You may think that you can take this for granted. You will be all right with God. ‘Isn't everybody in the kingdom of God?’ you may say to yourself. Surely everybody is God's child. We have to warn you of this from the beginning. This is the whole purpose of preaching. This is the whole purpose of God ever publishing the Bible. That isn't true. You are either in the kingdom of God or you are not in it. Your soul is either safe or it is unsafe. Your sins are forgiven or they're not forgiven. You either know the Lord or you do not know him. You are either an insider – one of his people, one of his family – or you are not, and your soul is in eternal danger. The Bible urges us from cover to cover to get into the kingdom of God, to seek Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour. and find him and come to know him. But we have to start here. We have to start with a word of warning. Don't take it for granted that all is well with your soul. If you've never been converted to Christ, if you haven’t had the kingdom of God put into you in a remarkable way, you are still outside that kingdom.
If you are a child of God and you are in the kingdom, you will know it because the kingdom will be in you. The apostle Paul says that, as we come into the world, we are by nature the children of wrath. Our nature is the nature of a worldling, the nature of an unconverted person. On the other hand the apostle Peter says of those who are in the kingdom, that they are partakers of the divine nature. In other words something of God's nature has been put into them. Whether the kingdom of God is in you or not is made evident by this: what sort of a nature do you have? We speak of somebody who has a nasty nature, and we speak of somebody who has a pleasing nature. Taking that a little further we could ask, do you have a worldly nature, an unconverted nature or do you have a converted spiritual nature? It's all a matter of nature.
Nobody is born a Christian. The way we are born is this, and the way we grow up, we all have within us an unconverted nature. There is nobody born with this nature in them that makes them the children of God, that makes them believers. We are all born with selfish natures, worldly natures. We are all the children of wrath by nature, says the apostle Paul. By nature we are away from God. Before conversion because our nature is the nature of a worldling, we walk as Paul says according to the course of this world. We don't feel any great need of God because it is our nature to be self-confident and not to want God. It is our nature to be taken in by this world and to believe all its promises and all its propaganda, and to trust this world. We want to get as much as we can out of this world and to enjoy its pleasures. It is our nature to invest everything in this world. Before we are converted it is our nature to disobey God. We disobey him every hour, every minute, and it doesn't bother us. It is our nature to have no particular interest in God. Whether you are in the kingdom or not you can see by looking at your nature. When the kingdom of God and the grace of God come to you, your nature is changed and all those things become different.
Suddenly God comes down and touches the life. In great mercy he begins to make us think, and think hard. We begin to be worried and troubled about the things of the soul. We begin to be anxious. What if there is a God? What's going to become of me and my soul? Is it possible to know God? And then through the teaching of his word, through the preaching of the gospel, perhaps through the testimony of converted friends, he begins to teach us what he has done to save us from our nature. We begin to learn and understand how Christ came into this world, how Christ has gone to Calvary's cross, and paid the price for our sin, if we come to him; how he was actually taking a punishment we can scarcely understand. He was taking the punishment which human beings ought to have borne themselves throughout eternity. We begin to understand, and then if I come to Christ and if I ask for forgiveness of my sins and if I cast myself upon the mercy of God and ask him to convert me, I can have a new nature. I can have new life. I can be saved and my soul will be safe for all eternity. I receive a completely new nature and a new disposition. Did you understand that that was what salvation was? Something as dramatic, as radical as that?
God takes a person who is arrogant and proud and conceited, someone who has a very high estimation of himself or herself and his imagined accomplishments. He so touches the soul of the person that are changed and become humble, modest, interested in others, grateful. You'll have a sense of proportion and you'll keep your gifts in proportion. That is what it means for the kingdom of God to come into you. We have known people who have been utterly dishonest, such inveterate and hopeless liars that they have been twisted with it, lying all the time. Of all of us are liars naturally, everybody exaggerates, everybody lies to get out of trouble. There is something of the twisted liar in everybody, the false pretender. The new nature comes along and there is a conscience put in us, and all of a sudden we want to be genuine and we want to be truthful. We can't lie our way through business life or through family life anymore, because there's a desire to be genuine and truthful. And if we should sin and if we should lie, conscience hurts. Then there are people, and it is their nature to be vicious. There are people who are vicious physically and there are people who are vicious verbally and sometimes you wonder which is worse. There are people who are so hostile. They cannot control their tempers, their rages. Then again God comes along and puts the nature of the kingdom of heaven in such a person and all that snapping and nagging and nasty natured bitterness, is gone, and there is a kindness put in them, and a tender heartedness. That is what happens when the new nature comes in.