10-11-2020

Park Meadows Church

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We know we're in Romans chapter 8, verse 30, moreover whom he did predestinate them he also called, and whom he called he also justified.

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So we know the verse before that said, whom he foreknew, he also predestinated.

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Those two things happened before time began, so they are not in sequence, they just are. God is now, he's eternal now, and they just are, they just happen.

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He knew you with love and relationship before he made anything, he predestinated that you'd be adopted into his family and be his child, that happened before time began.

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And he did it by name, he knew you by name. That's how special you are. The world tells you you're a number.

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God tells you you're an individual child of his that he loves more than we can love our own children and grandchildren, which is amazing to think about.

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And then in time, as we come into time, two things happen in this verse. First, we are called by the

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Holy Spirit, and that's where the regeneration takes place, because at the calling, he regenerates us.

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This is what we call the effectual calling in theology. He regenerates us, he does about 33 things to us in a nanosecond or less, including giving us the faith of Christ, giving us a desire to repent.

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Giving repentance, by the way, means to change the mind, so he literally changes our want to. And see, a lot of people think you have to repent to get saved, it's the

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Holy Spirit who changes your mind. You don't repent, he does. He changes your mind, that's the repentance.

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And he lets you decide you're not God. God is God, and that's what the Holy Spirit does.

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God exists and you're not him, and you need him, and there's your savior, and you're hungry, and he's the shepherd and he has the food.

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And he does all that in a nanosecond, and our desire changes, because if that weren't true, we would have gotten saved the day before, or the day before that, the day before that.

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So the calling is so important, and I don't hear a lot of sermons on the calling anymore, but you go back 150 years, you heard it every

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Sunday, practically. And with the calling came justification. It's one of those 33 or more things that God did for us at salvation.

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And justified, if you remember, it means to be rendered righteous. It's something, it's in the passive in Greek, which means

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God had to do it to you. You could not do it yourself. It's not in the active tense, it's passive.

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I should say voice. It's passive, and he did it to you. And Bill's Sunday school lesson this morning was magnificent, talking about Jesus saying that it'd be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy individual to get saved.

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Well, the Jews felt like wealth, as you so well said in your lesson, that wealth was directly tied to God's blessings.

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And it's like it blew their mind when Jesus taught that. And like Bill said, some of the commentators try to say, oh, that's the camel gate.

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It just meant it wasn't really a needle. It's called, I think it's called the camel gate or maybe the needle gate.

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I don't know what it's called. I remember reading commentaries on it years ago where the camel had to get down on his knees and get unpacked to make it through.

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So it's really hard. That's incorrect. If you see that in your commentary, your commentator is incorrect.

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It's a literal needle and it's a literal camel and it's impossible. It's teaching the impossibility of a natural man, woman, boy, or girl to save themselves.

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And yet Jesus said, right in the passage, he said, with man, it is impossible.

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Just like it would be for a literal camel to go through the eye of a literal needle. It's impossible for a man, woman, boy, or girl to save themselves.

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And yet the modern gospel is all about that, but it's wrong. And yet Jesus didn't put a period there when he said it's impossible.

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He said, yet with God, all things are possible. Well, what does that teach us? Salvation is of God, not man.

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And that's what we're talking about this morning. It's God who foreknew you. It's God who predestinated that you'd be saved from a fallen race, all of which the rest is going to hell because it deserves it, because it's totally turned its head away from God.

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There's none that seeketh God, not one. We've all gone our own way, the

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Bible says. And so God had to wake us up. So he sent his Holy Spirit and awakened us.

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The Bible says he quickened us while we were dead in our trespasses and sins, he quickened us.

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He brought us to life. He brought us to life. That's salvation. Nowadays, it's all about what we do to get saved.

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No, that's not it. Those are effects, not the cause. The cause of the salvation is the regeneration, which happens at the calling, and the

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Holy Spirit does the regenerating. He applies the blood, all these things, gives you the faith of Jesus and so forth, gives you a change of mind, a change of heart, all of that.

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Everything that we do is an effect of that. We do it because he saved us. Even the coming down the aisle to get saved, you were already saved before you left the pew, because the

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Holy Spirit woke you up. You know, it's really interesting. I was thinking about this, Bill, while you were teaching, and I know

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I should have been thinking only about what you were teaching, but this played in with it really well. I remember years ago,

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I was looking, I think it's Romans 10, 13, whosoever shall call upon the name of the

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Lord shall be saved. Well, that's such a common verse, one of the first verses I learned as a new

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Christian. I hadn't actually done a word study on it in years and years and years, Bill, probably 25, 30 years, because it just seems simple.

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But it was in one of my sermons a year or so ago, maybe a couple of years ago, time flies when you're having fun.

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But so I said, well, you know what? I'm gonna do a word study on this thing. And I looked it up, and in the Greek, it actually says, whosoever desires to call upon the name of the

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Lord shall be saved. So the Holy Spirit puts the desire there, and that person shall be saved.

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So it's not the formula that we're taught in churches and so forth that saves us. It's the

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Holy Spirit calling us and regenerating us. All the rest is effects. All of our denominations bicker over the effects, which is so silly, because none of them are the cause of the cause.

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An effect can never be the cause of a cause. So we know that justified means you are rendered righteous by God.

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All right, last couple of times we talked about, there's about seven things you need to know in order to understand justification.

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The first one up there is the depravity of man, which we talked about that a second ago. None seeketh God, there's not one that looks for God.

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Man is depraved, he's not looking for God. All right, number two, though, is we need to understand the meaning of grace.

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We've been studying that for several weeks. So the meaning of grace, in Galatians chapter one, verses six through nine, we saw one thing about grace is when you move away from grace, like the

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Galatians did, where they wanted to add works to their salvation, they thought they could add works to faith to stay saved, and Paul rebuked them and called them foolish.

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And he said, who bewitched you? So you have to be bewitched to believe that false doctrine of works.

