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Transcript 771B
Questions on Remarriage, Salvation, and Raising Children
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hi, Mr. Camping. I have a few questions I want to ask you. A friend of mine and I were talking about a relative of hers who is in prison. And after he got into prison his wife divorced him. I listen to you talk about divorce, that there is really no reason for divorce. She was telling me that there is really no chance of their reconciling once he gets out, and he is due to come out in a short while. And she was just wondering, if he did meet someone else and fall in love, would he ever be able to remarry? Would he have to live single?
HC: Yes. Once we are married it is till death do us part. We can get a divorce insofar as the law of the land is concerned, but that does not leave us free to remarry. If he's going to live by God's rules, neither he should remarry nor should she. And actually, they ought to work toward a reconciliation.
CALLER: He tries to write her, but she has no contact with him at all. And she is living with someone else now. If his wife should die, then he would be free?
HC: Yes. You have the rule correctly.
CALLER: Also I have a lot of confusion. Some days I feel that I am saved, and then there are other days when I listen to Family Radio and I hear things, and I get really convicted and I get really confused, and I start doubting that I'm saved. I've asked the Lord into my heart and to lead me in my life and lead me to choose the right way to go and the right things to say, and I have days when I say things I shouldn't say, and I feel really convicted, and I feel really bad, and I feel like I'm not really worth saving.
Yesterday I heard a man talking on Family Radio, and he said that if we're not as righteous as Jesus was, then we wouldn't enter the kingdom of heaven. And I don't understand what that means, to be as righteous as Christ.
HC: There's a missing link in what you know about salvation. You have it very correct, that in ourselves we are desperate sinners; there is no worthiness in ourselves. The Bible speaks of us as being spiritually dead. And when it uses that kind of a figure it's horrible, because a corpse has to be put away. It stinks. There's nothing beautiful about it at all. And so the condition that we are in before Christ saves us is indeed terrible.
Number two, you've got it correctly, I think, that there is nothing that we can do to achieve our salvation. There is no way that we can become righteous and become worthy before God. It is what Christ does for us that's all important
Now the law of God condemns us to hell. The law of God declares, "The wages of sin is death." And the death that God has in mind is eternal damnation. When we become saved it simply means this, that Christ took upon Himself all of our Sins, every sin that you ever committed or ever will commit. When He went to the cross, He took upon Himself all of those sins.. He is eternal God, so He is able to do that. And of course He was found guilty. He stood before the judgment throne of God and was found guilty for your sins and my sins and the sins of everyone that He had come to save. And He endured the wrath of God, the equivalent of an eternity in hell, on our behalf.
Now that simply means that the law no longer can ever condemn us, because our condemnation has been taken care of in its entirety by the Lord Jesus Christ. There is nothing more that the law can do against us. And so we before God we become as if we are without sin. The righteousness that Christ has provided, in that He faithfully obeyed God in going to the cross on our behalf, has now been counted for us. We stand before God as if we are perfectly righteous. And what a wonderful condition this is.
Now what happens? When we became saved, judicially all of our sins were covered; every last sin was paid for. But insofar as our salvation is concerned, it's a two-part program. The part that you're already sensing in your life is the fact that God gave you a resurrected soul, a new soul. And in that part of your life you never want to sin again.
The Bible says that that which is born of God cannot sin. But in your body you have not been born of God as yet. Your body is still your same old body, and it has to go into the grave if you die before Christ returns, and return to the dust, exactly like the body of an unsaved person. You cannot go into God's holy presence with your present body, although you can go into His holy presence with your soul. And that's why when believers die in their soul they can go immediately into the presence of Christ, because at the point that they were saved they received their eternal resurrected soul, but not their body.
Now in our body we still lust after sin. We feel sorry for ourselves, we feel lazy, we engage in self-pity, we lust after the world. We have all the temptations from the outside because of our body that has not yet experienced salvation. Now God guarantees that we're going to get our resurrected bodies on the last day, but at this point in time we have not received that as yet. So our body is still lusting after sin.
