This message is about the gospel being our and the world’s only hope.
I want you to imagine that you live in Inwood—Inwood, New York. Inwood is a neighborhood in Manhattan. Inwood is a neighborhood divided. West of Broadway, 77% of households earn more than $100,000 a year. East of Broadway, 77% of households earn less than $20,000 a year. What would church outreach look like in that community?
We’ll see that the problem is actually the same in Inwood, Iowa. It’s the same sort of people with the same sort of problems who need the same good news. We’ll be thinking about that good news over the next five weeks. We’ll take five weeks because we’ll be using what are called the doctrines of grace and there’s five of them. They are found in our very own Canons of Dort. Today, in the first one, we see that the gospel is our only hope. That’s the claim of this sermon: the gospel is our only hope.
We will study this in two points. First: the extent of the problem. Second: the saving power of the gospel. We’ll work our way through the Scriptures on your sheet.
First: the extent of the problem. Humanity in both Inwoods is, by nature, much worse off than we realize. That’s the first doctrine of grace, which is called Total Depravity. It starts by saying that none of us are what we were created to be. Article 1, “Human beings were originally created in the image of God and were furnished in mind with a true and sound knowledge of the Creator and things spiritual, in will and heart with righteousness, and in all emotions with purity.”
That’s not us anymore. None of us would have the gall to stand up and say, “I’m what I should be. I’m all love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control all day every day. If you want to see what a person should be, simply come to me and view it.” We know ourselves better than that. We fall short of God in all the ways we were created to live up to Him. As Romans 3:23 puts it, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
That’s all of us—Inwood, New York, Inwood, Iowa, 2022, 1922, Bethlehem 1022 BC. It’s universal. David saw that. He prayed, “Do not bring your servant into judgment, for no one living is righteous before you.” Solomon saw that. At the dedication of the temple he prayed, “When they sin against you—for there is no one who does not sin…”
Now the fact that we all sin doesn’t make it any less grievous. Don’t imagine that God sees all of us in our sin, smiles, and thinks to Himself, “aww shucks; that’s just people being people.” Imagine that you move to Idaho. The morning after you move in, there’s a knock on your door. You walk outside onto your porch and see long line of people as far as the eye can see. The first person welcomes you to the community—“glad you’re here”—and then slaps you across the face. The next person does the same. You stop the third person before he gets the chance to slap you. He’s rather taken aback and says, “Don’t take it personal. It’s just what we do here.” Now, are you going to stand there and get slapped across the face by everyone in that line because that’s just what they do there? Of course not. The fact that it’s just what they do there doesn’t make it any less grievous. The fact that sin is what we all do here doesn’t make it any less grievous.
The Lord doesn’t take this continually slapping across His face lightly. He takes it as open rebellion because that’s what it is. Sin is a declaration that we will not be ruled. That’s why Moses told Israel, “You have been rebellious against the Lord from the day I knew you.”
Since the fall into sin, which we studied last year with Genesis 3, rebellion is our natural condition. As Article 1 puts it, “they brought upon themselves blindness, terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment in their minds; perversity, defiance, and hardness in their hearts and wills; and, finally, impurity in all their emotions.” Rebellion is the natural condition of humanity in Inwood, Manhattan. It’s the natural condition of humanity in Inwood, Iowa. Geography doesn’t change the heart.
To see this rebellion, you need to know where it shows up. It doesn’t show up in everyone being as bad as they could possibly be. That’s not what we mean when we say Total Depravity. That’s a very misguided understanding of this doctrine. It will make you suspicious of nearly everyone. It sets children up for great confusion when they grow up and meet many people who want nothing to do with Jesus and yet live lives with a great deal of integrity. I hope you haven’t bought into this misunderstanding. Test yourself. Do you think that if every father in the world was ranked in a line starting with the most patient and going down to the least patient that every Christian would be ahead of every father who could care less about Jesus? That’s not how this depravity shows up.