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Bewitched is a frightening word, if you think about it. And he said to them, when he said, let's just put the verse up here, look at Galatians 1, 6.

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I marvel that you, after he called them foolish, I marvel that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel.

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So when you move into adding works to either get saved, adding works to faith, like faith, yeah,

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I believe in Jesus, but that can be fatal spiritually when you put that there.

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I believe in Jesus, but you also gotta. That can be fatal spiritually. Because Paul said, if you say you need to be circumcised to be saved, then

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Christ benefits you nothing. Wow, think about what that's saying. So we have a lot of friends that we need to teach these things to the

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Lord, if he would open the door, don't we? So notice that it doesn't say you move away from good doctrine.

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You move away from good doctrine when you add works to faith for salvation or to stay saved.

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It's not that you move away from good doctrine. It says you move away from him. Who is that?

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That's God. That's frightening too. Second thing we learned, there is no other gospel than the real gospel.

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The real gospel is that Jesus died for the sins of his people, not the sins of everyone, but the sins of not every individual, but for the sins of all kinds of individuals,

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Jews and Gentiles, not just Jews. And he died for the sins of his people.

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He was buried and he rose again for the sins of his people, proving that he was who he said he was.

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And the Bible goes on and says that God placed us in him the day he died and the day he was buried.

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So our old man has already been crucified. That happened 2 ,000 and more years ago. So you, here again, salvation is of God.

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That's work that God did, not work you and I did. We're saved by works, but only

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God's works, not our works. All the work the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit did from before time began when he foreknew us and predestinated us, all that work saves us.

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We don't do anything to add one whit to it. And the modern gospel adds a lot to it, even in all denominations pretty much at this point, or adding things to it.

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It's very, very dangerous, but of course, Jesus said in the end times, we'll have many false prophets, did he not? Fulfill prophecy, that's kind of exciting.

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The only way that we can stay right is to stay in this book right here, or your phone, or whatever you have the

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Bible on, right? You gotta stay in this. You need the water of the word and you need the

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Holy Spirit to know what's true and what's not. The Bible says there'll be a generation when they call good evil and evil good.

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Do you think we're there now? Just watch the debates. You just watch the debates, okay? It pretty clearly,

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I won't say what I was about to say, but I will say you can see people calling good evil and evil good all day long.

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So we're there. There's a generation that says itself is right. We're there. A generation that thinks itself is right.

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Boy, the young people in our country today, they just think they've got it down. You can kind of smile at that if you're my age, 66 years old or older, you just kind of smile at them when they think they've got it down because we thought that too at one point, didn't we?

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But I'm telling you, I've never seen the time so set up for people who have the right mindset to accept the

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Antichrist as if he's the Messiah. It would be so easy at this day in which we live, but there is no other gospel than the true gospel.

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It's all about the blood of Jesus is what paid the price for your sins.

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And without that, you can't add anything to that for salvation. And the Holy Spirit, one of the things he does when he comes in the calling, when he regenerates us is he applies

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Jesus' blood, this individual person to me, to you, individually, not as a group.

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And then he comes to dwell in our body. Our body becomes the temple of the living

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God. That has to change a person. That's why we see fruits in genuine Christians. We see changes over time.

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Number three, the destiny of those who preach these false doctrines of adding works to grace or even works to staying saved, or you might call it sanctification.

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What's their destiny? Book of Jude says their destiny is often the blackness of darkness forever.

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That's hell. Now, the reason I said often is because there's two kinds of false prophets. There's one who Satan put here to come into our churches secretly and steal our freedom away.

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They're predestined for hell, the Book of Jude says. And I know all of you had people say, well, the

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Bible never says God predestinates anyone to go to hell, does it? Well, read the Book of Jude. But then there's another kind of false prophet who's just young and hasn't been through the

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Bible enough times and he makes a mistake and teaches something wrong. But later the Holy Spirit teaches him and he corrects himself and apologizes and tries to correct it the best he can and he moves on.

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And that's all of us. So not every false prophet ends up going to hell, but there are some predetermined to hell and Satan slips them in privily or secretly into churches to take our freedom of the true grace of God away from us.

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Keep that in mind. So we talked about that. Then in Galatians 2, verses four through five and 16, 20, and 21, how do we deal with these false prophets?

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So we talked about that. And then what causes people to believe these false doctrines? Galatians 3, one and following says you gotta be bewitched.

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That's frightening. We talked about what that means. All right, and then in 2

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Timothy 2, 24 and following is a beautiful passage of scripture. It tells you how to speak with people that are believing false doctrines like that.

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How do you deal? You have to do it in meekness and you instruct them. You don't try to debate them, you instruct them.

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You tell them the truth. Even if they don't believe the truth, you tell them the truth, even while they're not believing it. And go read that passage.

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It'll blow your mind if you weren't here the day we covered it. 2 Timothy 2, 24 and following, amazing information.

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It also speaks of the sovereignty of God and how that comes into play and even people understanding genuine, true doctrine.

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All right, so then we talked about, we started this, just barely started this last time, the total illogic of salvation by works.

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And number one, it is impossible for the natural man to be saved by doing good works, Galatians 3, 11.

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But that no man, that's zero. How many is zero? No man is rendered righteous, justified, by doing good stuff or keeping the law in the sight of God, not one man.

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So it's illogical to add works to salvation because God says nobody that does that can be saved.

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All right, the just live by faith, not by works.

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You say, does that mean they can live any way they want? God forbid. How can we who are dead to sin live any longer in it?

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But those are effects. The good life is an effect, not the cause of the salvation. So now we talk, start right here today.

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In Galatians 3, 13, let's talk about another reason why adding works to salvation is incorrect.

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And why are we even discussing this? Because what we're talking about is you cannot possibly understand justification.

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And that's the best word for like when I grew up Baptist, we used to say I got saved. What we meant was we got justified.

