Can a Sinner Be Saved at Death?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, can a sinner repent and be saved in their final moments leading up to their death?
00:00:12.000 | Before the answer can be given to that question, we have to ask, "Which sinner?"
00:00:21.000 | Which might seem strange, I suppose.
00:00:24.000 | The sinner who can genuinely repent, genuinely trust, genuinely be changed into a lover of Christ
00:00:36.000 | who deeply regrets a life wasted in preferring the world to Christ,
00:00:41.000 | that's one kind of sinner who might try to repent.
00:00:48.000 | But there's little reason to think that anyone who puts off repentance and loves sin for a whole lifetime
00:01:01.000 | would ever become that kind of sinner at the end,
00:01:05.000 | who genuinely repents, genuinely trusts, genuinely loves Jesus, now genuinely hates sin,
00:01:12.000 | genuinely regrets a whole life of sinning.
00:01:17.000 | The mistake that so many make when they contemplate the possibility of putting off Christ
00:01:23.000 | is that they think it's like snapping their finger.
00:01:27.000 | It's like choosing to eat or not eat, and it isn't.
00:01:31.000 | You can't choose to raise yourself from the dead.
00:01:34.000 | You can't choose to stop loving the world, especially when you have loved it for 70 years.
00:01:44.000 | I wonder if people who contemplate this possibility and wonder about it read Romans 8, 7,
00:01:52.000 | "The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God.
00:01:57.000 | It does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot."
00:02:01.000 | That's why I said, if you're going to ask, "Can a sinner repent at the moment of death?"
00:02:09.000 | I said, "Which sinner?"
00:02:12.000 | "This one can't, and the can't is not God won't let him,
00:02:17.000 | but he doesn't have it in himself to change himself."
00:02:21.000 | "I can't. I'm a lover of the flesh," or 1 Corinthians 2, 14.
00:02:26.000 | "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.
00:02:29.000 | They are folly to him, and he cannot understand them because they're spiritually discerned."
00:02:35.000 | So if a person thinks that they can come to that moment in life and just snap their finger and say,
00:02:40.000 | "Well, now I can stop being a person in the grip of the flesh, stop being a person enslaved to sin,"
00:02:47.000 | they don't have that freedom to do that.
00:02:50.000 | They can't just snap their finger and become a different kind of person after years and years.
00:02:56.000 | There is a hardening that a person can reach after which God won't strive with them anymore.
00:03:05.000 | Oh, I remember my father preaching on this to young people as a kid
00:03:10.000 | and telling the stories of young people who walked out of his services saying,
00:03:15.000 | "Maybe later, Pastor. Maybe later we'll get serious about Jesus,"
00:03:18.000 | and being killed by being hit by a train on the way home.
00:03:22.000 | I watched the tears flow down my father's face because it was a real story
00:03:27.000 | that he was talking about from one of his crusades.
00:03:32.000 | But the answer that the person may be asking is,
00:03:38.000 | "If my mom is 80, can she be saved?
00:03:45.000 | If she's going to die two days from now and she's on a respirator,
00:03:50.000 | can she be saved after living all her life?"
00:03:54.000 | And the answer to that is, the thief on the cross had lived his whole life in sin,
00:03:59.000 | and he looked to Jesus in the very last hours of his life and he said,
00:04:04.000 | "Remember me, please."
00:04:06.000 | And Jesus looked at him and said, "Today you will be with me in paradise."
00:04:10.000 | Those are really sweet words for the person who has lived their whole life
00:04:15.000 | and now really, really regrets that they have wasted it.
00:04:20.000 | And the reason it's possible for a person in the 11th hour to be saved
00:04:26.000 | is because by grace you have been saved.
00:04:30.000 | It is not your own doing.
00:04:32.000 | It is the gift of God, not of works, not a lifetime of works,
00:04:36.000 | not of works in the last hours, not of works so that no one may boast.
00:04:43.000 | And Jesus told a parable, didn't he, about the workers in the vineyard
00:04:48.000 | and some worked all day and some worked just an hour at the end of the day.
00:04:52.000 | And Jesus paid them all the same, and when the people who had worked all day got angry,
00:04:58.000 | Jesus said, "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?
00:05:04.000 | Or do you begrudge my generosity? Is your eye evil because I'm good?"
00:05:09.000 | In other words, he's saying, "I'm free.
00:05:11.000 | I can show grace to people at the end of the day if I choose to do that,
00:05:16.000 | so be glad that you got yours and I will give what I please to whom I please."
00:05:23.000 | So I think the word to all of us in this is, "Behold, now is the favorable time."
00:05:30.000 | And the now is for a 14-year-old now or an 84-year-old now.
00:05:36.000 | Now is the day of salvation.
00:05:39.000 | In Hebrews 3, "Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today
00:05:45.000 | that none of you be hardened."
00:05:48.000 | So the question in the end is, "Can or will God save the truly repentant in the last hour?"
00:05:56.000 | Indeed, he will.
00:05:58.000 | And the question is, "Will we be able to repent?"
00:06:01.000 | And I would warn everyone, you can't presume that you will be able to repent
00:06:07.000 | if you push Jesus away now.
00:06:10.000 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:06:13.000 | Email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:06:16.000 | You can visit us online at desiringgod.org to find thousands of free books, articles, sermons,
00:06:21.000 | and other resources from John Piper, all free of charge.
00:06:24.000 | I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.
00:06:26.000 | [ Silence ]