Assurance Of Salvation

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First of all, before we start, could someone give me a good definition of assurance? Assurance of salvation, how would you define it?
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What are we talking about here, so we're all in the same playing field? It's okay, anybody can answer, it's only being taped, it's fine.
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Daniel O 'Brien? Okay, and that you could also know that, personally know that, you could be assured of that in your own heart.
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Good, Bruce, do you want to add anything? Okay, good, so now we all know what we're talking about, that we could know for certain that we are saved beyond the shadow of a doubt and that we will, in fact, not have to pay for our own sins and we will be in heaven with God forever.
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Number one, I'll ask the question, you say true or false, and then tell me why true or why false, how's that?
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Assurance is not a very important or vital issue, that's probably what I should have said, it's not that big a deal.
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Why spend a whole Sunday school on it, right? False, why is it an important topic? Why is it really a current event?
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Why could I teach this every year at BBC and it would still be good for every one of us?
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That's kind of what I do every year, I'll teach on assurance in some way, shape or form. Why is it important?
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Yes? Okay, so you can personally know, so we can get rid of doubt, which
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Becky called a sin, good. Anybody else, Charlie? So if anything's in the
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Bible, we should know it, right? The last four weeks, Song of Solomon, it's in the Bible, we need to know it whether we think we do or whether we don't, good.
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Would you say there's an increase these days in a man -centered gospel, i .e.
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Dave Hunt's book or Norman Geisler's book about how God reacts to our work and then decides to save or not to save versus God as the one who's in charge, saving or not saving?
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I would say that would be true. I would say that our particular church, we would have a higher degree of those who struggle with assurance than at a church where the
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Bible's not really taught. That is to say, when the standard of the word is being taught in Sunday school and from the pulpit, here is
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God's standard, don't you sometimes feel, I can't live up to that standard? And if I can't live up to that standard, am
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I really a Christian? So you'll see, for instance, at Grace Community Church, I'm sure we're R .C.
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Sproul pastors, when the word of God is thundered forth, many say, well, how could
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I be a Christian because I can't live up to that? And so Bible -teaching churches have a propensity to have more lack of assurance, even though they probably have more people saved.
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Last week, by the way, when I said, I don't think half of our people at this church are saved, what
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I meant to say, what my mind was saying is, Grace Church, if there's only half the people regenerate there,
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I think we have a greater number of saved people at our church. So I wasn't saying we have a greater number of fewer people saved, but a greater number of greater people saved.
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I'm just kidding. I think we have more people saved in this church than half, but we do have people in this church who aren't saved.
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But when you hear the word of God proclaimed, like this morning from James 3, as I've studied the passage this week,
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I've thought to myself, I'm a teacher and I don't speak like I should all the time. Could I be called a
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Christian based on what I say? So assurance levels at Bible -teaching churches sometimes waver.
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If you're at a non -Bible -teaching church, hey, you've been baptized, you're in. Why struggle with any of the assurance?
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I think it's also important because if you have assurance, it would be good for you not to lose it. Thomas Watson said,
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Be careful you do not lose your assurance. And old Puritan Joseph Carl in 1653 waxed eloquently about assurance, and he said,
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The greatest thing that we can desire next to the glory of God is our own salvation.
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And the sweetest thing we can desire is the assurance of our salvation. It is hard to get things done when you don't know that you're going to heaven.
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Yes? It is very, very difficult. I like to sing with the songwriter in It Is Well With My Soul, My sin,
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O the bliss of this glorious thought, My sin, not the part but the whole,
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Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul. Assurance is good to study because we need to know there are doubts around here, and it will cause us to praise.
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Before I go to number two, any questions on number one? I can tell time ticks.
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When you first become a Bible teacher, you are so afraid to get up in front of people with God's word, you can barely get your spit.
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And five minutes seems like 500 minutes. And then after a while I still get nervous before I teach
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God's word, because it is in fact God's word. But then all of a sudden you realize I don't have enough time.
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There's too much to be said, there's too much to go over, and I don't have next week to teach, so we'll just get through as many as we can.
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Number two, people can have assurance of salvation and still go to hell.
