Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 817 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text

-- Brother Phil Enlow: Well, praise God! I thought of...as we sang that last song, it just seemed like the Lord was just focusing in my mind on the grace, and just a little bit more about what that meant...what that means. We know the scripture, "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." (NIV). Ephesians 2, 8-10.

I remember something kind of humorous that happened when I was a youngster. I was 15 years old and I was in a youth group. We were having our little youth group meeting prior to the evening service and somebody got the bright idea that we needed to be ready to do...ready to serve the Lord, ready to do whatever happened and so they thought they'd give an illustration of that. Out of the blue, they called on me to stand up and talk about grace.

And if there's anybody who had no clue how to speak in public and no confidence to do it that was me. I stood there for about a few seconds just totally tongue-tied, and I can't even remember if I said anything sensible, and finally they took mercy on me and let me sit down. But I praise God, there's a lot we could say about grace today.

I wonder sometimes if we realize just how dependent we are on God. The whole business of coming to God, the whole business of God working in people's lives, the strength that you and I need today. We are by nature self-reliant, self-willed. And it's the mercy of God that deals with our hearts to change that. Because unless He dealt with my heart, I would go on as I am and so would you.

( congregational amens ).

You know, I felt like during the funeral the other day, the Lord quickened that to me in a fresh way...just how dependent people are upon the grace of God to come to Him. You know, it's not hard to convince people that they are sinners with sort of a natural understanding. They know they do things that are wrong. They know they're not perfect. They know they make mistakes.

But that's not what it takes to come to God. It takes a divine revelation. It takes Holy Ghost conviction of what we really are, not by human standards, but by God's...by the standard of God's holiness. Only God can do that. We can try to get people saved until we're blue in the face and nothing will happen until God begins to deal with the heart, and suddenly the eyes are opened.

How many people sing the song "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see." And how many people sing that that are totally blind and have no clue what that's about? It's become just a...almost a cultural folk song. It's a feel-good song that everybody knows and everybody sings...but to know the reality that's behind that, behind the truth of that song, to see the transformation that took place in the life of the one who wrote it, from a slave trader to a minister of the Gospel who understood that he was...he saw the blackness of his own heart in the light of God's revelation. And instead of running from that, instead of pushing that revelation away, God gave him the strength to say, yes Lord, to humble himself to that revelation.

And I'll tell you, there's no way that anyone of us can come to God or progress in God until we are willing to come to the light and to run to it and to see that light, though it exposes our ugliness, to see that light as the greatest treasure that there is, the greatest hope that there is, is for God to deal with our hearts. I thank God that He's shown me in the measure that He has, because we are absolutely proud creatures.

But how many...this is...there's such a body of truth here that I guess I've got in my mind peripherally here, but I'm thinking I want to focus on this particular thought right now. But I wonder as I look abroad in the land, and I see churches producing converts right and left and yet I wonder how many, what a tiny percentage there must be of people that have really experienced a revelation of their total lost-ness before a holy God. I mean there is no substitute for it, and we need to do what Brother Thomas said so many times. We need to preach the Word and let God work and pray.

I don't know any other formula...there's no formula, but that's the nearest thing I know to a formula for seeing God work! God knows who He's gonna reach. He knows every one of His. And our job is not to help Him out. Our job is to be instruments to see Him work in hearts and lives. I appreciate the testimony...both testimonies, but I appreciate what Pablo said about seeing God work there, that it wasn't anything he went and said, oh, I've got to fix this situation. I've got to do this. No! It was just God working and Him calling down and saying, pray! That's right. Because if God doesn't work, all the effort that we put, that we invest in somebody to try to help them, try to make 'em see, try to make 'em change, it's not gonna work.

( congregational amens ).

God has to perform a miracle! There is nothing short of a miracle of God that can fit any of us to be part of His Kingdom and to ever stand before Him on that day. God has to...it's a miracle of God's grace if you get beyond the point where you say, yes, I make a lot of mistakes and I need help with this. But to see I'm a lost sinner...and God is gonna justly condemn me on that day....

Not only am I a lost sinner, I have no hope, there is nothing I can point to in myself. You look at every religion, every philosophy in this world and you trace it back, and you will find somehow man is at the center. And man is at the center because whatever that particular religion or philosophy identifies as the need, the answer in every case is something for us to do to pick ourselves up and to deliver ourselves. I don't care which religion or philosophy you look at. Man winds up having to be his own savior.

