Totally depraved.

These are not my words, these are some snippets from a sermon on total depravity I listened to by John Piper yesterday. It blew my mind.

1 Corinthians 10:31 - So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

Sin, by its nature, is a falling short of the glory of God.

Romans 1:23 - exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

We are offered God himself as our treasure and we trade it for... you name it. The heart is a desire factory - it produces all kinds of alternative desires to God.

When we ask, where does God and His glory fit?, he's hardly even there - for the fallen, unregenerate, human being. His glory is simply not a treasure.

You don't feel the weight of sin when you use the list method, you have to bring God into the picture. The majesty, greatness of God and the pervasive demand of seeing and savoring his glory, that we don't do.

Romans 14:23 - But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

What is sin? Anything. The best things & the worst things. Anything that is not from faith, is sin. In other words, if you're not depending on God to teach you, enable you, empower you to do a thing so that He gets the glory... you're sinning.

1 Peter 4:11 - whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength the God supplies–so that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.

Everything that we do, should be done, in reliance upon a redeemer to forgive us and an empowerer to enable us so that when it is done, the redeemer and the empowerer get the glory. Everything that is not done that way is sin.

When you stop to think about this, it means that this world is simply drowning, in a sea of sin.

Example: If I asked my son, 'I want you to wash the car, if you want to use it tonight to go to the basketball game.' And he gets really bent out of shape, and he hasn't set that in his schedule and he doesn't want to do it. And I said 'Barnabas, I don't want to be picky but that's the requirement, wash the car and sure you can have it tonight.' And he walks out of the room fuming at me, I am his father, that fuming at me is not a good thing, he should be willingly submissive, obey his dad, be thankful that he can use the car, wash it. He stomps out as thought he is not going to do as I say, and I notice an hour later that he is out in the drive way washing the car, and everything in his body is exuding 'I don't want to be doing this' and 'I'm angry at my dad for doing this'. Now he is doing what I told him to do, how does that make me feel? Is he obeying me? In the raw external sense, but not in the heart sense. He is being totally governed by principles different than his love for me.

That's the way unbelievers build hospitals. It is a good thing that hospitals get built and it is a good thing that unbelievers build them. God wants compassion to abound in the world, but the attitude if you actually boil it down to God issues, which are the ones that count, they're oblivious of God, they are not relying upon God, they are not trusting God - they are giving him zero attention of their time. So God is like me watching my son wash the car. The car will be clean tomorrow and that's my will for my son to drive it, but, my son is in rebellion.

To listen to the rest of this sermon, go to, http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Seminars/2280_TULIP_Part_3/