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You can know for sure you're going to heaven, but you can end up in perdition. Yes? True. Don Whitney, who's been here, and we just asked to come back in 2008, the devil's diabolical strategy in general is to convince lost people that they are saved.
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And really there are four types of people. Those who think they're saved, but they aren't. Those who think they're saved...
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Let's see, why does this not read straight? Those who think they are saved, but aren't. Those we think are saved, but aren't.
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Those who are saved, but don't act like it. And those who are saved, and they act like it. How many people here have read
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Pilgrim's Progress? If you haven't read that book, you need not to pass go, not to collect $200.
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If you would go read that book, you'd be challenged, encouraged. It is such a great book. It used to be, until the
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Purpose Driven Life came out, the number two best -selling English book of all time. Can you imagine the Pilgrim's Progress replaced by that book?
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You need to read that book. Not that book, but that book, the Pilgrim's Progress. By the way, you know something about fads?
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They come and they go. And I have my fad books in the office, and there's Prayer of Jabez, and there's
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Wild at Heart, and there's Purpose Driven Life, and they come and they go, and there's just no weightiness. They're transitory.
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They just are flighty. But you get Pilgrim's Progress, and you read it and reread it, and it's just this allegory of the
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Christian faith. Bunyan would say that there is a porthole to heaven, a porthole to hell at the gates of heaven.
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You think you're going. Can you imagine that day? I'm going to heaven. I'm re -listening to the
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USS Indianapolis' sinking in World War II, the last Navy ship sunk in that war.
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And those men, 1 ,000 men on the ship, they were torpedoed with multiple torpedoes. 300 men immediately died, and then 700 got into the water, and about half of those men either died of the oil that they were breathing in from other injuries or the sharks.
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And there was a man going around giving people assurance of salvation and last rites, and there you are, and you think, you know, it's just worth it to die.
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I can't take it anymore. I know I'm going to go to heaven. I've been baptized as a kid. You take your life jacket off and swim into the school of sharks and just let them eat you alive, and you think you were in hell, but hell is yet to come.
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How deadly would that be? How horrible that is.
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We have all kinds of people around us telling people that they are for sure going to heaven when they're not.
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What is your name? Who gave you this name? Answer, my godfather and my grandmother in my baptism, wherein
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I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of Christ.
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My own church that I came from, a Lutheran church, in their booklet called Baptism Saves, we find this.
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Baptism establishes a new relationship with God. Through Christian baptism, we have our sins forgiven, become heirs of eternal life, and can remain his child forever, amazing grace, end quote.
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How many people here in New England or in the Midwest, where Lutheranism is big, realize that they have been baptized and they're going to heaven?
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I've told this story 20 times. I moved to Los Angeles. I'm totally unregenerate. I moved to L .A.
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to sin. I meet this lady who I actually met Kim through, and we would jog together and stuff, and I got to know her a little bit, and I'd go to church, you know,
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Christmas and Easter kind of thing, and she told me that day, she said, I said, you know, do you have a faith or something?
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Her name was Aria, which is strange. Aria is kind of this New Age deal. We had a pastor's wife in town about three years ago change her name to Chantilla.
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I can't even remember, some weird New Age thing. I just kept thinking of Chantilly Lace or something, was what
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I was thinking. She said, well, I worship
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Jesus. I thought, this is pretty good. She worshiped Jesus, too. She said, would you like to see a picture of him?
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And I thought she was going to show me a picture where you kind of see it in little boys' rooms where there's a boy at the helm of a ship, and Jesus is kind of standing behind the person with his arm on their shoulder or some kind of nice picture of Jesus, you know, the way
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Jesus really looked with blue eyes and long hair, straight nose. But there's a picture of a man standing there.
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She said, this is the Jesus I worship. And you know the whole story, but I said, who is that?
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That's not Jesus. And I knew as an unregenerate person, that can't be Jesus. Jesus is revealed in the
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Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I pulled out my old catechism questions from when I was a Lutheran, and I wish
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I could remember what I was taught, because in many cases it was good Bible doctrine and knowledge.
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False assurance is being promoted everywhere by sacramentalists. It's being promoted by legalists, where they say, if you do this, for sure you're going to go to heaven.
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It's being promoted by easy -believers. If I can make up that word. Here you shake the preacher's hand, you sign the card, you come up to the front, you are in, and don't let anybody tell you anything different.