But the truth of God is that there's nothing we can do--nothing that we can do. And how important, how critical it is, when God's Spirit comes knocking and convicting that we not resist that...we not say, oh, that doesn't feel good. I don't want to go that way. Oh God, if there's a person here and God's Spirit has convicted you, you need to run to that light. You need to cry out to the God who is reaching you, because it's not His hatred, it's not His condemnation, it's His love.

( congregational amens ).

Do you know where condemnation comes from? Condemnation comes when God gives light, and when we say, no, I don't want that light. That's where condemnation comes from. There's a lot of people who've never had light. You know the Scripture says of many people...Paul said this when he was addressing the people on Mars Hill. He talked about many people who just lived and died in heathen darkness. He said, the times of that ignorance, God what?

( congregational response ).

Winked at. I'll let God explain that one day, but I'll tell you what, there is a great responsibility that falls upon every person when God begins to come calling and knocking at the heart's door. Without that, we have no hope. And folks, when we see needs, our natural inclination is to try to do something. Well, I'll tell you what we need to do. We need to cry out to God to work. And when He works and when He wants to deal with...to use us in some way to say some simple things, it's exactly what Pablo said, we don't have to have the perfect words. We just have to be willing.

Sometimes it isn't anything more than just putting our arms around somebody and saying I love you and I'm praying for you. God doesn't need our fancy help. He doesn't need our cleverness. He's pretty good at what He does, and we're not. Oh how foolish we are sometimes, and yet it's an honest zeal, it's an honest desire many times, but it's ignorance on our part, about how God does things.

It's grace! Grace is something God institutes. It's an effort that God extends to work in human beings who need Him and we're helpless without Him. It's a favor, it's an effort that God expends upon us though we do not deserve it and could never deserve it. It's a revelation of His character and His love in spite of what we are.

And I'll tell you, the closer you get to God, the more you're gonna realize just how much love it is...how much love it takes for Him to love you. If you don't have that, you haven't seen much. If you don't have that sense about it...how could God love me? I mean when you really think about it, if you look in the mirror and start focusing on you and your reaction isn't, oh, how could God love anybody like me, you haven't got the picture. But oh, what a glorious revelation of His love it is, that He's willing to reach down anyway.

And so the very first thing in coming to God is, God has got to bring us not just to a sense of need because someone preached and we got all stirred up emotionally, it's not on a human level at all. There's got to be a mighty work of God's Spirit in hearts. I pray that God will reveal to us the difference! It's very easy to preach in such a way that you can pull on people's emotions and you can get people to come and run down to an altar and respond. I'll tell you, many people have learned how to do that and I fear that many times, we haven't known the difference. God doesn't condemn us, He wants us to learn, though, doesn't He?

( congregational amens ).

He wants us to grow and just learn how to pray and learn how to recognize when God is moving. When He's moving, it isn't hard, because it's something He's doing. Whatever we do, we can forget about it, it ain't going nowhere. But God is able. He is the only One who is able to do what needs to be done.

And you know, even though we come to that knowledge, you know our human inclination is to say, well there must be something I can do about this. I've discovered now that I'm a sinner, that I need Him. There must be something I can do. But, oh, that's not what it is. God's grace does not simply leave us in that position. God's grace reaches down and begins to show us, not a list of things that we need to do to rectify the situation, He shows us a Savior! He says, yes, you're a sinner. Your sins reach to heaven and all you can do apart from me is sin. But I want to show you what I've done about it. You couldn't do anything, but I've already done it in Jesus.

( congregational praise ).

I took all of those sins that you've now become aware of, and I've put them on Him, and I poured out my wrath upon Him as...He stood in you place as the sinner. Oh, what a revelation, when a sinner comes to a place where they know they're a sinner and they see, they really see for the first time what Jesus did. You can't ever be the same once you see that. I'll tell you, kids grow up in church and they hear those words, but until it's a personal revelation, it means nothing.

Oh thank God for grace today, the grace that shows us our need, the grace that shows us a Savior. But you know, even when you see that, we're totally helpless, we're bound by those chains of sin. Yes we can say, thank You Lord for what You did for me, but you know you cannot repent, you cannot believe without God's grace, without His help.