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That was the moment when the Holy Spirit rendered us righteous. He applied Jesus's blood to us and rendered us righteous.

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We say I got saved, right? I do like the phrase got saved. It doesn't say I saved myself.

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I didn't grow up in a church that said I saved myself, said I got saved. That means God did it to me. That was correct.

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That was good doctrine back in those days. But the thing is people come along and try to get you to add works and they say, yeah, but you gotta, you gotta do this, you gotta do that.

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You gotta worship on Saturday, which is nonsense because Sabbath means arrest. We have

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Sabbath every day. Born -again Christians have Sabbath every day. So don't tell me which day

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I have to worship the Lord. Every day. We choose, the Lord's day was his resurrection

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Sunday, which the early Christian church chose. It's clear from the book of Acts and church history and everything.

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It's very clear. Only Judaizers would want to cause you to go back and do the

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Sabbath on Saturday. It is true the Sabbath is Saturday, the

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Jewish Sabbath, but our day of worship is the Lord's day, right? So Christ, one of the reasons it is so illogical to add works to salvation, number two reason is because it's totally contrary to the

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Abrahamic covenant. Now we mentioned this right at the end of last Sunday. And in Galatians chapter three, it's interesting that the greatest information about the

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Abrahamic covenant in the New Testament happens to be in this book, this rebuking and calling foolish the people that add works to their salvation for salvation or to stay saved.

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Now don't get me wrong. We believe in adding works to our salvation, but it's an effect of the salvation.

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It's not the cause of it, plays no role in the cause of it. That's a big difference. That's a big distinction.

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So we believe that Ephesians 2, 8, 9 is true, but so is verse 10.

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It says that God preordained that those who are saved will walk in good works. That's part of God's plan.

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And the reason you do is the same reason you got saved. The same Holy Spirit that called you will help you to start walking right.

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Start cutting sin out of your life, putting conviction on us for the sins we have to help us get rid of those and make us more like Jesus.

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We don't ever arrive perfect until he comes back for us, do we? But it's a lifetime of effort to live and be good men and women and follow

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Jesus Christ. And yet the scripture says so clearly that he's put this treasure, which is the new man, new woman in earthen vessels.

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God understands we're natural. We still have an old man and we mess up, don't we? So if salvation had any role in us performing, we would lose it.

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It's totally illogical to teach that or believe it. I don't like to debate, but if you ever wanted to get me in a debate, just let me put me on the stage with somebody that believes that.

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I won't even need a Bible, I don't think. Just need the Holy Ghost to help me. But it's just so illogical.

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There are a thousand points of scripture that teach it, that it's illogical to add works for salvation or for staying saved.

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It's ridiculous. Galatians 3 .13, I'm kind of dogmatic on that. Can you tell? Like, that's not something

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I fudge on. Dogma, I'm not changing on that one. And that is a point of fellowship, really.

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And by that, I don't mean we can't be friendly and nice with our friends that go to denominations that don't understand this. We'd be very friendly and nice to them, but we'd probably be very uncomfortable worshiping with them, wouldn't we?

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That kind of fellowship, like the lunch we're gonna have after this. You're fellowshipping around Christ, you'd just be arguing all day.

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How can two who are not of the same mind walk together, the scripture says? So that won't work.

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So I do believe we should remain friends with them and try to have open doors to discuss some of these very scriptures with them.

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But even when you do, only God can open their mind because they're blinded by Satan. And that's the second Timothy passage teaches that.

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So Chris, talk about this Abrahamic covenant. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law being made a curse in our place.

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And on behalf of us, it means both, four means both those things. For as it is written, cursed is everyone that hangs on the tree.

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So the first point we see is that the word redemption means to be set free by paying a price, all right?

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Now look at verse 14, that the blessing of Abraham might come on the

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Gentiles. And that's what Paul means when he said Christ died for all men. He doesn't mean every individual, he means all kinds of men.

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He was, you gotta always ask who's he speaking, who's being spoken to in a passage of scripture. That's one of the 10 rules of Bible interpretation.

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Who's being spoken to? Speaking to Jews who thought God would not save a Gentile. And Paul says, no, you're wrong, brother.

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Jesus died for all kinds of men. And in the Greek, the word pas, translated all, more often means all kinds of, than it means all individuals.

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It means both, but you can only tell by the context. But I'll tell you what, you can take the context of this whole book right here, from the first page to the last page.

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And the context of this book teaches that all those passages can possibly mean is that Jesus died for all kinds of men.

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Had he died for every man, woman, boy, or girl, then they would all be in heaven because salvation is by the blood of Jesus and whoever he spilled that blood for is saved.

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How do I know? Because the Bible says we were ransomed. And whoever the price is paid for, that's who gets away from the captor, isn't it?

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So I just do the math on that. I mean, that's just logic. And we've gotten so far away from it. 150 years ago and on back for at least three or 400 years of more modern

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Christian history, well over 90 % of certainly

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Baptist believers believe that Jesus died only for the elect, not for the whole, not for every individual.

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And that's the only thing that fits all of scripture. If you stick with us long enough, I know that's difficult for some of you, not here locally, but some of you guys, that's difficult and that's okay because my job is not to convince you, my job is to get you to study.

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Just check it out and see if I'm right, okay? Because if I'm wrong, you need to email me so I'll get rid of it. Because I'm not in it for the argument,

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I'm in it for the truth. If I'm wrong, let me know, show me where. And I don't say that tongue in cheek,

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I mean it. People that live here know that we mean that. We will correct ourselves as a group if we're teaching something wrong, we will stop teaching it.

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But I don't think you can find anything, when we finally do get past verse 30, we've already covered the rest of Romans eight, so we're done with it.

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And we're gonna be in Romans nine, how are you gonna make that fit anything if you don't understand all these other things?

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So we'll get there. Redemption, it's interesting when you see the word redeemed, it means to be set free by a price that's paid for you.