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There's false assurance out there by experientialists. You speak in tongues, you must be a
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Christian. And then I hear these words. Not everyone that says to me,
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Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
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Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name cast out many devils?
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And in thy name done many wonderful works, and I will profess unto them, I never what? Knew you.
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So sad. Okay, questions so far. Number one and number two are done.
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Now we have number three, which is the added one, because I took it out by mistake. Number three, the most popular religion in New England calls assurance a sin.
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What do I mean by that? Why would I put that in? Okay, true, but why is it true?
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How much is enough? You never know. If you have to cooperate with God, how much is required?
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Good. Gregory the Great, the 7th century Pope, not only denied assurance was possible, but he said it was dangerous and not desirable.
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It was called the sin of presumption, that you would presume that God saved you to the very end.
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The sin of presumption. Assurance was dangerous. And by the way, how can I control all of you?
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If I'm the leader, I can control by many ways. I could control you by greed, your own greed.
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I could control you by fear. Somehow, if you don't do what I say, something's going to happen.
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But this sin of presumption is a mortal sin in the Roman Catholic Church.
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And when Luther was talking about justification by faith alone, the anathemas were hurled like a...
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I'm actually glad I've forgotten his name. Who's the baseball pitcher for Boston Red Sox?
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Kurt Schilling. Like a Schilling fastball comes the hurled anathemas of Trent that say things like this.
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If anyone says that after the reception of grace, the guilt is so remitted and the debt of eternal punishment so blotted out to every repentant sinner and that no debt of temporal punishment remains to be discharged either in this world or in purgatory, let him be what?
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Damned, sent to hell. Could we use this knowledge to help evangelize our
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Roman Catholic families and friends? Would this be some good springboard? They don't know that they can go to heaven.
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For sure, they're hoping. But what could we say? What would be a good way to evangelize some of our friends?
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Remember, Roman Catholics aren't our enemies. They are the mission field. Yes? Do you have peace with God?
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That is a great question. Okay, anybody else? Why don't we turn to Colossians Chapter 2 and let me remind you that it's easy to talk about what some religion teaches or says.
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By the way, they have not rescinded that theology I've just given you. But just let me remind you and kind of wash you afresh in the
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Word of God where we are forgiven for all our sins. The hymn writer may say it, but that doesn't make it true.
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But here in Colossians Chapter 2, in a book that talks about how Jesus is all you need, people come around and say you need
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Jesus plus this and Jesus plus that and Jesus is fine and everything else, but you need something more. Colossians 2 basically says here is the supremacy of Christ.
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You need no other. You need no other doctrine, Savior, Lord, or Master. And Colossians 2, as he is describing things that you don't need, he says something about our salvation that's wonderful in Colossians 2 .13
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that should strike forever any kind of thought in your mind that we have to pay for our own sins either temporarily here on earth or in purgatory, that we might have to use an indulgence or a sacrament.
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Here, Christ is the one. He is the Savior. And it says, And when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you see the next part there,
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He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all the sins we've committed up to that point.
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Here, the text is clear. All our transgressions. I wish I had a board here.
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I meant to put a board in. Made alive together with Him. These are the three words where we get that one word made together alive with, the three component words.
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Let me just tell them to you and see if you can know what they are from Greek to English. Soon. S -U -N.
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Made alive together with. The first word in the Greek is soon. We're going to put all these words together.
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Do you know what soon is? S -U -N. Soon and very soon is not the answer. Have you ever been to a synagogue?
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A synagogue. Something with. Synergy. Something with. So you've got soon there.
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The next word is where we get the word zoo. Now, don't take this too far.
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We're with a bunch of monkeys kind of thing. Zoo. I remember the first time I went to Berlin and we traveled into the zoot garden.
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The zoological garden. Zoo means what? Life. And then the last word is poema.
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Poea. It is a word that means what? To make or to do. That God has made us alive.
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He did that together with Him. Kind of an interesting word. If you don't remember that, that's fine.
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But He has quickened us together with Him. He has made us alive with Him.
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And He has freely forgiven us. My favorite word in all the Bible is probably charas.
