CHRIST MUST SAVE US!

Dear friends, let me tell you, once for all, that you cannot make yourselves fit for heaven, you cannot clothe yourselves with the garments of salvation, and you cannot renew your own nature. Somebody says, "But, sir, you discourage people by telling them that they cannot change themselves." That is the very thing I want to do. "Oh, but, I want to set a man working!" says one. Do you? I want to set him not working; that is to say, 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 preaching. 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 should know that they were on the road to a simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ!

-Gospel report by preacher C.H. Spurgeon (1834–1892 A.D.)