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And it's also translated sometimes as ransom. And we've talked about ransom, it's only whoever the ransom is paid for, that's who gets loose, not everybody.

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So Jesus ransomed his own, he knew who they were before the foundation of the world, is that difficult? It says the scripture we're on earlier,

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Romans eight, 29 and 30, for whom he foreknew, that means he loved you, had a relationship with you before he made anything.

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Those are the same ones who get called and justified. Those are the same ones for whom he gave his blood, all right?

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So now we see here that the blessing of Abraham, why is it that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law?

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Why did he set us free by giving his blood to us? And the Holy Spirit sprinkling it on us individually at the moment of our justification,

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I should say. At that moment, why did all of this come to pass?

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Verse 14 tells us why, so that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles as well as the

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Jews. You see, Jesus died for every man, meaning this, for every kind of man,

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Jew, Gentile, black, white, every kind of man. So there will be some from every race of man saved by Jesus Christ.

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And this passage shows that it brings the Abrahamic covenant and shows that it was never meant just for the

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Jew. It was meant for the Jew and the Gentile. In fact, ask yourself the question, was

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Abraham a Jew or a Gentile two seconds before he was circumcised?

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He was a Gentile. So the father of the Jewish religion is a Gentile, and yet they thought in the time of Paul, they thought, well,

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God won't save a Gentile. They just weren't thinking, were they? We Christians are that way. We don't think enough, do we?

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We don't think about the things we already know enough. This Jesus died to redeem us from the curse of the law so that the blessing and the covenant, the promise of Abraham could come on the

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Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the spirit through faith, not through works.

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Not through faith plus works. Through faith. Number two, all saved by the

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Abrahamic covenant. Need to understand that it is an unconditional covenant. There's nothing in that covenant for man to do.

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God does all the work. So that makes it illogical for us men to add works to the blood of Christ for salvation.

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Not as the cause. Works are the result. Works are the effect.

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The blood is the cause. The Holy Spirit is the cause. The Father is the cause. The work that they all did on our behalf from before time began is the cause.

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Man wants to get a little bit of credit, but he doesn't get any. God gets all the glory for this. A man getting part of the glory for his own salvation would be as impossible as a camel going through the eye of a needle,

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Jesus and Brother Bill taught this morning. Verse 17 says, in this

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I say, that the covenant that was confirmed before of God in Christ, it was confirmed before the law.

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The Abrahamic covenant happened 430 years before Moses came along and it cannot disannul anything

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Moses taught. Moses cannot add works to an unconditional salvation covenant, can he?

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So the works apparently were for something else. The law was for something else. It had another purpose, not to save people.

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In fact, it kills people because unless you keep the law in every point you die, you deserve death, eternal death.

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So that's not the purpose of Moses and the law. It was to show us a great need for a savior. It was to show us the need for that blood of Jesus Christ.

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Jesus taught during the times of the law, didn't he? And he kept pointing out, well, listen, if you even look at a woman and lust for her, you need to pluck your eye out because it'd be better to go to heaven with one eye than to go to hell with two eyes.

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He said, that's how hard it is to get saved by the law. If you wanna start adding that or helping that to get to heaven, you can't possibly do it.

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In fact, Jesus is the only man who did it. The only man. You can't do it, I can't do it.

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They couldn't do it when he spoke to them and he was pointing out by showing them the law and it's true since.

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It goes beyond the letter. It goes to the spirit and God sees your heart and desires.

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You're gonna save yourself by covering that up like a Pharisee that's a whited sepulcher on the outside and full of dead men's bones on the inside or are you gonna believe

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Jesus when he says that won't get it? You see? So the covenant of Abraham was long, hundreds and hundreds of years, 430 years before Moses came along and so Moses cannot change it.

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He cannot eliminate the promise and he didn't try to. He understood how it fit together and he understood

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Jesus and a lot about Jesus Christ too. It existed 430 years before the law of Moses.

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Verse 18, for if the inheritance comes by the law of Moses, it is no more promise.

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So you can't both call it a covenant of promise, an unconditional covenant and say you gotta add the law to it.

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It's totally illogical argument but God gave it to Abraham by promise, by faith in that promise, not by works and Moses' law can't change it.

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The third point we see is salvation by works is a contradiction in terms.

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You can't say it's by promise and faith but it's also by works and Moses. You can't, it doesn't fit.

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Oil and water. All right, so it's all right here. So what is the correct purpose of the law?

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We see that's the next point. It's to lead us to Christ and see a need for grace because all the law does is expose how impossible it is for us to fit through the eye of that needle.

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We're not even camels but we can't fit through it with or without the camel. So look at verse 22.

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But the scripture has concluded all under sin, all pos, it means all kinds of men, both

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Jew and Gentile. Now in this context, I think it can also mean every individual.

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You can only tell by the context but we certainly know it means all kind, both

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Jew and Gentile, all Jews and all Gentiles are all concluded to be under sin, why?

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So that the promise by the faith and notice it doesn't say in Jesus in a good Bible because a good

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English Bible that follows the Greek, it will say of, so check your Bible right now.

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What are you reading? The American Standard, NIV, they're gonna say in right there. King James is the only book

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I've found in English that says of and it's what the Greek says. So you have errors in the modern versions.

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You need to know that. I know it's not popular. And listen, I wanna make this clear. I would rather you read an

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NIV than not read the Bible. So I'm not one of those that says that just throw it out, throw away your Bible, especially if it's all marked up.

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But I am saying consult the King James from time to time and the Greek, if you have a good concordance and you'll see some amazing things that are missing that you need to know.

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And this is one of them, because what it says is the scripture has concluded that all of us are under sin, which means we're not gonna be able to save ourselves by being good.

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All right? So that the promise that works by the faith of Jesus, not faith in Jesus.

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See, that's different. Faith in Jesus is something I can do. It's a work. Because when

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I work my brain, that's a work. I gotta eat food for my brain to work, don't I? I've gotta eat food and my brain has to work for me to think anything, certainly to work up belief in something, right?

