Welcome back to Aspastor John. This summer Pastor John is out of the studio preaching in Belfast in Scotland before returning to the States for a 40-day writing leave to finish up a book on Providence on the sovereignty of God a book he started last summer and hopes to finish this summer I cannot wait to see it and all of it the travel the book writing in this very podcast is all made possible by you we are supported by the prayers and the funding of God's people so thank you for generously

investing in this important and eternal work so with Pastor John busy we're diving into our archive of 1500 episodes and this summer we're pulling out some of your favorites about once every 50 episodes we release one that touches a nerve and touches the 300,000 play mark these are the elite episodes in our six and a half year history we only have about 30 of them and here's one of them

we get a lot of emails from listeners every month and I don't think there's a more common question in our inbox than one that we recently received from a listener who asks this hello Pastor John I read your article about the unforgivable sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit

my questions are two number one can the true believer whose salvation is eternally secure in Christ still be guilty of blasphemy

and number two is blaspheming the Holy Spirit the same as grieving the Holy Spirit

Pastor John what would you say to this listener and many others?

Let's put a couple of key passages in front of us about the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit so we know what we're talking about

so here's Mark chapter three verse 28 to 30 truly I say to you Jesus is talking truly I say to you all sins will be forgiven the children of men

and whatever blasphemies they utter but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin

for they were saying he has an unclean spirit in other words they were attributing Jesus deeds to the devil instead of the power of God in him

one more text Luke 1210 and everyone who speaks a word against the son of man will be forgiven

but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven

now over the span of my ministry there have been several people not a lot but several

probably a lot more people who don't come forward but these came forward several people who came to me deeply convinced

they had committed the sin against the Holy Spirit and were therefore beyond forgiveness and they were terrified as you can imagine

now it seems to me that we need in helping those people deal with what they're saying

we need to put alongside the statement that blaspheming the spirit cannot be forgiven which is there

the many statements that whosoever believes on the Lord Jesus will be saved

not whosoever believes if they haven't done a few other things

for example act 1631 believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved

he didn't ask the jailer now you've never blasphemed against the spirit of God

you just said if you believe you'll be saved and John 640 Jesus said for this is the will of my father

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