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And charas means what? Grace. He has graced us. That's what the word here for forgiveness is.
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He has graced us. Forgiven us all our sins. Ephesians 1 says
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He's lavished salvation upon us. Now these sins could either be ignorant or high -handed.
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They could be original sins or actual. They could be past, present, and future. They could be thought, word, and deed.
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They could be mortal and venial. Even though we don't believe that. They could be sins of omission, sins of commission.
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They are all gone. So much so, look at verse 14. Having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us and which was hostile towards us.
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That's what the law was showing towards us. We are debtors. It's not our friend.
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It was hostile towards us. We have this idea that sin incurs a debt to God. That's a good thought.
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And we have something that is due God. And now He remits that.
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And now we have forgiveness. Having canceled, are blotted, are wiped out.
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If you have an eraser and you erase the board, that's the same kind of idea. And I think we have a great opportunity to tell people, just like Lewis said and Dr.
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White, to say, would you like to know how to have all your sins forgiven? Do you know that you can have all your sins forgiven?
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At your particular church, do they teach there that every sin is forgiven? And if you do what my grandmother has done in the past,
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I think you will do yourself a disservice. And I'll never forget sitting there, and I was a new Christian, and she would say to me,
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Mormons believe in Jesus too, Mike, and so you just need to calm yourself down. Well, she was right on one thing.
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When I was a new Christian, I needed to calm myself down. Running around, you know. And I probably should have run around like that more.
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Looking at everyone now, instead of saying, here's a nurse, here's a sales recruiter, here's a truck driver.
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I was looking at every one of them thinking they have a soul that's going to live forever, and it's either going to go to heaven or hell based on their belief or rejection of Christ.
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So I was running around like a wild man. I'd get my boss in the car.
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I was a sales rep, and he would sit with me, and I'd think, all right, we're done talking about accounts, and it's time for the cassette deck to go in, and, you know, the lake of fire, part six, and I would put this thing in.
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Years ago, I was talking about honoring our bosses or something at work, and I called my old boss, and I said,
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I just said something nice about you from the pulpit, and I thought I would just call you and say you were the best boss I've ever had, and I want to thank you for that.
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And when my father was dying, you would send me to Omaha to train somebody, and then I'd be there for a day, and then you'd say, ah, just stay with your father.
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So he'd pay for my flight, basically, to get me there. I said, you were the best boss I ever had. We'd talk a little bit, and then he said, well, so what are you doing?
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I said, well, I'm a pastor now. He said, you've probably calmed down a little bit from when you originally were saved, yes? I said, yes, but where do you stand with God?
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Actually, he attended church for a while and made a profession, but I don't think it went beyond that.
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You can have a Jesus that doesn't save all the way, yes? The Catholic Jesus and the
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Mormon Jesus and the Jesus of the Bible are three separate Jesuses, and don't let the vernacular, the verbiage of when someone says,
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I believe in Jesus, and you know their lifestyle does not reflect that of a Christian who wants to learn and to grow, then probably the best thing you can do is judge not, lest you be judged.
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No, the best thing you could do is to say, it is incumbent upon me, yes,
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I don't want to self -righteously judge, but I know my own life was a wreck, and it's still a wreck apart from the grace of God.
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This person needs the gospel, and then we can preach the real Jesus, the Jesus that when he dies at Calvary, nothing needs to be added to that death.
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None of the seven sacraments, no church attendance, no evangelical Protestant sacraments.
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It's a good opportunity to preach the gospel to these folks who have no idea. All right, number, what are we at now?
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Number four in my book, God did not have to tell us that we could have, wait, you can know for sure if you're saved.
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Have we already talked about this? You can know for sure. If you wanted to tell me that you could know for sure, and you wanted to prove to me from the
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Bible that I can know for sure, what book would you turn to that has the word you can know for sure all the time?
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So much so that it has the word know, know, know, know, K -N -O -W, know, all the time.
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I don't even have to exegete it. I don't even have to preach it. It's just there that you can know so many times is in the
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Scripture. You can know that you can be saved. 1 John. That's right. Let's just turn there.
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You could go to John, the book of John, or you could go to 1 John. And let me just remind you that there's a book in the
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Bible that is good for you. If you struggle with your assurance, then
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I would send you to 1 John because it's an excellent book to make sure that you can know.