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You can't be saved by that kind of belief. You're saved by the faith of Christ.

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Galatians has it more than one place and other places in scripture. The Holy Spirit gives you Jesus's faith.

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That can walk on water. Your faith is here today and gone the first time God doesn't answer your prayer. Yes, then you doubt him.

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That faith won't save you. Admit it with me. You've done it. I've done it. He doesn't answer your prayer like you wanted.

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You doubt him, at least for a little while. Then the Holy Spirit comes back and says, no, don't doubt him, right? Isn't that how it works?

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And you say, okay, I'm sorry, Lord. I don't understand you, but I don't doubt you. How about that? That's better.

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So the Holy Spirit comes, but you see, it's not our faith that saves us. It's the faith of Jesus that saves us.

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Very few Americans know that today. You go back 150 years, everyone in sound churches knew this.

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We don't know it today. We think it's our own faith. Why? Because we introduce humanism to our salvation. I've got to do something.

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At least let me believe. You know, I grew up in a denomination, the Baptists, I pick on them from time to time because I was one.

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And they used to pick on the Church of Christ because the Church of Christ had five things you had to do to be saved. That's evil.

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Saved by faith, they would say. And yet they would have two things. You got to believe and repent. You gotta, right?

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You gotta believe and repent. They had two things. So go to church with us. We only have two requirements.

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It's easier than going with them, right? It's so silly. Those are all effects. None of that saves you. What saves you is the faith of Christ.

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Check it, study. Just, you don't have to believe me. I don't want you to believe me. I want you to study on your own.

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But it is the promise becomes operative when the Holy Spirit calls you, opens your blind eyes, your deaf ears, and turns your mind on, changes your want to, changes your thinking.

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That's repentance, by the way. So he gave you the repentance too. You didn't do it. He gave it to you. That's from God. And then he helps you understand because he all of a sudden, he gives you faith as the gift.

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Ephesians 2, 8, 9, and 10. Very clear. He gives you faith as a gift. It's not something you did.

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It's something you received. Now that by that faith, you can receive the promise because the promise is by faith only.

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The faith of Jesus Christ might be given. Does that sound like you work to get it? Listen, can you, like if I, Dave wants to give me a new set of golf clubs, that'd be awesome.

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I said, well, Dave, let me pay you 350 bucks. And he says, dad, did you know those have gone up since the last set you bought?

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Would you believe 1 ,500 bucks? Oh, so at this point,

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I want grace. Just give me the golf clubs, right? So, but if I pay him, is it a gift?

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Or did I just defy the definition of gift? Listen, people play with the Bible all the time like that. They defy definitions of words, of the

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Greek words that the Holy Spirit picked. You can't, that's not, that's breaking the 10 rules of Bible interpretation.

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You, listen, it says it's given to you. What'd you do to get it?

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Nothing. That the faith of Christ will give you the, help you receive the promise as a gift.

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It's given to them that who? Believe. Well, who believes? Now, what's interesting, if you study through the book of Galatians, you'll see verses where in one verse or two, one or two or three together, it will say that you're justified by the faith of Christ.

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And then it'll read a little bit, it'll come in here and say that you may believe in Christ. Now there's your belief, but which happened first?

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And then it ends by the faith of Christ. So it sandwiches your human belief in between Jesus' faith twice mentioned in the passage.

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So which comes first? So if the picture is a tuning fork, the faith of Christ, you hit it and it's vibrating.

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You bring your faith, your little doubt plus faith, plus doubt, plus faith, and you move it over close and it vibrates at the same frequency of Jesus.

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That's how your human belief works. And he brought the promise and he gives you the faith of Christ.

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And now you believe. You see both in that one verse. Isn't that interesting? So you see the faith of Christ.

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You see the human belief both in one verse and this is how God works it out. So you have to understand the decisions that we make are important.

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The sovereignty of God does not erase the responsibility of man. In fact, Adam and Eve ate the fruit because they wanted to, and God held them responsible for it, right?

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There's the responsibility. And we're paying that price still today because they were our parents and we were in them when they did it.

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According to scripture. So that's original sin, but the Lord gives us all of this at the moment of justification, the moment of the calling.

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It's so beautiful. To those that believe. Now, this is kind of interesting because I know some of you guys out there were probably thinking, oh, wait a minute,

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David. You just got through saying we're saved by the faith of Christ. And then the scripture says, so that the promise by faith of Christ might be given to them that believe.

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It almost looks like their belief has to come first and then they get that. Well, let's look a little deeper.

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If you take a look at the word believe there at the end of verse 22, it's in the present participle in Greek.

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That's part of the 10 rules of Bible interpretation. You got to look at the grammar. Why did you take it in school?

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Because they made you, you saw no need for it. But now that you're born again, you see a need because you need to be able to interpret scripture.

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You didn't know that when you were a kid probably, unless you came to our Christian school. I grew up in some of our Christian families, right?

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But that's why we study English, all right? So a Greek has some of the same parts of speech.

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So we understand some of them. Some of them are a little different. This one, that believe in this sentence, verse 22, it's in the present participle.

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The present tense when it is in the participle indicates action occurring at the same time as the action of the main verb.

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Now, what do you think the main verb in that is? Well, you've got to look at what's going on in the whole verse.

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The scripture has concluded all under sin so that the promise by the faith of Jesus might be given.

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So you receive the faith of Jesus. Now you have his faith to help you believe

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Abraham's promise, right? Which was that there would be a Messiah who would die in your place. And at the very same time, you got the faith of Christ you believed.

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So the belief does not happen first like it appears when you read it in English. I know I'm going shooting over your head a little bit, especially this late in the message, but you understand, you read that in English, would you agree that it sounds like everybody that believes then they're given the faith of Christ and they get the promise?

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In Greek, it doesn't read that way because the faith of Christ in the given part happens exactly the same time as the other belief.

