The second point of the so-called Five Points of the Doctrines of Grace, the U in the Tulip Formula. Before I do that, I'd like to just very briefly review the T in the Tulip Formula, which is called Total Depravity. Now, I would like, if you would, just indulge me for a moment or two, for you to turn to the Book of Romans, the third chapter. The ninth verse, the principle is advanced by the Apostle Paul. And incidentally, when we talk about these truths, we're talking about doctrinal beliefs. It isn't our purpose to get into a theological study. is comprised of doctrine, but theology is more than doctrine because theology asks questions and answers questions and debates itself and goes sometimes through a very circuitous route to get to a point. You would know that if you read much theological material, that theologians love long arguments and long words and long sentences, but they do get to the point eventually, and by the time they get there, they're usually pretty well honed and understand the doctrine well. We aren't theologians. We don't pretend to be theologians. We're believers in a set of truths, and we'll call it for the purposes of identifying what we believe. We believe we have a certain belief system. Our belief system embraces grace, which is what we're talking about. And in churches, it embraces life, which is separation and sanctification. Embraces church and that's basically and it embraces eschatology and that's our belief system. That's that's basically Encompasses what we believe within the framework of what I have just said within that framework are lots of Lots of discussions for for doctrinal positions The first doctrine and I and I mentioned to you last week and and ventured to you that it really is the foundation doctrine of all teaching on grace and that is the doctrine of Total depravity that is the total inability of a person any person Unless touched by the sovereign grace of God to be saved. He has no ability. He has no desire. Let me let me just Make this statement as well we're not talking about when Adam and Eve sinned and and and the nature of sin was put in them, that when their first children were born, or all of their children were born, and their children's children, their great-great-great-grandchildren, and all the way down, however many generations it is from them to us, we do not mean to imply that we have all been somehow crippled, and therefore not able to come to Christ, even though we may wish to come to Christ. I assure you that anyone, no one has ever lived on the face of this earth who wished to repent of his sins and receive Jesus Christ and come to him who has not done it. There is no such thing as being crippled with inability and having desire to do it, but can't because of inability. That's not what total depravity is about. Total depravity, I guess the best way for us to understand it, the simplest way, is to think death. Next time someone dies and is laid out in a funeral home, go to the coffin and say to that person, don't you want to live? And talk to that person. If they don't take you away and put you in a padded cell, you may stand there for a considerable length of time speaking to that person and telling them about all the advantages of life and how much better they'd be off alive than dead. And why aren't they? And why don't they? And why don't they get up? And there'll be no result. And you know there'll be no result. That's exactly the way we are by very nature in our spirit. We are dead unto God. We have no life to God. A thousand, 10,000 or billions of people can stand right in our face and tell us about all the wonderful advantages there will be to us if we would only repent of our sins and receive Jesus Christ. If only we would, and it will mean nothing to us. We will not act upon it. It will mean nothing at all because we are dead. Until life is given to hear what is said, we will remain dead in our trespasses and sins. And that's what total depravity is. If you can just think of death, then you'll get probably the simplest way to define what the Bible says about total depravity. But these verses, starting with the ninth verse and just reading a few verses, What then are we better than they in no wise? For we have before proved, both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin. As it is written, there is none righteous. No, not one. There is none that understandeth. There is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way. They are together become unprofitable. There is none that doeth good. No, not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher. With their tongues they have used deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways. The way of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Let's stop there and let's pray. Father in heaven, grant now that you would teach us. We need to learn and then we need to rejoice in the great salvation that you have wrought on behalf of your elect through Jesus Christ. And so give us minds to learn and hearts to worship tonight. I pray in Christ's name. Amen. Scriptures tell us in the gospel of John, the Lord Jesus Christ in his own words says something like this, all that the father hath given me shall come to me and he that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out. The idea, of course, being that when a person, and this has been said to me many times in my ministry, many times, people who have sat under sovereign grace preaching say, well, you know, when it's my time to be saved, I'll be saved. A former member of our church whose husband used to attend faithfully and knew a lot about the Bible, I spoke to him one evening about salvation. I said to him, X, why aren't you saved? What's hindering you? And his wife who was sitting there said, well, when it's God's time to save him, he'll save him, which is precisely the wrong thing to say at a time when I was witnessing to this man that the hour of salvation is now, not five years from now. The point is that when one comes to Christ, he will be received by Christ. One is never going to be able to blame God for his not being saved. There will be no excuse before Him. They are without excuse, according to the Scriptures. At any rate, I just wanted to point that out to you. Now I'd like you to turn to the book of Ephesians, and we'll just look at the fourth verse of the very first chapter, one verse, for our discussion this evening. Well, two verses. We'll start with verse 3 and read verse 4 as well. