Now this is exactly why people are offended that God forgives sinners. The reason for that is because they feel that they have done their duty for years. Of course it's a delusion. God will only save the souls of people who acknowledge themselves to be hopeless and lost and sinful. It doesn't matter who it is. If I think that I am good enough for God, and I can stand up and say, ‘I have always lived a reasonable life’, I'm only deluding myself. All I am showing is that my grasp of righteousness and sin is skin deep. If I have never looked down and seen my heart as it really is, seen all its dishonesty and its darkness, its selfishness, its conceit, and its covetousness; if I have never looked within to my soul and seen my thought life and the way that I operate, then I'm just demonstrating what a superficial person I am. But this is the elder son.
God the Father may come to you, it may be hard for you to hear, but this will be your response. If you have to come with nothing in your hand, with no merit, if you have to acknowledge you deserve nothing, then you will refuse to have Christ, you will refuse Christianity; it may be that that causes you to draw back. And yet God will send the Saviour, and he will send his messenger, he will work in your conscience, and he will probe you. Look at the apostle Paul. He is a tremendous picture of how God works. The apostle Paul had heard the gospel; he was the official Jewish parliamentarian appointed to root out and exterminate the sect of the Nazarenes, the name given by the Jews to those who loved the Lord Jesus Christ. He knew what they taught. He had heard their message, and he knew it plainly, and it deeply offended him. These people taught that the only way in which a man could come to know God was by repenting and giving their lives to him. That deeply offended the apostle, and he hated the message. He was obsessed with the idea that he was fit for God, and that all his ceremonial and all his attempts to live a righteous life were completely successful. He was on the road to Damascus, on an assignment to arrest and prosecute with the sentence of death those who worshiped as Christians. He, as it were, would not go in, and he would even kill those who did go in. But the Father came out to Paul, and entreated him and dealt with him on that Damascus road, and blessed his soul.