In this book we are writing, as it were, the spiritual biography of man. Our story encompasses his life in creation,in the fall, in grace, and in glory. We have seen what God meant him to be in creation, what he became in the fall, and what God has done for him through grace. We have now come to the most crucial point in his whole story. A choice must be made that will give direction to all that lies beyond both for time and for eternity. It is a decision that determines destiny. Will the natural man remain on the plane of the natural or will he choose to live on the plane of the spiritual? Will he receive or refuse God's gift through grace? Will he cling to his sin or lay hold upon God's Son?
The Inevitable Choice - Your Sin or God's Son
God's first gift to man is that of a Saviour because this is man's primary need. It was God's love for sinners that led Him to give His Son to die for us (Romans 5:8). Christ was born into this world a Saviour.
Luke 2:11, "For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."
It was Christ's love for sinners that brought Him from Heaven to earth. By His own testimony He came to seek and to save the lost.
1 Timothy 1:15, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners: of whom I am chief."
Luke 19:10, "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost."
"Man of Sorrows,' what a name,
For the Son of God, who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim,
Hallelujah! What a Saviour!"
Christ crucified is the sinner's only way back to God. He is the sinner's only door of access into the presence of God and God's only door of access into the heart of the sinner.
John 14:6, "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me."
John 10:9, "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture."
The initial relationship of the natural man to God must be that of a sinner penitently acknowledging his sin and accepting God's gracious gift of a Saviour. The sinner must come to God through the crucified Christ, or he cannot come to God at all.
This is an exceedingly humiliating position for the natural man to take, it knocks the underpinning from beneath his entire life for it strikes at the very root of his self-will, self-love, self-trust and self-exaltation. By it he is compelled to acknowledge that he has made an utter failure, that he is wholly incapable of living his own life in his own strength, but more than that, that he is absolutely unfit to live in the presence of One who is righteous and holy. It brings him altogether to the end of himself, to the foot of the Cross to acknowledge his sinful, helpless, hopeless condition, and to look up in simple faith to the Crucified Saviour, who alone can life him to a higher plane of life.
Many sinners in the world today will not go thus far. They will acknowledge their lack of light and their need of a teacher; they will confess they do not know the right way of life and need a leader; they will admit the low level of their standards and their need of an example; but they will not acknowledge that they are out and out sinners needing a Saviour. They simply place themselves outside the class for which Christ died. But the Lord of Glory did not leave the bosom of His Father and the joy of Heaven for the suffering and sorrow of earth and the shame and scourging of Calvary's Cross merely to receive the patronizing admiration of men and to help them to live a somewhat more intelligent, respectable, useful life as sinners on the plane of the natural man. He came only because men were lost and must be found: because they were sinners and must be saved. He came not to call the righteous but sinner to repentance.
Through Christ, as Saviour, God had provided the only way back to Himself that He deems effectual: He has opened the only door from earth into Heaven. Through His Son, as Saviour, God has made salvation from sin a potential gift to all sinners so that since Christ died and rose again all men everywhere are shut in to an inevitable choice - the choice between their sin and His Son. "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."
Since the shedding of the precious blood of His only begotten Son on the Cross of Calvary, God the Father sees every person on earth either with or without a Saviour.
~Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 1 - "The Gracious Invitation")
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