There's a lot of preaching today, that sort of...they wouldn't exactly say it, but they almost act as though everybody that's born into the world has the power to believe...that all God has to do is come and make them aware of the Gospel, and it's all within their power to accept it or reject it. Well that's not so. No one can come to God...no one can come to Jesus, except what?

( congregational response ).

The Father who sent Jesus, draws him. I'll tell you what, we are helpless in every possible way. But you know what? When there's a heart that's been dealt with, to see their need, to see the Savior, and they're open...they're crying out to God...it causes them to cry, because that's all they can do. They're like a sheep that's caught in the thicket. It's powerless to help itself. But I'll tell you, there's a Savior who hears the response of that kind of a heart.

( congregational amens ).

Oh, He's not looking for your righteousness. He's not looking for your great strength. He's looking for a heart that says, oh God, I need you.

( congregational amens ).

Oh God, I need you. I'll tell you, He can grant to any heart the ability to repent. What do you think happens when someone resists the grace of God, and resists it, and resists it? You know, there can come a time, and there's been many testimonies I've heard over my lifetime of people who've reached a point where they knew what was what. Intellectually they knew, but they had no inclination, no ability to repent. Oh what a terrible place to reach. But oh the grace of God, when He draws near that gives you an ability you don't possess in yourself to turn from your own way and to go God's way.

( congregational amens ).

Praise God! And an ability to believe! That's why the Scripture says, it's through grace...or by grace, through faith, faith is the means of obtaining what God has given to us. But it says, that's not of yourselves. Don't go looking inside for faith, you just lift up your heart and cry out to God. God can give you the strength of heart to believe. It is a divine miracle...every single step is a divine miracle.

( congregational amens ).

We have no power to produce Christians here. All we can do is say, oh God, work. God, change hearts. God use us, show us what to do, because He does use instruments. We're His instruments, but we don't know what to do, we cannot construct a program or a plan or fancy sermons or anything. We're totally and 100 percent dependent on God to work with people's hearts.

( congregational amens ).

If we realize that, then we don't sit back and expect the preacher to do it. We say, God, we've got to call on You when we see needs. We have got to be in the place where we cry out to You. We've had a wonderful testimony right here of seeing God move in a particular time and a particular circumstance. There was a need we were made aware of and there was a lot of prayer that went up, and God responded to that prayer, didn't He?

( congregational response ).

God moved. That's a testimony to us of what God is wanting. Do you see needs that just seem intractable, seem impossible? Oh, I'll tell you, the devil is real good at pointing to that situation and say, boy, you've prayed about that, you've been worrying about that, you've been working at that so long. It just ain't gonna happen. Well maybe we just need to step back and say, oh God, nothing is impossible with You. Lord, our eyes are upon You. We know we can't do anything. And we know when something happens, You're gonna get the glory, because it's all in You.

( congregational praise ).

Oh, praise God! God is so incredibly merciful in all that He does, but it's grace. We need grace to serve Him. We need grace to do everything in our lives. Do we understand just how dependent we are on God? Oh, I'll tell you what, we spin our wheels. We strive...we try to do so many things and we need God's grace. We need His strength. We need His help. Oh, praise God.

I don't know where to go with this. I just...looking to the Lord, because I am completely, completely without anything. I have nothing to give you unless He does it. But I know that there's a secret here in our dependence upon God that we need to get a hold of more than we know, more than we do. I'm gonna go ahead and just give you a Scripture. Please stop me if this dies and doesn't go anywhere. But I just had a Scripture come to me a lot of times recently and it just keeps coming back to me.

And I'm not sure what it's for, whether it's for writing or preaching or when...but there's a phrase out of a Scripture in Isaiah 26 that relates very closely to what we're talking about here. I don't know, I had this come to me several weeks ago. In verse 12...there's a testimony about God's grace and about God's work and God's people. And it's looking forward to a time when there is a people who will say a certain thing.

And this is the thing that they're saying. "LORD, you..." in verse 12, "LORD, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished you have done for us." Now think about it. It says, we've accomplished these things. He just using this term 'all.' All that we have accomplished...so he lets you know it's not just some of it. All that we have accomplished, You have done. And do you see there is a secret to effective service. There is a secret to effective living. There is a divine secret in the simple fact that God does not just simply hand us a bunch of rules to live by and say, this is how you succeed in the Christian life. It is a divine partnership in which God extends His strength and His grace. But it's more than that. It's not just God helping us...it's God doing it.

( congregational amens ).

You see the difference?

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