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They happen at the same time. Why? Because that's how the, when the Holy Spirit calls us and regenerates us, it's just now.

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It's just now, it's not a function of sequence. Now it's written in sequence because we think in sequence, but as far as how it happened, it's just a gift.

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It's all one big gift of salvation, but all these things are parts of it all at once. So your human belief didn't cause the

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Holy Spirit to give you Jesus' faith. In fact, you got

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Jesus' faith and your faith came along beside it because the Holy Spirit changed your thinking in a nanosecond of time.

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All it really, it's not even in a nanosecond. It's just outside of time. It's a heavenly thing.

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It's a miracle. I know you love the grammar. All right.

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So the promise is by the gift of Christ's faith to us. Isn't that nice?

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We received the promise because the Holy Spirit made us able to believe like Jesus believed. Verse 24 says, "'Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto

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Christ.'" Now we see the purpose for the law of Moses. It's not to save us in the purest sense because it only condemns us because we don't keep it.

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It condemns us. So what is the purpose of it? It's like a teacher. It's a school teacher and we're like little children.

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When you believe in works, you first think of God and you think, well, I better be a good person, don't we? Didn't we all think kind of that way when we were little kids?

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When we think as a child, a lot of adults still think that way about God. And now we need a teacher to teach us everything we need to know to be an adult.

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Is that correct? So that's the allegory here. And so the law is the teacher that brings us to salvation purely by Christ and the work he did for us, not by the stuff we do.

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So it's a teacher that makes us see a need for a savior so that we might be justified by the law.

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No, the law is the teacher. The teacher can't make you be an adult, only the Holy Spirit can. The teacher just tells you about it.

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The teacher shows you a need for grace because you can't keep this law. It's too difficult for a sinful human being.

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So there it is. Now we see the purpose of the law, to get us to see that we need grace.

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But after faith has come, now look at this. After faith has come, tell me when faith comes, what's the event called?

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Well, let me ask you, does it come in time or before time? It's not a trick question.

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I'm glad we have the people mic turned off because it sounds like this out there. I probably, probably if we had been back there today, you'd be watching, hey guys,

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I apologize. We can't see your texts because I know you guys are sending notes and you guys are shouting.

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Guys, say this, say this. All right, so it happens in time, right? When does faith come?

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What event is that? The calling, thank you. Who said that?

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Katie said that, very good. All right, so at the calling, faith comes.

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But after faith has come, we are no longer under the what? Schoolmaster, and what does it picture in this allegory?

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You said it, the law. So now listen, you got friends in all these denominations.

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Almost everyone is tainted with it now in the end times. They say, yeah, but you gotta, and just put a word there.

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You gotta get baptized in our water, not your water. You gotta go to church, you gotta tithe. You gotta repent.

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You gotta quit hanging out with those people. You gotta do this, you gotta that. And the scripture says you're no longer under any of that.

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Doesn't it? Well, like you gotta use grammar if you're gonna get the passage correctly.

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What does the grammar say? It says, in the purest meaning of the verse, you're not under the law anymore.

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Once faith has come, and that comes at the calling, and in less than a nanosecond,

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I'll have to say, because it's not a function of time, the Holy Spirit just, boom, and it gives you like over 33 things, including

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Jesus's faith, brings your faith alongside, causes you to change your mind, that's repentance. Causes you to desire to go to church, get baptized in the water and all that stuff, but those are effects, not the cause of the salvation.

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And an effect can never be the cause of a cause. Just study logic, if you don't believe me, take a college course online, study logic, you'll see that's right.

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And God said, come let us reason together. You need to know logic. But anyway, there we have it.

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So what part does the law have in our salvation? No part, other than showing us we need it.

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Would you agree with that? All right, so the law has no effect once its purpose is served.

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We're not under it anymore. Now, but let me ask you this, can the law still have an effect in our family?

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Well, don't we have a lot of people in our family that are still children? Both literal children and adults who still, their faith is like, you mentioned a person, we better be careful, everybody can hear us now.

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It's good not to mention names. Oh, you did mention a name. Oops. Well, that's okay, we'll cut that out.

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Ben Mitchell will remove the name. But anyway, in case that person's listening, but here's the thing. You can't come in and say you're under the law when you're removed from it by God himself.

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So the law has no effect, but is the Old Testament still useful? It is because we have children that need to learn the 10

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Commandments, which is part of the Old Testament. Will it save them? No, could it keep them from getting hurt though?

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Yeah. Would it do them some good to understand that the most important law, listen to me children right here, the most important law is honor your mom and your dad, honor your parents so that your life may be long on the earth.

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Wouldn't that, it's useful, isn't it? So it has a huge use. So I'm not saying it's not useful,

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I'm saying it doesn't save us. It plays no role in our salvation other than to lead us to Christ. Isn't that something?

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And that seems simple to us that once we've studied this before, and even today as we review it, it just seems so clear.

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For you're all children of God, how? By faith, not by the law.

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By faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

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Does that mean you have to be baptized to get saved? Yes, it does.

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But there are many types of baptism taught in the

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Bible. And this is not a reference to water baptism because water is a picture.

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The water baptism, we baptized last Sunday, didn't we? Two of my grandbabies.

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When they stepped into the water, it pictured that they died in Christ. Their old man was crucified in Christ.

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When they went under the water, it pictured they were buried and the old man is dead.

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And what do you think it pictures when they come up out of that water and what did they feel? Because I asked both of them, they both felt it. They felt like they're resurrected and have a new life.

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No, they didn't word it that way. They said, it feels different, it feels good. It does, because it's a picture. So this is not talking about the picture in this passage, it's talking about what it pictures.

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And I would like it if the English didn't use the word baptized because that's not an English word at all.

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We have no word baptized in English. So actually it comes from baptizo, which we don't have that word in English.

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We do now, but I mean, it doesn't, it carries all different meanings in English. But in the Greek, it means simply to be emerged or totally surrounded by something.

