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Transcript 375D — Panic at the Thought of the Lord's Return
CALLER: I have been a Christian for quite a few years, and yet I cannot explain why I panic when I think of the Lord coming back. I've given up everything that I can think of that might be offensive to the Lord. I haven't gone to a movie in twenty-five years, and I don't drink or smoke. I mean, I don't do anything that I think would be offensive to Him. And yet I can't find anything in my life that would make me afraid of His coming. And yet I am. And I'm afraid I'm going to be left.
HC: Let's analyze that a moment. Are you going to go into Heaven because you have begun to live a good life?
CALLER: No, no. I could never earn my way to Heaven.
HC: All right. In other words, you definitely know that you're saved by God's grace, and that except for God's grace you would go to hell. Do you know that?
CALLER: Yes, because we can't go to Heaven by works.
HC: We can't go to Heaven by works.
CALLER: No.
HC: All right. Now when we become saved, it means that we are hanging our whole life on the Lord Jesus Christ. Now the Bible declares that if we confess our sins, and to confess our sins means that we acknowledge our sins before God, we turn away from our sins. And it says, "If we confess our sins, He [that is, God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
Now if you really believe that you're a sinner, and that Christ has covered all of your sins, if you really believe that He has paid for your sins, and yet you feel like you might go to hell, then the question has to be asked, "Are you really trusting Christ?" Or do you just think that you're trusting Him? Do you really take God at His Word? Do you really believe exactly what the Bible says?
CALLER: I believe every word of it.
HC: Well, then, when this panic comes upon you when you think about the Lord Jesus Christ coming, ask yourself this question: Why am I frightened? Am I afraid that I might go to hell? On what basis could I go to hell? Do I really trust that Christ has paid for my sins? If He's paid for my sins, then I have no fear of hell any longer His love will cast out this kind of fear.
CALLER: Do you think it could possibly be the devil that just makes me think of these things?
HC: No. If you're a child of God, the devil has nothing on you. It has to do with an area of unbelief in your own heart. The Bible declares, and of course our faith is not a perfected faith. We believe, and we cry out to the Lord, "Oh Lord, help Thou my unbelief." It means that you haven't learned yet to cast yourself altogether upon the Lord Jesus Christ. You haven't come to that point yet where you have abandoned yourself to Him altogether, recognizing that because of what He has done for you, recognizing that because He has saved you therefore there is no condemnation.
CALLER: It's easy for me to believe that about other people, but I can't understand why He should love me enough to do that.
HC: He certainly didn't love you this way because you were worthy.
CALLER: No, I know that.
HC: At this point you have to recognize God's sovereign grace. God, in His sovereign grace, decides whom He is going to save. If He decided to save you, that's His business. I don't understand why I'm saved, either.
CALLER: I guess it's just hard for me to understand that kind of love, because I've never had that kind of love in my whole life.
HC: But that's what the Bible talks about. This is the love of God, that He does reach down into the pit of hell and save some. He does rescue us from the miry clay of hell and make us His child.
We may not understand this. We may not fathom how God could do this marvelous thing for us. But because the Bible says so, that is all that we need to have. We trust what the Bible says implicitly. It declares it to be so, and therefore we praise God for His grace.
CALLER: I see. I do believe all of that. Will I finally come to the point where I fully accept it? I do accept it, I can't explain what I'm trying to say.
HC: Let me ask you this. Is there anything in your life, way back when, and maybe it's so deep in your soul that you've even forgotten it, or you wanted to forget it, is there anything that you ever did in your life (don't tell me what it is if you can think of anything - but just think about it in your own thoughts) that you have a question, "Could God have forgiven that sin, too?"
CALLER: Well, yes there is. I know God has forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself.
HC: Ahhh, I see. In other words, you did something in your life at some point, and you are not secure in relationship to that sin, are you? Intellectually you know that God has forgiven that sin, but yet in yourself you feel what a stupid person, what a foolish person you were in committing that sin, and you have never forgiven yourself.
CALLER: Yes.
HC: All right. Now we're beginning to strike a little bit of pay dirt. You see, this kind of thinking, and I'm not saying this unkindly, of course I'm only saying this to help you analyze yourself, because I see that you're seeking for an answer. This kind of thinking is a result of pride. Before we can be saved, before we can have that assurance of knowing that we are a child of God, we have to humble ourselves. We have to recognize that we're a rotten, no good sinner.
Now if we look at a sin in our life and we can't forgive ourselves, effectively we're saying, "You know, fundamentally I'm a pretty good person." Now we don't put it in this crass language, but it really runs something like this, subconsciously, in our soul. "Fundamentally I'm a pretty good person. I have lived a fairly decent life, and therefore I certainly ought to be saved by God. But I did do a certain sin that I'm very ashamed of. And oh, how stupid I was, and foolish I was in committing that sin. And that should never have happened. Now I know God forgives that sin, but my oh my, how did I ever get into that sin?" And so we say, "I don't forgive myself."
Now really, what we're on is an ego trip. Really, what we're saying is, "God, fundamentally I'm pretty good. I'm sorry that I committed that especially bad sin, and I'm glad you forgive that. But fundamentally, I'm a pretty good person."
CALLER: I really don't believe that I am.
HC: Well, but the fact that you can't forgive yourself means that deep in your subconscious, you still are taking on some claims of personal goodness in yourself. It means that you have not abandoned yourself. You haven't come to that point yet in your life like the publican of old, who dared not look up to Heaven, and smote his breast, and didn't come near into the temple. He stood afar off. And he cried out, "Lord, have mercy on me. I'm a sinner."
And so you look at that sin in your life that you can't forgive yourself for, and you say, "Well, that's one of them, but when I look at the rest of my life, as I measure my life by the standard of God's holiness, there are lots and lots and lots of sins. Any one of them ought to send me to hell. Oh God, have mercy on me."