This depravity shows up in a refusal to submit to God. It shows up in that very patient father who listens to Jesus say, “forgive others as God has forgiven you,” and responds, “fat chance. I wouldn’t forgive my cousin for what he did to me if he came crawling on his hands and knees.” That’s where you see the depravity. You see it in the refusal to submit to the word of God. You see it in the refusal to submit to God of the word.
We’ve been seeing that with Pharaoh and the plagues in the evenings. We’ve seen his depravity in his refusal to humble himself before the Lord. Now, Pharaoh might have been a tremendous administrator whose managerial skill truly benefited tens of thousands of people. He might have made his mom rightly proud in any number of areas, but that’s not where we see this depravity that destroys. We see it in his refusal to submit to God. “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God,” wrote Paul. “It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.” It’s the refusal to submit to God.
That’s the human problem, and when we say it is total as in Total Depravity, we are saying that we can’t and won’t fix it. Our ability to turn to God and submit to Him is totally gone. As Article 3 puts it, is that we “are neither willing nor able to return to God, to reform their distorted nature, or even to dispose themselves to such reform.”
We can’t make our sin problem right and we don’t want to. That’s because by nature we are controlled by our rebellion. We’re born enslaved by it. That’s why the Bible says that left to ourselves, we humans are slaves of sin. Titus 3:3, “we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures.” John 8:34, ‘Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”’ We’re born with hearts that are dead to God—dead in sin. Ephesians 2:1, “you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” Colossians 2:13, “you were dead in your transgressions.”
That’s the depth of the human problem and to begin to think about outreach you need to sit with that. We tend to focus on symptoms. We tend to think that the problem is sexual immorality or bitterness or not going to church. Those are just symptoms. Focusing on them is like putting asper-cream on a broken arm. Focus on the inability and unwillingness to submit to God. The rest is symptoms and it doesn’t ultimately matter which ones show up.
Imagine a heart with a throne on it. Unless Christ is on that throne, sin is. Sin is a monster with any number of faces. The fact that it changes faces while on that throne doesn’t mean it’s left the throne. Imagine that you’ve got a daughter who has lied for years. She suddenly stops lying. Now that’s great—life will go better for her—but if she stopped lying for some reason other than God having given her a new heart that longs to please Him in everything and repents when she doesn’t, the monster of sin is still on the throne of her heart. It’s just changed faces. Maybe now it looks like pride, or like judgmentalism, or hooking up with her boyfriend. It’s not about the face. It’s the same monster from the neck down and it’s on the throne of her life. It rules her.
Who is ruling you? Who is on your heart? It's always about the heart. That means that to really reach out, you need to deal with the real problem. As Iain Murray explained, “To teach men that they possess the ability to turn from sin when they choose to do so is to hide the true extent of their need.” We don’t want to treat the severe problem of humanity lightly. We don’t want to deal with a mere symptom and say, “peace, peace,” while unwillingness to submit to God sits on the throne. We want something completely different. That’s our second point: the saving power of the gospel.
Since humanity wouldn’t and couldn’t right itself, God did it through the gospel. To get us ready, though, He gave us the law. He gave us the law of Moses, in part, to prove to us that we wouldn’t and couldn’t make ourselves right.
Imagine a professor dealing with an arrogant student. This student, for no good reason, thinks she’s ready for Advanced Calculus for Engineers. The professor knows that she’s not. He’s had her in class twice now and knows that she not only she doesn’t apply herself but doesn’t want to apply herself. She keeps pushing the issue of that class and so he sits her down and gives her a sample test from it. She can’t even begin to formulate one answer and now she knows it. She knows the extent of her problem. That’s what God does with us with law of Moses only it’s not Advanced Calculus. It’s basic love. It was given, in part, to show us that we can’t and won’t fix ourselves.
The gospel is something different. That’s Article 6, “What, therefore, neither the light of nature nor the law can do, God accomplishes by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the Word or the ministry of reconciliation. This is the gospel about the Messiah, through which it has pleased God to save believers, in both the Old and the New Testaments.” This is what changes the heart—not us doing anything but God doing everything—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as we will see.
