Spiritually Blinded
Jun 13, 2007, There are many people today who are sincere and honest and many of them are giving their very lives trying to remedy the situation but they cannot bring us out of the pits that we are in today. That’s exactly where we are. We are bogged down in the pit of materialism and rationalism and infidelity and the pit of sin and religious profession.
The trouble with religion today is that our preachers see and acknowledge one side of the Gospel, but reject the other. They see that:
-Christ died for sinners
-They see that salvation is by grace
-they see that there is no redemption apart from shedding of blood
-they see that you must believe on Christ to be saved.
The one thing they don’t see and cannot admit to is man’s totally-depraved condition because they have never been awakened by the Holy Spirit. They never find the door that leads to the light. That door is repentance. Christians, preachers will talk about repentance and try to give a description of repentance, but they have never experienced repentance. The reason they have never experienced repentance is that they have never known the Holy Spirit conviction.
Most Christians will pass off the Holy Spirit conviction has nothing more or less than a psychological, emotional move upon an old dead corpse by a preacher/evangelist that has moved on his intellect, but he has not been awakened spiritually. Only the Holy Spirit can awaken a dead sinner. You can Preach, you can pray, and so on, but nothing will wake a sinner but the Holy Spirit.
Until whoever is teaching you or you or receiving from he will preach and teach man’s ability to believe and receive Christ. They will teach salvation hinges upon man’s believing. Once a person has been convicted by the Holy Spirit of his sin of unbelief and see that his whole heart is one of unbelief. The unbelieving heart controls his depraved will, and that he can’t believe until the Holy Spirit breaks the power of sin, the power of Satan, and gives him faith to believe. It is then and only then that he can receive Christ and trust Him as his own personal Lord and Savior.