OUTLINE:

The Gospel Call
A person who never shows up, mind, heart, and will…cannot receive the free gift of salvation by grace through faith!

What Is Good?
To love like Christ does. To abide in a love that cannot help but express itself, and to be honest about those who receive it and those who don’t.…

Who Gets To Define It?
God does. His fingerprints are all over His creation and through the various special revelations of Himself, including His manifestation as Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Loving
The greatest seed we can ever sow is the Gospel. This seed is the very expression of God’s love, and therefore, when sown righteously, an expression of our own love (Jn 3:16; Eph 5:25-27; 1Jn 4:19).

“he must deny himself”
Repentance involves the mind, heart, and will of man. A person unwilling to “deny himself” cannot follow Jesus, precluding them from His salvation.

Unfruitful “soil”
Arrogance maintains an unrepentant “soil” that will not receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It will receive a different gospel from a different spirit regarding a different Jesus (2Co 11:4), and it will even bear fruit after that kind, but it will never be fruit of the true “Vine” (Jn 15:5).

1Co 3:9
For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

Arrogant “soil”
Arrogance might concede a portion of the self life, but never all of it. Jesus demands a willingness to “bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Mt 3:8), for the results are, “whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mk 8:35).

Ac 11:18
When they heard this, they quieted down and glorified God, saying, “Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life.”

The General Truth About Demands
The Bible is chalk full of demands that are literally impossible for man to obey without the help of the One making them. While this seems paradoxical, it is nothing less than God’s grace. God is merely looking for willingness/humility in a man.

The Gospel Offends
The Gospel is THE most offensive news you can give an unbeliever still abiding in their flesh, particularly an arrogant one  (1Pe 2:7-8). An arrogant person will take a free ticket to Heaven but will always refuse the call to repentance that Jesus demanded.

Salvation is never preceded by unrepentance.

The General Truth About Demands
The Bible is chalk full of demands that are literally impossible for man to obey without the help of the One making them. While this seems paradoxical, it is nothing less than God’s grace. God is merely looking for willingness/humility in a man.

Jas 2:19
You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.

Is 5:20
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

Attrition vs. Contrition
True repentance is an act of contrition, not attrition. Contrition is from contrite (Latin: “to be worn out, ground to pieces”); vs. attrition (Latin: “abrasion, scraping, to rub one thing against another”). (Psa 51:17; 34:18; Is 66:2; Ro 10:10; 1Jo 1)