Paul explained that to the Romans. He wrote them a missionary support letter talking about the outreach he was doing. He explained how enslaved, dead, totally depraved hearts come to life by hearing about Jesus. Paul wrote, “What the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
Humanity couldn’t and wouldn’t deal with its sin problem and so God dealt with it by becoming human. He took our life—what we deserve for not being able or willing to submit to God. He gave us his life—put his Spirit in us so that we could and would submit to God.
We receive all this by faith. We are put right—or made righteous—by faith. ‘For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”’ It’s not about us making it right. We just receive it like beggars. That’s how rebel pride is subdued.
Now anything that doesn’t deal cut that deep doesn’t actually deal with the problem. Anything that doesn’t deal with the rebellious, enslaved heart that’s dead in sin, doesn’t deal with the problem. Offering the world life lessons from the Bible doesn’t deal with the problem. You can teach the value of integrity from Daniel’s example without ever forcing a confrontation with the monster of sin on the throne of the heart. You can teach the value of being above reproach like Daniel without showing the utter need for a new heart. Jesus warned against it. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.” If your goal is to convert someone to Christian living, don’t. The monster of sin on their heart will just change faces from lawlessness to legalism and the man will be just as lost and now think he’s found, and that’s often the most lost man of all.
People don’t need the message of Christian living. They need the news about what Jesus has done. They need to be told to receive what they couldn’t make happen. It’s the only way to the new heart. “I am not ashamed of the gospel,” said Paul, “because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.”
It’s about Jesus kicking the monster of sin off your heart and sitting down himself to rule. Unless Jesus sits down to rule your heart, the monster of sin is still in charge even if that monster looks and sounds just like you. You can’t be in charge of yourself and have Jesus on the throne of your heart. There cannot be two masters. That’s the message that’s needed out there. That’s the message that’s needed in here. Outreach is never us stooping down to help those messed up people. It’s us messed up people sharing the message that we need.
Three principles to remember as we do this. We’ll have principles for outreach each week. Today, just three of them from this first doctrine. First, remember that this requires a miracle. You can’t change people. You couldn’t change yourself. If you try, you’ll either despair or you’ll deny the severity of the sin problem and say “peace, peace,” when there is no peace. You’ll simply shoot for less than a heart that wants to please God. You’ll shoot for less than that in yourself. You’ll shoot for less than that in others. You’ll imagine that you can MacGuyver a solution to the sin problem. Total depravity says that the problem is beyond your ability. You need a miracle. The gospel does the miracle.
Second principle, pray. If you’ve been given a new heart, you know it took a miracle. You know that you’ve received something only God could do. Ask Him to do it for others too. Prayer and outreach go together. “Pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message,” as Paul put it. “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved.” Pray like God does the real work… because He does. Pray like it’s going to take a miracle because it will. Everyone who has ever received the new heart that longs to please God has received this miracle. There is no outreach without prayer. There’s just confused people trying to change what they can’t.
Third and final principle, please don’t rely on your own wisdom. I thought seminary would teach me how to convince others to follow Jesus. I thought I could learn how to make the gospel compelling to dead, enslaved hearts that didn’t know they were dead or enslaved. I thought I could learn how to do it just right. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about sharing the news about what Jesus has done knowing full well that this message will always seem foolish to most. There’s no way to do it and seem wise. That’s what Paul told the Corinthians, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.” Paul didn’t rely on his wisdom. He relied on the fact that God said that if salvation was going to happen, it was going to happen through the gospel. He told people about Jesus and let God do the miracle as God saw fit.
Do you believe that? Do you believe that humanity’s problem is really as bad as we’ve seen and that it’s impossible for us to fix? Do you believe that it’s something only God can remedy, and that the good news about Jesus is His means for doing so? Do you think this gospel is the only hope in Inwood, New York? Do you think that it’s the only hope in Inwood, Iowa? If not, you’ll try something else. If you think the gospel is the answer, rely on it. It will do what God sent Jesus to do. Amen.