Now because our soul, however, does not want to sin, there is conflict. And that's why at the end of the day, as you have already intimated, you feel miserable. You're under conviction, thinking; "Oh, why does it have to be this way? And how is tomorrow going to be any better?" And that's the life of the believer, that we recognize that today was not a perfect day because we see the sin, where we fell into temptation, and so we ask the Lord to forgive us so that we might not have that sin between us and God.
We don't have to ask Him to cover it by His blood because it was already covered by His blood. But we want to level with God about it. We don't want that sin to stand between us, and we want Him to strengthen us so that we'll begin to turn away from those besetting sins.
And as a matter of fact, the life of the believer is a life of growing in sanctification. We get victory over this sin and over that sin and the other sin, and every time we get victory over another sin we find it was covering up a couple of other sins. And so it's a constant growing all of our life. But we never arrive, because we still have a body that lusts after sin.
CALLER: So how can you know in your heart that you really are saved?
HC: First of all, do you trust what the Bible says, that you're a sinner, that you're under the wrath of God, and that Christ is the one who became sin for you and paid for your sins? Do you accept that because the Bible says so?
CALLER: I accept everything that's in the Bible.
HC: All right. And you also know deep in your heart, when you look at yourself honestly (and salvation is the moment of truth; we have to take away our rose-colored glasses and all of our pretences and look at ourselves exactly as we are), you are ready to say that you know that you want to do God's will, that is your earnest desire, to do God's will, even though you don't always do God's will. But really this is your desire, both in doctrine and in practice that you want to do God's will. And that's an evidence of being saved.
Or, another way of putting it is, you find that when you do sin there is struggle going on within you. You don't like it. Oh, you like the sin at the moment. All sin is attractive for the moment. But afterwards you just feel miserable. "Why did I do that? Why do I fall into that sin?" And you just feel upset within yourself, and that's an evidence of the fact that you are a child of God. Or it can be that kind of an evidence.
And taken all together, you can soon begin to see that "Yes, I know that I'm a child of God. I know that I want to do God's will. I know that I love the Lord Jesus as my Savior. I know that I trust that He has paid for my sins." And now, the more you read the Bible, the more you ponder the verses in the Bible, the more your faith will be strengthened. Faith is a gift of God, but it works in our lives as we read the Scriptures. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."
CALLER: Last night I had a nightmare. I dreamed that the Lord had come and I was tied on this rope, and I was left behind, and everybody was laughing. And today I've been worried all day.
HC: That nightmare revealed an inner lack of trust in your life. It was not a message from God, of course. A dream simply tells us something about what's going on in our subconscious. Every one of us starts with the faith that God gives us, but we have to cry out, "I believe; help Thou my unbelief." And right now you need to have your faith strengthened, that you know that you're a child of God.
Let me encourage you to read I John 1:9: "If we confess our sins . . ." Now the word "confess" is the key word. It means more than admitting our sins. It also means that I admit that I am a sinner, and I also don't want to sin. I look at myself honestly, and really I want to do God's will. That is confession.
But look what the rest of the verse 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 that is a tremendous statement, because God is going on record that He is absolutely faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness, if we confess our sins. That is, if we find in our life an earnest desire to do God's will, and we unhesitantly admit when we do sin to God, we don't kid ourselves that this does not happen in our life, we're very honest before God insofar as our sins are concerned, then we have the assurance that we are a child of God.
CALLER: I have a lot of guilt, and I really feel bad, and I keep hearing my mother say, "Well, that's your curse. It's going to be like that forever because of what you did," because I had my son outside of marriage, and I'm still not married. And I have problems with him.
HC: The big question you may be facing is, has Christ's blood covered that sin that you committed, when you lived in adultery? Is that so bad that Christ cannot cover that altogether?
