Extract From a Sermon Chas. H. Spurgeon
Let me tell you once for all, that you cannot make yourself fit for heaven. You cannot clothe yourself with the garments of salvation. You cannot renew your own nature.
Somebody says: "You discourage people by telling them that they cannot change themselves." That is the very thing I want to do.
“I want to set a man to working!" says one.
Do you? I want to set him not working! I want him to have done with any idea that salvation is of himself. I want him to drop that thought altogether, and just to feel that if his salvation is to come out of himself, he has to get everything out of nothing; and that is not only difficult, but impossible. He has to get life out of his own death, to get cleanness out of the filthy ditch of his own nature, out of which it can never come.
Discouragement of this sort is the very thing I always aim at in my dealing with the unsaved. I am afraid that there are many people who are made to believe that they are saved when they are not. My belief is that God never healed a man till he was wounded, and that He never made a man alive till he was dead. It is God's way first to drag us down and make us feel that we are nothing, and can do nothing, and that we are shut up to be saved by grace: that Christ must save us from beginning to end, or else we can never be saved at all. Oh, if I could but bring all my hearers, not only into a state of discouragement, but into a condition of despair about themselves! Then I would know that they are on the road to a simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Our extremity is God's opportunity. Oh, how I long to get you to that extremity!
It' is absolute helplessness and death that puts the sinner where Christ can deal with him. When he is nothing, Christ shall be everything.
Have you never heard of the man who saw a person drowning, and plunged into the river after him, and swam to him? The sinking man tried to clutch him; but the swimmer knew that if he let the man get hold of him he could not bring him ashore. So he kept swimming around him; the man went down, and still his rescuer did not touch him. He went down again because the swimmer could see that he was still too strong. When he was just going down the third time, then the wise rescuer laid hold of him. The man was at the end of his own strength; he was helpless, and so could not impede his deliverer.
That is what you have to be, sinner friend. When you cannot do anything for yourself, then you cannot any longer hinder Christ. Your business is just to yield yourself right up into His hands to be saved alone by Him.
“Are there to be no good works?" asks some one: Oh, yes! Plenty of them, as soon as ever Christ has saved you. The first thing a man does when he is through with his own works and gives himself up entirely to Christ, is to cry: "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? Thou hast saved me. Now use me, if Thou wilt, not for my own salvation, but to glorify Thee. Let me show to men what Thy grace has done, and so express in some poor, feeble way the gratitude I feel for the free salvation which Thy grace has given to me.”
"Except ye be converted,
and become as little children,
ye shall not enter the kingdom
of heaven.”