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places, according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. And the word which is rendered chosen here in the English, the King James, translates from the Greek word elexato, which means to be holy. be elected, to be chosen. It literally means to be chosen. When you go to the polls and cast your vote for someone, you are choosing someone to serve in that office. If he gets enough votes, he is elected to that office, and he therefore has succeeded in his quest for the office. The same word applies here, and the same idea is carried by that word. The idea is that the object In this particular case, the object of the choosing plays no part at all in the choosing, but that the chooser does all the work and makes all the effort. In this case, it would be God who is doing the choosing, and it is sinful man who is the object of his choosing. The question often is raised, well, if you really believe that only those who are chosen by God are going to be saved and go to heaven, then what is the purpose and point of gospel witness or gospel preaching? In fact, there is a whole sect within the so-called Baptist denomination which really believes that and make no effort toward gospel witness or gospel preaching or missionary effort. They're called primitive Baptists. We nicknamed them hardshells. And they simply do not believe. They believe in the sovereignty of God to such a degree and such an extent that they do not believe there's any urgency or necessity at all in propagating a gospel witness or the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So their argument is if some are elect, then why preach? And the answer is if none are elect, there would be no purpose in preaching. In fact, if none are elect, there wouldn't be anybody to preach. So the idea of propagation is carried with the notion of election. Election is the encouragement to propagating. It is through election that we have the encouragement to know that the Word of God will produce an impact and result upon a sinner. The Bible makes it very plain that without the Word, no one is going to be saved. And the Bible also makes very plain that those who are saved are saved because they are chosen of God unto eternal life. And so we just, that one particular verse of scripture that I've just read for you is enough proof text for the idea that election, God choosing, is in the Bible. Now it's necessary that we understand that if someone is spiritually dead, dead, dead, unto God, no desire unto God, no life unto God, no ability unto God, none of those things. And they're all inexorably connected. One cannot have life unto God, one cannot have desire unto God, but no ability, and one can have no ability unto God and have desire. The will is dead because the spirit is dead unto God. I want to talk to you for a moment about the will, the human will. Pay attention. As many of you, this is old stuff. You've heard it before, but it's important that you understand this. There are two wills involved in salvation. It's God's will and there is the candidate's will. Now don't run out the door and say the preacher's gone free will. Let me explain that. God's will is evident. God, before the foundation of the world, for purposes known only unto himself, without any condition at all to be met on the sinner's part, has chosen some unto eternal life, and that's why it's called unconditional. Not that there's anything good in you. There's not anything that recommends you to God. You're as dead as the next person. You're as great a sinner as the next person. If you haven't exercised and practiced the potential of your sin, the potential is just as great in you as it is in anyone else. You are too, like all of the rest of us, worse than anything you've ever done. And you are gross and great sinner before God. There's nothing in you to recommend you unto God. Nothing, absolutely nothing. There are no conditions that God sees in you that would cause him to choose you. In fact, the very idea of grace is so mysterious from the human perspective that we will never know in this life why some are saved and others are not. Grace being what it is, is the result of God's sovereign choice by which he bestows upon you favor you have not merited at all and have not deserved. We will never know why. If there's a basis at all, by which God has somehow chosen to bestow grace upon a sinner. We will never know it in this life because the Bible has clouded it so much and says we are all sinners and we are all undeserving. There's just no basis for believing that we deserve it at all. But obviously, God doesn't run a lottery in heaven. It didn't before time began and God's will was exercised in this matter. But anyway, getting back to will. God's will obviously is involved in choosing someone to eternal life. The sinner's will obviously is involved in the matter of salvation, too. It first is involved in a resistive mode, in a depraved mode, in a spiritually dead mode. But nevertheless, do not make the mistake in thinking that a sinner has no will. He does have a will. The will, however, fits his character. If you are spiritually dead unto God, then your will will fit your character, which means that, well, build a fence around you. Just pretend there is, well, now they have these doggy fences where they put a little charge on your neck, and if you get near the wire that's buried in the ground, it zaps you. Well, you're wearing one of those now. And you're running around in your life all over the place. And you get near the perimeter of your life and you get zapped. You don't have any desire to cross that line. There's nothing over there that interests you at all. Everything that holds your interest is here. And that's your nature. I use the nature of animals to finally make my point. And you'll remember this, I'm sure. If there's a drought and a horse is in the pasture and there's nothing to eat and he's dying of hunger, and you had a nice