The Unpardonable Sin

A minister one time was speaking informally to a group of college students in their fraternity house. He turned to the chairman of the discussion group and asked: “What are you living for?” The student replied: “I am going to be a pharmacist.” The minister said: “I understand that this is how you are going to earn your livelihood, but what are you living for?” The youth bowed his head for a moment, and then looking up with clear, true eyes, he said: “Sir, I am sorry, but I haven’t thought that thing through.”

You see, we are placed in this world to build men and women, boys and girls, whose lives will continue on through all eternity. This is what we must be living for, and we are in our professions merely to pay the expenses.

It matters not so much whether my boy becomes a ditch-digger or an engineer, or an assembly line worker as it does that he be a Christian. I am to build into his life staunch honesty, and a holy fear of doing wrong, and a genuine concern for the value of human life. If I have done this, then I have done more for him than the gift of a million dollar estate.

We will not always be successful. In Matt. 13:58 we read that Jesus could do no mighty works in his home town because of their unbelief...”He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Sometimes not all the praying in the world will change a person. People are sometimes stiff-necked and there is an awful lot of resistance given to the invitation of Almighty God. There are many people in our world who are convinced that they are good people, and that they have no need for anything more. God could not save them, because they have saved themselves already! They are right, and anyone who tries to make them think otherwise, is wrong.

We believe that there gets to be a point in life when the condition of unpardonable sin becomes dangerously real. It comes like this: when a person is wrong and believes for a long enough time that he is right, then a reversal of values begins to take place. Wrong becomes right, and right becomes wrong. It is nearly impossible for such a person to become a Christian, because he or she has so dulled the conscience that a right choice cannot be made.

It is like the story of the dancing slippers, of the little girl who wanted so much to dance, and who upon getting the pair of dancing slippers could not stop dancing. Her will was no longer in her head, but in her feet. So too, the man or woman whose God-given power of choice and decision has lost out to habits and patterns of behavior, finds that he is no longer in the driver’s seat. God cannot forgive such a person, because such a person cannot honestly ask forgiveness, and God will never save a person against his will.

I may not ask God to pardon my sins, but if my sin is the fact that I do not honestly believe that I need to be pardoned, then I am really trying to fool God! But God is not mocked!