NO APOLOGY!

Many men today appear to be ashamed of the doctrines of grace. If they preach these grand old doctrines at all, they do so very cautiously. In their attempts to make the gospel acceptable to carnal men, they “apologize and clarify” until it is explained away.

I make no apology for believing and preaching the doctrines of God’s free and sovereign grace. If there is a God in heaven, (and only a deliberately ignorant fool would deny it), that God is absolutely sovereign in all things. Unless all men by nature are totally depraved sinners, incapable of doing anything toward their own salvation, the death of Christ was a useless and vain thing. If God has a people whom he loves and to whom he is gracious, he loved them and determined to be gracious to them in eternity, in eternal election; the eternal God never changes in his purpose or in the objects of his love – He is immutable. If Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died in the place of sinners as their legal Substitute before God, those sinners are redeemed and must be saved; his infinite merits and the justice of God demand their salvation. If God the Holy Spirit sets out to save any man, that man will be saved by irresistible power; omnipotence cannot fail or be defeated. And every believing sinner will be preserved and kept by the power of God unto eternal glory; not one can perish whom God Almighty saves.

So far as I am concerned, these things are the very core of my faith. To deny one of these blessed truths would be, for me, a denial of my God and Savior, and of the gospel itself. What God has taught me by his Spirit, through his Word and my experience, I must believe. And what I know to be the very truth of God I must proclaim, regardless of cost or consequence. To do otherwise would be treason on my part, treason against my hearers, treason against my God, and treason against my own soul!

Here I stand. I can do nothing else. So God help me to stand!