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So it's not a reference to water. But when you say the word baptized to an English speaking person, what do they always think it means?

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Water, but it doesn't in Greek, okay? And you have to tell by the context. Clearly in the context, if you wanna pull out verse 27 and prove you should go to church

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Christ in the South, you can, but you just left out verse 24, 25, 26, and all the rest of the first part of book of Galatians to do that.

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I don't think that's fair with the contextual part of the 10 rules of Bible interpretation, do you?

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So if you wanna make that fit everything, then you have to be talking about spirit baptism, which is one of the 33 things the

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Holy Spirit does at the moment of our salvation. Not only does he give us the belief of Christ, the faith of Christ, and bring our belief alongside that, not only does he change our mind to want

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God to be God rather than ourselves in less than a nanosecond of time. I just think it's like heiress tense.

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It's like not with regard to time. It just happens all at once. Not only does he do those things, he changes our want to, but another thing he does is he immerses us in Christ and Christ in us, and that's what baptized means, to immerse in something.

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So what he does is he literally, would you agree the Holy Spirit is omnipresent? So he's everywhere at once.

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Would you agree there's one place he's not though? Probably never thought about that, did you? You have to have breakfast with Otis to think about stuff like this.

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Is he in the heart, the dark black heart of a lost person? So there's one place the

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Holy Spirit's not, okay? So when you get saved in that nanosecond, less than a nanosecond of time, he comes into that heart now.

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It's a renewed heart. He comes in to live in your life, and now you're totally immersed in the God because he was just in the world.

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Now he's in you and in the world you're surrounded, like as if underwater, as if you were immersed into the

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Holy Spirit and will be your whole life on this earth. That's what that means. You can't make water fit that passage because it ain't in there.

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The water baptism that's taught in the book of Acts in different places is clearly a symbol or a picture of the true immersion into Christ.

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It pictures it. It's an allegory. It's like a wedding ring. I'm not wearing mine today.

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Does that mean I'm not married to Charlotte? No, I'm married to Charlotte, but if I did have it on, it's just a symbol of it.

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It doesn't make me be married. And water baptism doesn't make you be a Christian. It's a picture of what did make you be a

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Christian, which is all of this work that God did. All of this beautiful work that Jesus did, we call it the finished work of Christ.

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And part of it was he immersed you into himself, into you and you into him by the

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Holy Spirit. We call it in English, baptizing us into Christ. It's spirit baptism.

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It's an invisible spiritual connection that we have to each other, to every other born again person, even the ones in heaven already, and to Jesus and to the

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Holy Spirit and to the Father, all connected and plugged in at one less than a nanosecond at the time of your justification.

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You hadn't had time to go get baptized in the water. And besides that, if you had to do that, what if you got saved on a desert with no water?

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What if you didn't have a church Christ on the corner? You gonna go to hell? I'm sure they have provision for that, right?

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Well, isn't it funny how you can change the rules when your doctrine's messed up? You just change the rules, kind of like the evolutionists do, right?

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You start bringing scientific information that blows away their belief, such as Dr.

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Ball finding dinosaur footprints on top of a human footprint, which they say can't possibly happen at the same time.

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Now they gotta go change. Well, that could happen because this and such happened. We changed our mind. We're gonna change our theory. Yeah, right.

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Well, when you have a lie, you have to change it all the time. That's a rabbit trail, but it's true. It's true of doctrine too. So baptized there means immersed, not water baptism, but it means as many as you as have been placed into Christ or submerged into Christ and him into you, you have put on Christ.

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That's what it's talking about, putting on Christ. So the method of salvation, faith and baptism into Christ by the

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Holy Spirit, it's part of the regeneration that the Holy Spirit does to you at the calling. Isn't that beautiful? It's all right there.

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It's pretty simple. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither bond nor free.

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There is neither male nor female with regard to how we get saved. For you are all one in Christ.

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So when that baptism takes place, when the Holy Spirit connects you to the

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Father, Son, the Holy Spirit, and to each other, we are connected as God's people, not as a human

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Jew, whatever skin God gave us, black, white, whatever. We're part of a new race now.

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We've been re -gened with God's genes and we're brothers and sisters. Color has nothing to do with it.

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Jew, Gentile has nothing to do with it. Male or female has nothing to do with that. We're all one in Christ because we've been connected to the

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Father, Son, the Holy Spirit at the moment of our justification. Now, what does works have to do with any of that?

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Nothing. The works can come later as a result of it, as an effect of it. So it results in one body.

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And the only reason we don't all worship together, of course, can in one gigantic church this morning, is because we're arguing over the effects, thinking they're causes of salvation and they're not.

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So everyone should be right here. Don't you think? I had to build a bigger church though.

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Okay. So the law is, here's a couple of final teachings this morning. We'll be out of time.

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A couple of other things we see here is that the law is weak and beggarly and some will never receive this knowledge.

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Now watch what this means in Galatians 4 .6. And because you are sons,

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God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your heart. That's the baptism it was referring to, the baptism of the

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Spirit. He has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your heart, crying,

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Abba, Father. Proof of salvation, His Spirit witnesses to our spirit at the moment we're saved and from then on the rest of our life.

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The only way you would ever doubt your salvation is if you had heard a lot of false doctrine in your life earlier before you got saved and it's still in that magnificent computer of ours.

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And we think of things we've heard that were false. It can make us think that. Another thing is when we sin,

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Satan can come and make you think, well, are you really saved? He can put that question mark there. But if you bathe yourself in the

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Word of God, you just immediately say, get behind me, Satan, because I'm not saved by what I just did or didn't do.

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I'm saved by the blood and it's still on me and you don't wanna be around me when that's on me, so leave in the name of Jesus.

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I prefer Jesus asking to leave because I'm not gonna tell him anything. All right, proof of salvation,

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His Spirit witnesses to our spirit. Number verse seven, wherefore thou art no more a servant but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ Jesus.