That's what we have to come to, where we can look at the worst sin of our life and say, "But that's only typical of the kind of a person I am, except for God's grace. That is typical. It happened to be a sin that in my human judgment made me a little more ashamed. But really, from God's vantage point, I know that that is typical of what I am by nature. I'm a sinner, and I cry out to God for His mercy. And I shouldn't have been surprised that I committed that sin. That is typical of the kind of a person I am outside of Christ."
And only when we can come to that valuation of ourselves, where we have been broken before God, so that we really see how spiritually bankrupt we really are, and will admit it honestly to ourselves, getting rid of all of these airs of pride, and sometimes we cover up pride by calling it self-respect. Well, that's another word for pride. We have to come to that point where we recognize that every best thing we've ever done stands filthy before God. We're dead before God. We're a corpse, a stinking corpse, before God. And it's only God's grace that can raise us up out of this miry clay.
CALLER: Does this one thing mean that I'm not saved?
HC: Well, I don't know whether you're saved or not. But I know this. You have no assurance of salvation. And I know you won't have an assurance of salvation until you come to that point. And it may be that God is indicating to you that you are not saved. Don't despair, however. It is a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more wonderful to discover I'm not saved now than to wait and take my chances with eternity, to die and then find out, when I stand before the judgment throne, that I'm unsaved.
CALLER: That's the part that scares me.
HC: Okay. The very fact that you are scared of Judgment Day indicates that there's a strong possibility that you are not saved. But then, if you recognize you're not saved, you've taken the first giant step towards salvation. The next thing you have to do is, look at yourself as God looks at you. And God looks at you as a hopelessly lost sinner, as someone who rightly ought to come under the wrath of God, who ought to spend eternity in hell, not only for this sin that you're ashamed of, but for a thousand other sins that your life has experienced. In other words, our best works are as filthy rags in God's sight. We're by nature sinners.
And once you come to that point, where you cry out, "Oh God, have mercy on me. I admit I am a sinner. I thought that sin was especially one to be ashamed of, but basically I thought I was a pretty good person. But now I discover, by God's Word, that there is none righteous, no not one. There's not any that do good. And that means me, too. That means that all these ideas I had about self-worthiness were just nonsense. I'm under your wrath, and I'm subject to hell. And oh God, I don't want to go to hell. Help me to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Help me to cast my cares altogether on Him."
You see, Jesus came for the sinners, not for the righteous. He came for sinners.
CALLER: The fact that it did bother me was a sign to me that I was saved. And if I wasn't saved, it wouldn't bother me.
HC: When you come to salvation, when you are really born again, sin will bother you. Not because you are threatened by hell, but because there is an ongoing, earnest desire in your life to do it God's way. And when you come to the end of the day, or whenever you pray to God, "Oh God, forgive me for the sins of this day," you don't live with remorse from your sins any longer. There is no problem of forgiving yourself. You know that those sins, too, have been covered by the blood of Christ. You have entrusted your life altogether to Him.
When you live with a lack of forgiveness of a past sin, it means that you still haven't faced the fact that you are a sinner altogether. Altogether you're a sinner. You haven't faced the fact yet that you have to acknowledge this to yourself and to God, and that once you do, then you're going to be on the path of salvation.
Pride in our lives will go nowhere except down toward hell. God declares that He will resist proud, but give grace to the humble. It's a broken and a contrite heart that God will not despise. Now the world operates with pride. Your peers talk about self-respect, and the fact that we have a lot to be proud of. This is the way the world operates. But if we're going to come to salvation, pride has to go. We have nothing, nothing, nothing at all to be proud of. We're sinners. We've violated God's rules again and again and again. And even those things that we thought we were pretty good about, actually, if we view them in the light of God's Word, we find that they were tainted by sin. We were self-serving. We were doing it for our own credit rather than to glorify God.
And so we stand spiritually bankrupt. And once we get to that point, then we're on the threshold of salvation. I have a very dear friend who was saved in the last several years, and there was a time in her life when she was just terribly offended when I said to her, "Before you're saved you are a rotten, no good sinner." This offended her drastically. But once she became saved, she understood what this meant, that in myself there is no good whatsoever.
CALLER: I admit that. I mean, I believe that.
HC: All right. Then look at that sin that you can't forgive yourself for, and say, "So what else is new? That was par for the course for a sinner. That's par for the course. This is no ego trip. Why should I not forgive myself? This is the way I was by nature. I was a sinner. This was typical of what a sinner does."
CALLER: But this happened after I was saved.
HC: If you have been saved, and then you committed a sin, then go to Christ and seek His forgiveness. You see, what have you been saved from? What is salvation? What have you been saved from? You've been saved from the wrath of God. And so if you committed a sin after you were saved, then recognize that it too is forgiven by God. And you still have to walk humbly. If it's an ego trip, in your pride you're saying, "Now I'm saved, and now I ought to always live the good life. And I can't forgive myself because I fell into sin.'' In that case we're not walking humbly before the Lord. We're walking with pride.
And pride has no place in the life of the believer. Pride is the thing that separates us from God. Pride in itself is a sin.
CALLER: I never looked at it that way before.
HC: So maybe if you would go to the Lord and cry out, "Oh Lord, have mercy on me and take this pride out of my life, that I think I'm really a pretty good person now, in myself I'm not a good person. It's only by God's grace that I have a desire to live for you. And oh Father, it is possible that I can fall, but I'm grateful that you do forgive."
CALLER: I see. Thank you so very much.
HC: I hope this helps a little bit.
CALLER: You have. Thank you very much.
HC: You're welcome. Good night.