Do you understand your need of spiritual life? You can grasp and you can see that you are a limited, dead worldling. You know nothing of the real meaning of life.
Do you understand your need of spiritual life? You can grasp and you can see that you are a limited, dead worldling. You know nothing of the real meaning of life. Are you ready to take the word of God seriously and believe this message? Are you ready to come under conviction of sin? Are you ready to look within instead of forever looking at others? Do you see your own need and repent and come in shame and ask for pardon? Are you ready to understand that God has got to change you, that you cannot do it yourself? Then here in this verse is how you must come. You must take absolutely seriously the Lord Jesus, and go to him and yield to him, and dig deep you get your foundation upon a rock. That is the only way to spiritual life. It means this: you go to the only one who the word of God describes in these terms: the Lord Jesus Christ. You go to him and you fall before him. You understand his message, which is this: that he suffered and died on the cross of Calvary to bear in his own body the full agony of your sins, if you will go to him so that he can pardon you and forgive you. You believe it, and you go to him with all your spiritual hunger and your need. And you go to him and you say, ‘Oh Lord, I have lived arrogantly and proudly and self-centeredly. I have lived by criticizing others all my life, and now I have had a glimpse of my own heart and my own wretchedness. Pardon and forgive me.’ You confess all your sin, and you ask him to give you this new life and to change your heart. As you do so, you give yourself unreservedly to him. You take him absolutely seriously.
If anybody goes to the Lord Jesus like that, this is what happens. He or she becomes like a house built on a rock – not like the other house which some pretending Christian tried to run up for himself. He has a Christian life founded upon a rock, and God builds it. God changes his heart. God gives him new appetites, new desires, spiritual perceptions. God makes a Christian out of him, guides him and leads him. And all the vehemence of hell and Satan and all the forces of this world, and all the persecution and enmity imaginable, cannot shake that person's spiritual house, because he is related to the Lord and he knows him and loves him, and God has changed him. It's a spiritual house, not a self-made house, and God will hold him and keep him. He is now a child of God. That's true conversion.
So don't crowd out your spiritual hunger with carnal things. Come to the word of God and seek and go on seeking. Don't turn away from conviction of sin. When you come to see by the Spirit of God that your heart is rotten, receive him and repent of your sins and ask and desire for all your worth that God would convert you and give yourself to him. There is nobody who has ever truly done that who has not received this powerful experience of conversion which the word of God promises.