FBC Daily Devotional – January 14, 2022

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, good Friday morning to you. We're at the end of the week already and looking forward to the weekend.

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I trust you are, and I trust you're looking forward to gathering together with God's people on this coming

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Lord's Day. It's always a highlight of the week. It should be. It should be the time of the week that we all look forward to, those of us who are followers of Christ, where we can gather together with God's people.

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We can worship our God. We can hear from his word and find out more of what

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God is like and what God likes, and that, you know, God can use those things to shape us and mold us into greater

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Christ -likeness. That should be the the goal and the desire of the life of every believer in Christ.

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Well, so here we are on Friday and a couple of days away from the Lord's Day, and today we read in Acts chapter 26, and in this passage of Scripture, Paul is standing before King Agrippa, and, you know,

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Agrippa just for entertainment purposes, I suppose, he wanted to hear what Paul had to say, and so Paul gives him an earful, and in the course of that testimony,

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Paul's testimony before Agrippa, he asks a question that still, it still serves to be asked today and needs to be answered by every single person, and the question is this.

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We read of it in, we read of it in verse 8, where Paul asks

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Agrippa, Why should it be thought incredible by you that God raises the dead?

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Of course, Paul is referencing the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb, and you can imagine that when

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Paul spoke of Jesus' resurrection, that Agrippa heard that and his eyebrows went up like, oh, yeah, right,

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God raised up Jesus from the dead, which led Paul to ask the question.

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It's a good question. Why should it be thought incredible by you, by anyone, that God raises the dead?

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Now, if you were to ask that question superficial, superficially to anybody on the street, a co -worker, whatever, you know, somebody you're trying to witness to or to testify about Christ to, and they're, you know, kind of scoffing a little bit, you know, ask this.

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Why should you think it's incredible that God should raise the dead? The probably off -the -cuff answer would be, well, nobody's ever seen it before.

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Nobody's ever seen anything like that. That, of course, would betray an ignorance of the biblical record, right?

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Because, I mean, there are several occasions where people have been raised from the dead that are recorded in the

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Scripture. You got a couple of them in the Old Testament, at least, and you got a few that in the New Testament, Jesus raised some people from the dead, and Lazarus, and Jairus' daughter, and so forth.

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But that nobody's ever seen it, would be the superficial answer to the simple question.

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You know, we don't have any video. We don't have any scientific record of that kind of thing happening.

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It's not been duplicated scientifically. So that's why we think it's simple. But really, really, the the thought that it is an incredible thing that God should raise the dead, an impossible thing, really, that it's not something that couldn't happen, belies a deeper problem.

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And that has to do with a low view of God, a very low view of God.

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It shouldn't surprise us that people deny the reality of the resurrection, who also deny the fact of divine creation.

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And a creation out of nothing, as recorded in Genesis chapters 1 & 2.

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It shouldn't surprise us that those who have no belief in the control of God, God's sovereign control over all things, that He could raise the dead.

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I mean, they don't believe that God has any control over the affairs of this world, the affairs of climate, and the governmental affairs, and so on.

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They have no thought whatsoever that God has any control over any of that. Well, if He has no control, no power, no say, no ability to do anything with the affairs of this world, then yeah, how could

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He raise somebody from the dead? Or that He has no personal or practical authority over my life.

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You know, I can do what I want to do. You know, God doesn't have anything to do with my life.

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I mean, that's how most people live. If they don't think that, if they wouldn't verbalize that, that's what they believe, because that's how they live.

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And when they deny the fact, the truth, that God is the ultimate judge of all the earth and of me, you see, that consistently low view of God shows itself also in the disbelief over the reality of a literal physical resurrection that God could and did raise

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Jesus from the dead. Why should it be thought an incredible thing to you that God raises the dead?

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If you have a high view of God, if you have a biblical view of God, you would say, well, of course

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He can, and of course He has. It's not an incredible thing that God raises the dead.

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I hope you have the right view of God, a view that sees it as nothing difficult whatsoever for Him to raise the dead.

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Because He has. If He hasn't, then my friend, we are all utterly hopeless.

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I'm glad we're not. Our Father and our God, we do thank you today for who you are. We thank you for your power.

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We thank you for your sovereignty. We thank you for your authority. We thank you for your righteousness.

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We thank you that we thank you that you do indeed raise the dead.

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Jesus Christ rose from the dead by the power of the triune

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God, and that is not an incredible thing to believe because of who you are.

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Thank you for revealing yourself to us in your word. May we trust your word as it is given to us.

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This we pray in Jesus name and for His sake. Amen. All right, well have a wonderful rest of your

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Friday and a great weekend. And I trust God will bless you in it, especially as you gather to worship on the