Presumptuous Sin

“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.” (Psalm 19:13)

The heart of man is desperately wicked, the Bible says in Jeremiah 17:9. In other words, all your intentions in your life were to do wrong, to please the devil, to please yourself, but God said that now He is going to get to that heart. He is going to do a work on the inside of people. It is not difficult to find out who is saved from who is not. It really is not difficult, because the person who is not saved will contemplate evil and execute it. If you are saved, you cannot do it. A person who is not saved can do many things. He can even come up behind the pulpit and say, “Thank God, I love Jesus. Thank God, I am saved. Thank God, I have been delivered, I have been blessed at such and such a time.” But he is not saved if he is able to contemplate evil.

I remember a sister came to me and said, “I am going to divorce my husband.” I objected, “But you cannot. If you are walking with the Lord, you cannot divorce your husband.” She said, “Oh yes, I can.” She continued, “My God,” (what she meant was her God as oppose to MY God) “is such a God, that anything I do, he forgives me for it. I can just ask him for forgiveness.” I said, “No.” David said in one of his Psalms: “Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.” You cannot commit presumptuous sin and still be saved. The person who is saved cannot deliberately say, “I am going to divorce that man and maybe marry him again.”

Do you know what she did? She divorced him. With the divorce she got the house and everything else. But then, she married him again. The poor, wretched man was helpless in her hands. He went back and married her again. What you think happened next? She divorced him again! And then what? She married him again! In time, she came to divorce him again and I said, “Listen. You are playing your hand and you are going to play yourself out. Though the man seems so malleable in your hand, there is coming a point where he might just say, ‘This is it.’” And this was exactly what happened. When she tried to get him back again, he refused. I think she has been trying up until now to marry and divorce him again.

But at the same time she is speaking in tongues and preaching, too. She is preaching the same Word that I am preaching and believing that she is a good Christian. I just pinch my side. I know she is not saved. You cannot be saved and commit sin. He that is born of God cannot commit sin (1 John 4:9). The word that is used in this passage is the word “commit.” It is an active verb, deliberate action. It does not mean, “fall into sin,” which happens to us who are saved, but “deliberately commit sin.” Such people are not saved; they are not born of God. They need to go back to Calvary and make a proper job of it.