Never underestimate the antipathy, the hostility, the opposition that is in the human heart to God and to Christ and to salvation. Never underestimate that force that may be in you. It's in all of us before we are converted. It will take you all the way to judgment and into a lost eternity; you must not be ruled by that. We need to call upon God and to cry out to him. He can overcome it – this inner hostility – and draw us to himself and show us the way of salvation. But like the man of Gadara, you must know your condition. What you need from God, first of all, is forgiveness. You need for your sins to be washed away. You need to see how far you are from God. You need to see that all your self-love and all your pride and all your deceits, and every word and deed in your life which is against God and against his law, which is selfish and self-seeking: all sin has to be forgiven because God is holy. God cannot have anything to do with sin. God cannot deal with us or bless us while we are unwashed, unforgiven. And there is only one way by which forgiveness can come about, because God is so just and pure and holy. He must punish sin and obliterate it from his eternal moral universe. I cannot make up for my past sin. I cannot in my own strength live a life which is pleasing to God. My sin must be judged. The only way God can forgive you is to come himself, to become a human being, God and man, and to take your guilt upon himself and to suffer in your place. That is what Christ, our Lord and Saviour, did on Calvary's Cross – the substitutionary, atoning death of Christ. He took the place of every man and woman who would ever be forgiven in the history of the world. He took their sin away, long before they even asked him in so very many cases. He took in his own body and his own soul the eternal punishment due to them, compressed into the space of six terrible hours, an act of amazing love so that he could purchase our forgiveness.
The second thing that you need is new life. You need conversion, the new birth. Now that's a term which is banded about today, and many people use it who don't understand its depth. What is the new birth? It is when God makes you a new person. It is when God gives you a new nature and changes your heart and your way of thinking, changes you radically and deeply through and through. You are given new aims, new intentions. Now you hate sin, whereas you used to love it. Now you fight against it and resist it, whereas you used to embrace it and be ruled by it.
There's a third thing you need. You need a relationship with God. You need to be able to talk to him and understand him in his words. You need to love him and be aware of his love for you. You need a relationship where God adopts you to be his child, sons and daughters of the Most High God. That's what Christ gives to all who trust in him, all who come to him.
Then you begin to realize he has changed you, and you know him and love him. You are drawn out to him and your tastes are different, and you are so desirous and excited when you read the Scriptures. You want to learn, you want to advance, you want to serve him, and all the evidence accumulates in your life that he has heard you and he has visited you and changed you by his mighty power.