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Imagine that you have just been diagnosed with cancer. The doctors say it will kill you, but there is a cure. There is a cure for your cancer, but you must get treated right away. What would you do? Imagine that you went home, and turned on your computer, and lost yourself on the Internet. Imagine that the next day, you went out with your friends. One thing leads to another, and a few months has rushed by. The doctor calls you at home, and argues with you. He says that you must be treated and it has to happen right now or you will die. But you do not believe him. You forget all about his warning, and just go right along with your life. Your neglect has taken on a life of its own. You got used to forgetting about your cancer. You hardly think about it at all now.

One day, you feel a pain, and go see your doctor. He looks at your sternly, and shakes his head. He tells you that it is too late. He tells you there is nothing he can do. He tells you the cancer is going to kill you now. You will live for a while, maybe six months, maybe less, but you will die. The cancer is not really what killed you. What killed you was your neglect. There was a cure, but you neglected it. There was hope, but you forgot about it. There was a chance, but you lost it. You have gone too far. You are living in death. There is nothing left to do now, but die.

You tell yourself that you would never do that. Yet that is the way that you treat your soul. God says that you are a sinner. God says that the wages of sin is death. God says that you will be judged for your sin with an eternity in Hell. God says that there is only one escape from this judgment. God says that you must trust Jesus if you are to be saved from sin and judgment. However, your response is lazy, sleepy and uninterested. You do not respond to the call of the Gospel. You go home and forget about it. You reject Jesus. You postpone your salvation. You think you can trust Jesus at any time in the future. Therefore you are acting just as if you had received a cancer diagnosis from a doctor. But there is a deadline to grace. There will be a moment in which the availability of salvation will be gone. You will have neglected Christ too long. You will have offended the Holy Spirit of God. You will have committed the unpardonable sin. Once you have committed the unpardonable sin, you are hopelessly destined for Hell.

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

The Bible gives many warnings about the unpardonable sin. The Bible gives the account of the Pharaoh during the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. God gave Pharaoh a clear instruction. Pharaoh saw miracles, but he did not obey what God told him. Pharaoh kept stubbornly resisting the instruction of God. Pharaoh was confident in himself. He continued to brace himself against God. Until it was too late. Until God finally gave up on him, and sealed him in his own stubborn resistance.

“And Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land” (Exodus 11:10).

How are you so different? You have seen amazing things. You have seen clear conversions and lives changed forever in Jesus. You have not seen fire hail down from the sky, but you are not any less guilty. You are not any less guilty, because you have heard the Gospel of Christ clearly preached to you. You have heard the Gospel preached, Sunday after Sunday, for months and years, and you have not listened to the call of the Gospel. You have not turned from your sin and trusted Jesus. You have hardened your heart. You have looked to the fault in others. You have looked to what the world offers you. You have concerned yourself as to what others may think. You have not listened to the call of the Gospel.

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

So in some ways, you are worse than Pharaoh, who never heard the Gospel. How many times did Pharaoh turn away the instruction of God through Moses? Ten times? Twenty times? One hundred times? If you have been under the preaching of this church for a year, you have already turned God away as many times as Pharaoh did. God finally hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he could no longer obey. He could no longer listen to the warnings of God. He was dead while he lived. How many more times will you hear the Gospel, before God hardens your heart? Could this morning be the last time that God ever deals with you? Could this morning be your last opportunity to trust Jesus and be saved? Could this morning be the day that you commit the unpardonable sin? Could today be your deadline?

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

There was a time when a thought like that would have bothered you. You would have trembled at the thought of committing the unpardonable sin. Yet, now it passes right through your mind without touching your heart. Your heart has been hardened. You are a case-study in how to commit the unpardonable sin. The unpardonable sin is a sin of hardening. A sin of being insensitive to the communications of the Holy Spirit to your soul. Dr. Henry C. Thiessen said,

“The degree to which the soul has hardened itself and become unreceptive to multiplied offers of the grace of God, determines the degree of guilt. Final hardening is the sin against the Holy Spirit and is unpardonable, because the soul through it has ceased to be receptive of divine influence” Introductory Lectures in Systematic Theology (270).

The fact is that the thought of passing the deadline has no effect on you. Have you ever missed a deadline in school? Have you ever overslept and woken up late for a final examination? You messed up so badly, that all hope of fixing the situation is lost. You can only appeal for mercy, for forgiveness, for some negotiation with only your desperation to bargain with. That may work with a college professor, but it will not work with God. Once you have passed God’s deadline, you are without hope. You cannot ask for an extension. You cannot ask God for more time. You cannot ask for a lower place in Heaven. It is too late. You have passed the deadline. You have committed the unpardonable sin.

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

Your passiveness when confronted with this reality resembles the people of Noah’s day. The Bible says that Noah was a preacher of righteousness. Noah preached to the people of his time decade after decade. They reacted to Noah in the same way that you react to the preaching today. They listened with interest at first, but at some point, they stopped listening altogether. They dismissed his preaching as unimportant. Maybe some of them thought that what he said was true, but they were not going to change their lives for his ideas. If it started to rain, they could just run over to the ark and jump in. They could have it both ways. All they had to do was wait and see if it would rain, and if it did, run into the ark. But they forgot about God. They forgot that God had set a deadline. The Bible says,

“And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in” (Genesis 7:16).

