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conviction of sin before or after faith I'd say both before faith in terms of conviction of sin Jesus says in Matthew 9 I did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance so yeah the Spirit of God convicts us of our sins to show us our need for Jesus now of course the question comes up, how much and how long?

I don't think it's the two-year period. I've been convicted of my sin for two years. I think I've filled up the measure of my guilt, and therefore now I'm going to believe. That I'm a sinner and I need Jesus? Conviction of sin. How much depths of despair and misery do I need to get into? The Bible doesn't address that.

The birth of regeneration, before the conviction or after? Well conviction comes and then we look to the Lord Jesus. If you're asking is conviction of sin a part of regeneration, is that the question? I think that's really what's under the hood with this one. Conviction of sin before or after faith? I took it this way. Is there any conviction of sin before we believe the gospel? Yeah, or else we're not going to look to Christ as our Savior in the gospel. And then after faith, is there a conviction of sin? Yeah, you know. Laws of Tudor, yeah.

I feel it driving down Yale Road every single day. I mean, you know, I'm not the most patient man, and traffic seems to exacerbate that, and I'm convicted of my sin, and I need to confess it to God. That's how I understood the question. Is that how you took it? Yeah, yeah. I don't know that I'd locate conviction for sin as a part of regeneration.

No. No. No. And I think just some churches do teach that, which is you're awakened, kind of regenerated, you got this conviction going on, time of period, or just, yeah, you got the misery and you're feeling the burden. And then God gives you faith and you believe. And that's all part of that. So it gets kind of chronological when the order of salvation. No, I took it as, is there conviction before you believe? Yeah. Or else I wouldn't believe. Is there conviction after you believe? Yeah, because I feel it all the time. Yeah.

I mean, going back to that comment that, you know, that there's a period of time, a period of grief over sin of misery and, you know, reflection and contemplation on your sin before faith is given, that's not what the Bible presents as a reality. When you are regenerated, when you are, let's just say, if we speak of conversion itself, there's no period of misery in conversion prior to which the gift of faith is given. conversion is the divine bestowal of the graces of faith and repentance. And so God saves us, and you know, this is another one of those things, to heap upon To heap upon a weak sinner the reality, to heap upon a believer the reality that they must experience a particular period of self-wallowing grief and misery before something can obtain in the blessed complex of salvation is to heap something that is unbiblical upon that person. Spurgeon says something like this, but he goes on to say something like, but let us not spend a lot of time there when we're convicted of sin.

What's the call? What's the blessed command? It's flee to Christ. And that's where we go. We don't go with both eyes looking inwardly upon ourselves in misery, because what a terrible place to be. Conviction of sin drives us with both eyes of faith to look upon the risen and exalted Christ and to there find not our misery, but our joy. Nor are we to look with one eye upon ourselves and another eye upon Christ. We're to look to Christ and that's His own command.

Look to me, come to me, and you will find the blessed captain of your salvation. And David in the Psalms, you know, if you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? I'm going to live in that state for two years. No, but there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared.

It seems like an ecclesiastical imposition on categories to provide an intended outcome. Keep people miserable. Why that's the endgame, I don't get it. I mean, we try to make people happy, not with juggling and buffoonery in our church, but joy is the default disposition, or supposed to be, of the people of God in terms of gratitude.

And to try to quantify how much misery, how much sin, how much, it almost then becomes kind of a work. Well, I've got this much sin, so now I... No, you're convicted of sin, that there is a conviction. If I don't know sin, I'm not going to see the need for the Savior. But how much? And if you look at the conversions recorded for us in the New Testament, there's no period of time. Matthew is told, follow me. Well, Lord, I got to be miserable about my sin for two years. No, he follows Him. The Philippian jailer, I mean, he's ready to do himself in, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.

Okay. You know, so again, an ecclesiastical imposition put on people for some intended outcome that I'm not sure what. Probably driving it is, you know, we don't want presumption. We don't want fakes. As I mentioned earlier in the baptism question, God's given us a tool to keep, you know, the church pure. It's disciplined. It's Matthew 18.

It's not, you know, keeping people from the peace that is in God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We're not going to encourage you to look to the Lord Jesus Christ because you might pollute our church down the road. No, look to the Lord Jesus Christ. If you do pollute the church down the road, know that there's going to be implications, Matthew 18.

But why do we necessarily assume everybody's a fake? Why do we necessarily assume everybody's presumptuous? And how is it presumptuous to believe what God tells us to believe? It's a command according to John in his first epistle. How is it presumptuous to receive what God has said I will give you.

I think the onus of proof or burden of proof is on them. Show us this ecclesiastical construct that keeps people in this position of disadvantage, that keeps people in this sorrowful state. Until such time as you're convinced that they've arrived at their misery, now you can give them the permission to believe the gospel? It really does short-circuit, you know, what we see in the book of Acts.

Repent, be baptized for the remission of sins. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. You may, if you believe, you know, be baptized. It's just, in our attempt to keep the church pure, we're, you know, probably inadvertently, you know, bruising the souls of many. Absolutely. It's very hazardous. It is.

And if we think about the blessed words of the scriptures that speak to the certainty of salvation and the assurance that we can have as believers, we're not Catholics. The doctrine of presumption is Catholic. It's not Protestant. Keeping people in slaves to... The papal system. The papal system.

We have the blessed promise of John that he wrote in his epistles so that those who believe might know that they have everlasting life in the Son. And so, we have that blessed hope, we have that blessed assurance, we have that blessed certainty that if we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall be saved. That's right. Well, it's glorious.