CALLER: I know that if you're sincere in asking for forgiveness that . . .
HC: Remember that this is a very serious question, because if you don't trust that Christ can forgive all your sins, then you're not trusting Christ. Then you are effectively calling Christ a liar.
And it is true that when you have lived in sin, and this sin haunts you because here's the evidence in this son who doesn't have a father, and now every time something doesn't go quite well you wonder, "Is God reminding me of my sin again? Is this some kind of penance or a penalty that I have to pay?"
Well, the fact is that no matter how much you have sinned, you could have not only lived in adultery, but you could have lived in the most corrupt way possible. You could have lived in the most depraved way that man could describe. And yet all of that sin is covered by the blood of Christ, if you have become saved.
And so what is happening in your life, if you are a child of God, is not penalty for the fact that you lived in adultery. But it is the natural outworking that sin takes. For example, a man is a drunkard, and gradually that drunkenness destroys him. He gets cut off from his family, he loses his job, he gets cirrhosis of the liver, he gets brain damage.
But now he becomes saved; he becomes a child of God, truly saved. Are all of his past sins connected with drunkenness (and they are many) all paid for, insofar as Judgment Day is concerned? The answer is yes, absolutely. Is God going to punish him in any way for his past misdeeds as a drunk? The answer is no. But the natural outworking of his former life still has to follow. He still may die of cirrhosis of the liver. Just because he became saved it doesn't mean that he will be reconciled with his family. He may never get his job back again. You see what I mean? There still is that natural outworking.
Now you have a child. If you're having problems with him, that's not because of punishment that God is putting on you, if indeed you are a child of God and your sins have been paid for.
But it's a fact that you don't have a father to help you rear this child. Perhaps you're not the wisest mother. And you have not brought him up in the fear and the nurture of. the Lord. You probably have doted on him. You probably have felt very guilty about this, and so when he was very small, when he was one year or two years of age, you never wanted to spank him or speak too harshly against him.
CALLER: You're absolutely right.
HC: And so you were ruining him all the time, because you were not training him in the proper discipline. And that's the natural outworking, you see, of guilt in your life. But it is not a punishment of God because you formerly lived in adultery.
CALLER: So actually it's my own doing.
HC: It's your own doing. And the quicker that you accept it and ask the Lord for the complete trust that all your sin has been paid for, the quicker you will be able to look at your son without that guilt complex. And you can look him right in the eye and say, "Now look, you're my son, but now I've got to get busy, hoping it's not too late, to bring you up in the fear and the nurture of the Lord. And there has to be some discipline here. And I've got to take this matter in hand right now."
CALLER: I got him into Sunday School, and I'm going to start going to the same church that he goes to. And I've been reading to him. I've been starting in Genesis and reading to him.
HC: And remember that if he disobeys, that is, if he is disrespectful, and I don't mean every little thing, but there comes a point when you see that he is not obeying, that he is not recognizing your authority, that you have to take him in hand, and he needs that spanking that God has provided a place for. And his tears will dry up, and he'll be grateful after he's had the spanking. It's a very important part of the discipline that may come, if you find that he is denying your authority.
And then you love him up and go on from there. And you can pray the Lord for wisdom to rear him in a way that's pleasing to Him.
CALLER: I've told him what I heard on Family Radio, that when a child disobeys his mother he's disobeying the Lord.
HC: That's exactly right. And God has admonished us as parents to bring our children up in the fear and the nurture of the Lord and to use the rod when it is necessary. And if we do not, then we are disobedient. And you can explain to him that if you do not chastise him whenever he needs it, then you are being disobedient to God.
CALLER: That's what I told him. I said, "Any time that you don't mind me and I don't make you mind me, then I'm disobeying the Lord, and I'm in trouble."
HC: That's right. Now you've got the right idea. May the Lord give you such wisdom, and also a real recognition of His grace.
CALLER: Thank you, Mr. Camping.