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Wow, that takes us to a whole new place at the moment of justification. Now we own everything in the universe.

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So we're no more a servant. The Old Testament people or people under other religions of the world see themselves as a servant to God.

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He's the King, we're the servant. And kingdom is taught, but Jesus plainly said,

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I don't treat you as a servant, I treat you as a child and a brother, depending on whether you're looking at the

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Father's viewpoint or Jesus's, not as a servant. Now you can serve together, we work in the family business, don't we, with God?

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It's His business, we work, but we're not like someone who's not in the family.

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That's interesting to think about, isn't it? So we don't, it's a little different. We still, we try to work harder than everybody else, but Jesus said with regard to this, we're all in the family.

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We're all in the family serving, and He does not treat us as a servant, but as a son and an heir of everything.

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Wow, that's something great. Verse nine says here in Galatians 4, but now after that you have known

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God or rather you are known of God. Don't you think that's an interesting thing the

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Holy Spirit put in there? Because if all you said was you've known God, you'd think that you got saved because you went out to seek

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Him and figure Him out and you figured it out and so you got saved. But He said, no, the truth is you're known by God.

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He knew you first. That's the only reason you know Him is because before the foundation of the world, He knew you as His own and He sent

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His Holy Spirit to call you and He woke you up and now you know Him. See, rather you're actually known of God.

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How do you then turn again to weak and beggarly elements whereto you desire again to be in bondage?

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What is that a reference to? The law. Now look, you're saved because you know

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God. Oh, wait a minute. Actually, because God knew you. That takes the works away right there because it goes right back to Romans 8, verses 28, 29, and 30 where it says who

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He foreknew, that's who He predestinated and that's who He called and that's who He saved, right?

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So it's not about what we did, it's about what He did. And so now we see that if you turn back to the law,

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God calls that like a weak and beggarly element compared to grace. Why do people wanna bring it back in the church again and again?

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And we came out of the fundamental Baptist. They said, well, we're not legalist because we believe in salvation by faith, but you gotta wear short hair.

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Women can't wear pants. You gotta do this. If you don't come to church all the time, you're a pagan.

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Tell me that's not law. You got all these rules that I don't find in my Bible, but if you don't keep them, you're not spiritual.

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That's legalism too. It's very much legalism. And listen, it kills. The letter kills.

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The letter killeth, but the spirit brings life. So anyway, another rabbit trail. But that's weak and beggarly compared to living by grace.

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You don't have to tell your kids a list of music they can and can't listen to. Just tell them, look, when you sit down in the car, ask the

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Holy Spirit, do you wanna listen to this with me? And if He says no, turn it off. That's living by grace.

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All right, so after grace, the law compared to it is weak and beggarly and enslaving, and it has no part with grace with regard to your salvation.

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I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labor in vain, Paul says to his own converts.

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He said, look, I left you the true gospel. Grace without works for salvation.

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I come back and now you've added works into your salvation. First of all, you're foolish. Second of all, you've been bewitched.

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And thirdly, I feel like I wasted all my time last time I was here. Because a false prophet came into your church and in three hours, totally took you away from the truth.

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I've wasted my time on you. Now, he says that, he doesn't really mean that, but he's rebuking them, isn't he?

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He doesn't really mean it. He loves them, he's gonna stay with them. I guarantee you, he's gonna straighten them out. That's what this whole letter is about.

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Symptoms of people who are under the law. Wow, well, look at verse 16. I am therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth.

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People that have already been sucked into this, when you do tell them the truth, they will bite your head off. They'll wanna argue with you, they will not like you.

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They will be your enemy because you're telling them the truth. Who's experienced that? That's why that 2

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Timothy passage that we've discussed earlier is so important. We don't argue with them, we instruct them. We just tell them the truth.

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If peradventure God might open their eyes and if he doesn't, they won't get it. So that's the symptom is they wanna count you as an enemy just because you believe in grace.

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It's a very unpopular truth, always has been. All right, so I think we're out of time there.

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Let's stop right there today and we'll get back into a little bit of this and eventually we'll be done with chapter eight and then you think this has been interesting, wait till you see chapter nine of Romans.

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We may get kicked off the air for that one. All of a sudden, we might have to find somebody besides Zoom, they may say,

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Matt, we're gonna turn you off, right? We'll see. All right, let's hope the

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Sunday school board doesn't own Zoom or shares in Zoom, right? All right, let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for your word.

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We ask you to place it deep within our hearts and minds, always remind us of things we already knew and keep us thinking about them so that we can be a help to others.

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Lord, use our testimony in the lives of other people in this week to come. Open doors for us to speak to our friends and neighbors who may have been under some false teachers and they secretly took their liberty away and they're not even aware of it.

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So help us, Lord, to work together with you in your work and may your Holy Spirit be their true teacher.

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Give us the words to say. We ask you to go with us in this time of fellowship. We're about to have a meal together.

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We ask you to bless it in Jesus' name. Now, before we sign off, you guys out there, we've got several of you who have families who have joined our church on the online church part.

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This coming Wednesday night at 8 p .m. Central, we'd like to meet with you on Zoom and fellowship together.

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And I would like all of you to be on there. And if you need instruction on how to get on Zoom and all that, we can let you know the technology if you need to know it.

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But we'd like you to be on there. We're gonna try to make it be where you can see our new folks, see their faces, see their families.

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Some of them may choose to give their testimonies and we can chat with them and have fellowship. We can't do the meal yet on Zoom.

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That's way off another 20 years in the future. Eventually we'll be able to do it. But so we're gonna do that for you.

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So remember that's 8 o 'clock p .m. Wednesday, that's Central Standard Time. And we'll be sending you via email a

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Zoom link. And all you have to do is click it on your laptop and you should be able to do it on the phone too, right?

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Click it, it'll open up and we'll be there. We wanna spend some time with you guys. All right, you are dismissed.