Once Noah and his family had gone into the ark, God closed the door behind him. Once God closed the door, it was too late. Those people, that were waiting to see what would happen, before they got on the ark, were drowned in the Flood. God had set a deadline. They listened for decades, until they could no longer listen to Noah with any serious urgency. They thought he would go on talking about God’s judgment without it ever happening. And when God’s judgment came, it was too late for them to be saved. They had crossed the deadline.

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

The Bible speaks about Esau. Esau was no ordinary man. Esau was the son of Isaac, one of the patriarchs of the faith. Esau grew up hearing stories about God. Doubtlessly Esau heard about how God rained down fire and brimstone to Sodom and Gomorrah. Esau heard about God, but it had no effect on his life. Esau thought so little of God that he was willing to sell away his birthright to satisfy a fleeting desire. Esau sold everything he could have been for a bowl of stew. At some point, Esau realized what he had done. He knew he had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to take it all back. He wanted another chance. But there was a deadline. The Bible says of Esau,

“For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears” (Hebrews 12:17).

Esau wanted to change. He wanted to repent. But he could not. It was too late for Esau. Something had changed in his spiritual situation. Something was different. Something was different that he did not expect. Just as Jacob woke up from his sleep in the middle of the desert – in the night, surrounded by solitude – to realize that God was there, God was with him, so Esau woke from his spiritual sleep and realized that God was not with Him. God was gone. God was not with him, and it was too late. He had passed the deadline.

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

You who have heard the Bible all of your life are in special danger. You grew up hearing stories about the Bible. The stories of David and Goliath and the walls of Jericho and so many others are etched into your mind. But you have heard these stories for so long, that they do not mean anything to you. They have the same effect on you as they did on Esau. They are just background noise to your own agenda in life. They have no real effect or impact on your decisions. Those stories are just something for children. Now when the Law and the Gospel are preached, they are just more stories. You cannot take it seriously. You cannot let the Law and the Gospel reach into your life. You cannot repent. That is what Esau was missing. He looked for repentance carefully, and with tears, and could find none. Dr. John R. Rice said concerning the unpardonable sin,

“There is a sin beyond that which can never be forgiven. Men never repent of it. This sin, once committed, is irrevocable. When I speak of the unpardonable sin, I mean that there is a sin for which one cannot have forgiveness in this world, of which a man never repents, from which a man never turns, can never be cleansed and forgiven… The unpardonable sin is different in that one may cross the deadline while still alive, [while still alive, one] may pass into the realm of the damned, may pass forever beyond mercy while yet alive in this world! How terrible this sin that has no pardon, no repentance, no forgiveness” (Crossing the Deadline).

“And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man”
        (Genesis 6:3).

Dr. Rice was an evangelist. He understood the urgency of the danger that a soul without Christ was in. Dr. Rice loved souls enough to tell them the truth about the deadline of God. Dr. Rice wrote in his famous song,

If the Saviour has called you to return from your wandering,
   If the Spirit has pleaded that you turn from your sin;
If the knock at your heart’s door, so insistent continues,
   Oh, refuse Him no longer, [He will pardon your sin]!
[Or] how sad facing judgment you’ll recall with no mercy
   That you tarried and lingered till the Spirit was gone;
What reproaches and mourning, if when death finds you hopeless,
   You have tarried and lingered and have waited too long.
(“If You Linger Too Long” by Dr. John R. Rice, 1895-1980).

The unpardonable sin has no repentance, no forgiveness, and is the end of hope. It is the deadline of God. Therefore you must act now. You must turn from your sin now. You must turn to Jesus now while you still can. You must look to Jesus by faith now. Jesus loves you. Jesus died for your sins on the Cross. Jesus shed His Blood from His hands, His feet, His head, His whole body, for you. Jesus says, “Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). Today, Jesus calls you to come to Him. If you come to Jesus, you are safe in His arms. You are safe from sin, and Hell, and Judgment. If you come to Jesus you are saved!

You must come to Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus is a real person. He is alive and in Heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God. Jesus is more than just a story, or a set of rules in the Bible. Jesus is more than an idea that you have to understand in your mind. Jesus is a real person, who really loves you, and who will really accept you if you trust Him. Jesus is the cure for your disease of sin. If you had cancer, and you understood how the treatment worked, and if you believed that the treatment did work, but if you did not receive the treatment, and you did not actually go and get the treatment, you would die. If you believe things about Jesus, without trusting Him, without coming to Him, without experiencing Him, without Him actually saving you – you will die. Therefore do not rest in what you can believe about Jesus, rest in Jesus Himself. Do not rely on what you can memorize or understand about Jesus, rely on the Blood of the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. Trust Jesus by faith!

Dr. Hymers, please come and close this service.

(END OF SERMON)
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Solo Sung Before the Sermon by Mr. Benjamin Kincaid Griffith:
         “If You Linger Too Long” (by Dr. John R. Rice, 1895-1980).