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It says over and over that you can know for sure you're saved beyond a reasonable doubt and that you can know your sins are forgiven and that you can know that when you die, you'll stand before God.
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What a doctrine is this? I mean, without trying to go back and relive my whole mother's death and everything else last year, but when the doctors finally told us, it's time to disconnect everything because she's just going to suffer more.
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And I said, well, wait a second. My mom told me just about two hours ago, laying there maybe in a morphine haze, she said, don't turn everything off yet.
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Just don't turn everything off yet. And I'm thinking now the doctors are telling me turn it all off. And I'm thinking
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I want to honor my mother and then the very last thing I do is going to be a dishonor to her, even though it might be the right thing to do.
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And I just thought, what am I going to do? The doctors, the nurses, they're not trying to act like we're taking their
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ICU room away from some other patient. And they were very kind, but it's time to just shut everything down.
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My mom just got done telling me, don't turn it off.
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And so I talked to the doctor for a long time, and then I thought, well, I'm just going to have to talk to my mother. And so when I talked to her, I explained to her, here's what's going on.
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Of course, her eyes closed. Again, a lot of morphine, so who knows what was actually said and done. But I said, Mother, the doctors think this is the time now, and we can't prolong your life anymore.
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And then I said, well, and why should we even do that? You're not going to get up again. It's either you're going to die with less pain or more pain.
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And I said, I'm more convinced now of the Scripture's authority and the promises in the Bible than I ever have been before.
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I said, to live is Christ and to die is, and I was up really close, gain.
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And then I said, Mom, absent from the body, present with the Lord. And so I was up really close, and I was just trying to preach to her, and I said,
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Mom, it's okay. It's not one of those things where we have to prolong your life to the very end, hoping somehow the merciful
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God of the universe might save you and make you born again at the last moment so you could spend an eternity in heaven praising
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Him because your lifestyle never showed that you were saved, but rather, as Wesley would say,
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Christians die well. I know you're going to heaven. We can know that we can know that we can know, and God's promises are for sure.
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And I said, do you have any question about where you're going to go when you die? She said, no.
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I said, do you still believe in the same God who you used to teach at Omaha Bible Church?
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Yes. And I said, soon you'll be out of all this pain, and you'll see the triune
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God with all His glory. And then my mom just kind of had her head back, and she moved just a hair, and then she said, one of the last words
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I remember her ever saying, she said, awesome. I said,
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I need to tell the doctors we can shut everything off. Okay. So boy, I was glad for that, because how do you go against your mother at the last moment?
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What if I didn't know that? What if I couldn't know? How painful and horrible would that be?
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You just kind of hope against hope, yet John says over and over and over, I mean, what a good God we have to give us this revelation.
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1 John 2, 3, By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep
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His commandments. Contra, verse 4, the one who says, I've come to know
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Him, does not keep His commandments as a liar, and the truth is not in Him. But whoever keeps
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His word, verse 5, in Him, the love of God has been truly perfected. By this we know that we are in Him.
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1 John 3, verse 14, you see the same terminology. Might be a good study at home sometime, is to look up the word know in 1
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John. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. Verse 16, we know love by this.
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Verse 19, we know that by this we are of the truth. Verse 13 of chapter 4, by this we know that we abide in Him.
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1 John 5, 13, These things I have written to you, who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may what?
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Know. Would anybody here like to differ with me that you can't know? I mean, it's just so patently obvious, one verse after another after another.
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You can know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are a Christian. You say, well, sometimes I struggle. I know, we'll get to that in a second.
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Maybe longer than a second. Okay, number 5. Something related that I thought quite interesting the first time
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I heard it. God did not have to tell us that we could have assurance, true or false. Did He have to tell us?
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Isn't it the goodness and the mercy of God that He would tell us? We could be saved for sure.
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We could be sealed by the Spirit of God, given the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as an Erebon, as a seal of possession, and ownership, and security.
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And God, in His perspective, could say, I've sealed Mike Abendroth until the day of redemption. He will be glorified.
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And the whole time I'm thinking, I don't know that I'm really saved. I think I'm different, but how different am I? Yet God in His promise has told us that.
