Regeneration Faith Series

We are in our series, friends, on the life of faith, and today we'll be confronted with one of the most challenging messages we can ever hear. It's a message where the rubber meets the road in regard to whether the God we serve is the God of the Bible or one of our own making. Is our conversion genuine or spurious? About a hundred and fifty years ago in this country, you couldn't join a church unless you demonstrated credible evidence of regeneration.

Today, many in our churches are religiously lost because they're unfamiliar with that term, regeneration, both intellectually and experientially. But we must ask ourselves this question. Is God the agent of salvation or is man? Are men saved as a result of a decision they make or as the result of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit? Sit up straight, friend, and hear this message.

I pray you benefit from it as I did when I first heard this story. I'm about to relate to you now. I cried like a baby as I saw how deceived certain religious people can be.

It turned me upside down. That's what revival does when God comes and speaks to us in such power that the three-legged stool of self-righteousness, self-reliance, and self-preservation is kicked right from beneath us and we're made to see our raw spiritual barrenness and rotten sinfulness before a thrice holy God. And we realize how far we are from the God of the Bible.

Well, my message today, friends, begins with this true story related by a missionary. This is what he said. He said, you could stand on a certain cliff in Mexico and gaze down at a certain village of Mexican workers.

These people work down in the riverbed in their corn patch, and there they grow their corn. And when the corn is ready to harvest, they shuck it, and after it dries out, they'll take it and grind it into cornmeal and make tortillas. And then take those tortillas down to the open market, and there sell the tortillas for a few pesos and put them away.

Come back out to their house, and there they will live off of lizards. They'll go out among the rocks and catch these huge, long lizards and delete those lizards and save that money for a special day, a special day when they will start a pilgrimage up the mountain, for up on top of that mountain is a wooden statue of Jesus Christ. The terrain to that statue is so bad that most of the people will have to crawl on their hands and knees a couple of miles, and by the time they get to that statue, they are bleeding all over.

Standing beside the statue is a priest, and that priest is saying, now you love God, give to Him because you show your love by giving. And those people will reach into their little bags and purses and pull out those pesos stained in their own blood and drop that money in a slit in the top of the head of Jesus. Then the priest prays, and when he is finished, the priest will yell, you have not given enough.

Look, Jesus is sad. He is crying. And all the time there will be another priest hidden in that hollow statue, and with a little hand pump, he will pump water to where it comes out of human-made tear ducts, and that statue is crying.

And there, those people will give all they have, crawl down that mountain, and go back to eating lizards, growing their corn, to make more tortillas, to get more pesos, to go and give to a dead God that cannot move or hear. I submit to you, friends, there are many serving in churches today, in both the pulpit and the pew, who have gotten out their pocketknights and have carved out for themselves a God they can live with. But the trouble is, it's not the God of the Bible.

I wonder how many good Baptists and good Presbyterians and good Methodists and other good religious people are barking like dogs in hell right now because they followed the wrong God in life. The God they served wasn't the God of the Bible, the gospel of the Son of God, his rights and claims on all followers of his. Jesus said, if any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

I submit to you, friends, any kind of Christianity, less than that, is not the genuine article. You're eating the lizards of a false conversion by following a dead God. You have no reality of God in your life because you're a stranger to work of regeneration upon the heart.

And there's nothing worse than hanging around a religious person that's lost. They're just a Pharisee. They'll cuss you out.

They'll curse you. They'll lecture you. They'll tell you everything that's wrong with you.

They have no love of Jesus in them. Your God is as good as dead as that wooden Jesus, and he can't help you none. I know I'm a sinner, and I need a substitute for sin, but there's no hope for poor little E. A. Johnston unless Christ's life is laid down and applied to me.

I can't stand before God in my own merits. I must stand in the merits of another, the Lord Jesus Christ. Listen, friend.

You must be born from above and washed in the blood. You must get to Jesus. Get to Jesus.

Jesus saves. Jesus declared, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again.