porterhouse steak that you'd ground up just for him because that's all you had to feed him, all there was, you took it out to that horse and you say, horse, eat this and live. The horse will die. He will not eat it. He has no interest in eating it. And do you know why he won't eat it? Because it's not in his nature to eat it. It's totally contrary to his nature. And coming to God in our human frame without any divine intervention is contrary to our nature. We'll live if we do it, but we have no desire to do it, no will to do it. And oh yes, I forgot, if the horse did eat the meat, he probably would die anyway because he has no ability to eat it. There's no means by which his digestive system would handle the fat. And therefore, he has no ability, he has no desire because it's not in his nature nor is it in his frame. And that's exactly the way we are. It's not in our frame to come to Christ. It's not in our nature to come to Christ. And if we are going to come, we're going to come because God chooses us unconditionally unto himself. Of course, the question is to come then is, is God unfair? Is it wrong for God to give life to some and ignore the others? You have to remember, that there's only a positive action involved in unconditional election. There's no negative action. Only a positive action. The positive action is that God gives life to some. There is no negative action. It's passive action. If there's such a thing as passive action, he's passive. Just leaves him alone. If he leaves us to our own devices, there's no way we're ever going to be saved. Never, never, never will we be saved. Election sometimes is understood by those of more Arminian bent that God elected all men without exception unto salvation. I have a quote here. I've quoted this not as fully as it's written here before me now. This was Dr. John R. Rice's school of theological thought. He was headquartered in Springfield, Missouri, and he was a very prominent evangelical, two generations before me, but he lived, his ministry extended into my lifetime, so I mean, he's not that ancient, unless you consider me to be ancient. At any rate, his successor, the younger man who trained under him, who was to wear the mantle of his ministry, was a man named Noel Smith. When he was preaching and teaching, he asked a rhetorical question. He said, what is hell? He answered the question himself. I tell you, and I say it with profound reverence, hell is a ghastly monument to the failure of the triune God to save multitudes who are there. I say it reverently. I say it with every nerve in my body tense. Sinners go to hell because God Almighty himself could not save them. He did all he could and failed. Now, this isn't true at all. That's just not true. It's blasphemy. That is blasphemy. I don't care if an evangelical said it. An evangelical blaspheme God when he said that. Because first of all, God does not fail, ever. If God fails, if God really can fail in anything, including salvation, Find another God. If your God does that, then find another one. They're all about the same. They'll all do you about as much good, which is no good at all. But the triune God does not fail. And I don't care with how much reverence he may have said that. That is a terrible statement to make about our God. But that's where disbelief in the doctrines of grace will take one. Ultimately one will get there. He may not utter those words from his lips, but those ideas will be in his heart and in his mind. He shall not fail. He does as he pleases. He calls whom he purposed to save. And whom he purposed to save he calls and he foreknew them. And he predestinated them unto eternal life. Whom He calls, He justifies. Whom He justifies, He glorifies. We don't mean that the election is just calling someone to service. We don't mean that election is what occurs at the moment someone is saved. We mean unconditional election is God before the foundation of the world writing your name or a sinner's name in the Lamb's Book of Life, inscribing it there indelibly so that it will never be removed. neither then or in time or in eternity when time is no more. Why is all this important? What's the difference? What doctrine do you believe? What possible difference can it make? Others will say. I have often had sent to me by people who knew a lot of Bible, brother, doctrine. isn't important, just so we believe the cardinal things. That's what is important. I want you to know that sovereign grace is cardinal. Without it, there's nothing else important. It's not cardinal to many people. It's not a cardinal thing. It's just so long as you're saved and going to heaven, never mind how or why, never mind about God's great instrument of choosing, involving, which is the sum total of all grace, is God's choice. But what are the advantages, the evidences of unconditional election? Well, shall not avenge his own elect, and who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? And the other advantages accrue as we shall see, which includes such things as preservation, sanctification, that is the setting apart, the separation from sin, and the separation from a sinful life, and separation from the power of sin. The only thing that we are not separated from in the new nature is the presence of sin. Someday we'll be separated from that too. But even that is because of God's sovereign grace. Stop to think about it. Everything we are, everything we hope to be in Christ, everything we hope to gain through him, all of the expectation, and even the great difficulties we face in our own lifetime, a problem today, a hurt today or tomorrow, a tragedy, a sadness, a betrayal, whatever, knowing that our God is sovereign in every way, a true despot, He really is, an absolute monarch, not simply over the elements, but over every affair of every human being in His life, to know that God is in control, in control with everything. No surprises for him, none whatsoever, only solutions. The sovereign God, your sovereign God, the God who chooses unto eternal life is the one who will resolve the conflicts in your life because he knows that he will overrule all things for your good. All things work together for good for those who love God. to those who are called according to his purpose.