall say may surprise you, but I want you to remember them. All through this summer I've treated you with the utmost kindness and indulgence. I've always come to you when you've sent for me, and many times when you've not. And it's because I feel kindly towards you still and wish to do you good that I shall now say some very plain things which you may not like, but they are true. Firstly, you say You've committed the unpardonable sin, but you do not believe what you say. You believe no such thing. You know indeed that you're a sinner, but you don't believe that you've committed the unforgivable sin. You're not honest, not sincere when you say so. You don't believe it. Secondly, it's pride. It's the foolish pride of a wicked heart. which makes you say that you committed the unpardonable sin. Influenced by pride, you half strive, only half after all, to believe you've done it. You want to exalt yourself. You pretend that it's some great, unusual, uncommon thing which keeps you from being a Christian. Ah, it is the unpardonable sin. Pride lies at the bottom of that. Thirdly, You have no occasion for this pride. There's nothing very uncommon about you. You're very much like other sinners. It's not likely that you could commit the unpardonable sin, even if you tried. I don't think you know enough to do it. So she interjected at this point and she said, why isn't there such a sin? Yes, but you don't know what it is. And you don't know enough to commit it. Fourth, you're one of the most self-righteous creatures I ever saw. You try to think that you are not so much to blame for your irreligion, that you are willing to be a Christian and would be one if it were not for this unpalatable sin, which you try in your pride to believe you have committed. You pretend that it's not your present and cherished sin. which keeps you in impenitence. Oh, you're good enough surely to repent. Then you would repent, indeed you would, if it were not for this unpardonable sin. That's your heart. Self-righteous and proud. Fifth, your wicked heart clings to this idea of the unpardonable sin. It's an excuse. For your continued impenitence, for your living in the indulgence of sin and unbelief and disobedience to God every day, your excuse won't stand. You make it insincerely. It's not the unpardonable sin which hinders your being a Christian, but the wickedness of your heart, your pride, your vanity, your insincerity. I shall never again say anything to you about the unpardonable sin. If you have any real and just conviction of sin, you would never name the unpalatable sin. And with that, he left her. Now, there's such a thing as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. It's mentioned in the gospel these three times, and we won't apologize for dealing with this sober theme. Every wise Christian you've ever spoken to, or ever debated with about the unpardonable sin, they will always say one thing to you. One wise thing they will say to you. They will say something like this. If you are anxious that you have committed blasphemy against the Spirit, you need not fear that you have done so, because such blasphemy is always accompanied by complete indifference to losing your soul. In other words, if you're afraid that you've committed this sin, we can say with great confidence you haven't. Because your troubled conscience is a sure testimony that you haven't committed this sin. Even in our text, the Lord Jesus doesn't speak to the Pharisees, the judges there in Jerusalem, and say, you've committed the unforgivable sin. He doesn't say that directly to them, does he? He's saying to his religious despisers, Please take care. Because whoever he might be, who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, even if he is a Jerusalem theologian, he can't be forgiven. He will never be forgiven. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a sin against the great love of God in Jesus Christ, the obviousness of salvation, the reality of Jesus Christ. It's against the Sermon on the Mount. It's against our Saviour's resurrection from the dead. It's about every testimony we have in the Bible to Him and everything in the lives of other people around you that say their lives have been enriched and ennobled and elevated and sanctified, illuminated and enriched. magnified by God, by God at work in them. Here's the salvation and it comes right down to us. It comes right up to us. It's here. And you have had some taste of it, haven't you? You've got some knowledge of this salvation. What have you done? Have you dismissed it? It's beyond contempt. It's evil. It's unholy. The unforgivable sin is radical, total, blatant apostasy. When the Bible speaks to us about unforgivable sin, it's not speaking about how glad I am to see Joe Bloggs here tonight. It's not about that. It's not for us to pass on the warning to other people, but for us to take it very, very seriously ourselves. Not to speculate about people who were once baptised here and go nowhere tonight, but for me to take it, for the preacher to take it and lay it to his heart and walk more carefully and more godly and draw nearer to God and live a holier life and mortify remaining sin and walk in the Spirit all my days. And what I do, you must do. You must do too. We take the warnings of God to heart. Lord, bless your word to us this evening hour. Help us, save us from blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. O Lord, begin the work in us and then you'll complete it until the day of Christ. But if we began a work without Thee, what miserable men with such an appalling future lay before us. We don't want to taste only and see only, but we want Thee dwelling in us. living in us, quickening us, helping us all our lives. Deliver us from using this verse as an excuse for not living a happy Christian life and having a hung dog face because we're saying to others we might have committed the unforgivable sin. Oh Lord, deliver us from all abuse of Scripture, twisting it to our own destruction. God keep us, help us to assure other people of all manner of sins and blasphemies, to be forgiven. Hear us in Jesus' name. Amen.