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Do you see in 1 John 2 .25? The promise of eternal life. And this is the promise which
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He emphatically Himself made to us. Eternal life.
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When you see a promise in the Bible, I hope it causes you to rejoice, because God didn't have to give us any promises.
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He could have only had triune promises, and He didn't have to tell us any of His promises, yet He did. And I thank
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God for that. All right, we better hurry up. Number six. Assurance stems from other doctrines.
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True. What would be some other doctrines that if you were struggling with assurance, might be good to study these other doctrines so you could have better assurance, as everything's kind of linked.
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Sovereignty of God, good. The Christians all think about the sovereignty of God when they want to talk about assurance.
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That's good. Yes, Bruce? Propitiation. Propitiation, which you would describe as...
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Okay. That sounds like a pretty cruel God, though, as far as I'm concerned. There's a debate these days, by the way, that certainly
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God would not be some kind of wrathful ogre to punish His own Son. How could
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He do that? Which is very sad. In love and in wrath,
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He punished His Son. Okay, are there other doctrines? Good, Charlie? Immutability, that God doesn't change.
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We would call that the Daisy Theology. He loves me, He loves me not. He loves me, He loves me not, right?
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God doesn't change. The slogan that was always in my mind was, if ever He loved me, He'll love me forever.
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Because God does not change. Good. What else, Dave? Excellent.
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If you did not hear that, I will say it less eloquently. By the way, Dave reminds me always of...
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Was it E .F. Hutton commercial? When E .F. Hutton talks, people do what? They listen.
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When Pastor Jeffrey says something, it might be a good idea to listen. For those of us that sin,
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I know it's a small group, but we'll just talk about just us between us girls, sin in our lives decreases our level of assurance.
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And in our lives, on the scale of assurance, really secure, not very secure, don't feel saved at all.
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As we sin, we're going to slide up and down this continuum. And as Dave said, when you try to grab assurance, initially it's not a bad thing.
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I don't feel like I'm going to go to heaven. I know all these things. I've been serving. I know who Jesus is. And I've trusted my eternal soul to Him, but I'm just not sure.
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So what do they do? They'll run and try to grab assurance with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
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They're after assurance, and they've got to have it. That is the goal. That is the touchdown for them.
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I must have my assurance. And that is very misleading, because what you need to do is put that energy not into assurance -seeking, but into the person and the work of God, specifically manifest in Christ, life, death, and resurrection.
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When I struggle with my assurance, and I do, not often, but when I do, there's one book of the
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Bible that's for me, and I go there every single time. Anybody have an idea what that book is?
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It's the book of Galatians. Dave knows me. Shepherds are supposed to know their sheep, and Dave even knows his co -shepherd.
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I go to the book of Galatians because Galatians would teach me that God rescues us according to His will by Christ's work of grace, plus nothing else.
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Not my obedience, not my proper preaching, not my anything. It is trusting
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Christ alone. Getting back to what Dave said, if you struggle with assurance, stop trying to get it.
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Start trying to look at who Christ is, and I think you'll be helped. Spurgeon used to say it this way, if the dove of assurance that used to sit on your shoulder flies away, don't try to catch the dove.
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Instead, focus upon Christ Jesus and the dove of assurance will then float right back down to your shoulder and sit.
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When assurance is elusive, focus on Christ, His person, His work. We could talk about what
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Bruce said, propitiation, redemption, reconciliation, justification, all kinds of the things of what
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Jesus did, and you will be assured that God's grace is greater than your sin if you're a Christian.
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Other comments about that? Along the lines of what
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Charlie said about God doesn't change, Thomas Watson, the great Puritan, said, When God calls a sinner,
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He does not repent of it. God does not, as many friends on earth do, love one day and hate another, or as princes, who make their subjects favorites and afterwards throw them into prison.
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Reminds me of Joseph. This is the blessedness of a saint. His conditions admit of no altercation.
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God's call is founded upon His decree, and His decree is immutable. Acts of grace cannot be reversed.
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God blots out His people's sins, but not their names. If I were to take you someplace, let me take you to Romans chapter 8 for a minute, and I'd like you to find from me, see who can do it the most quickly, show me where sanctification is in the golden chain of redemption.
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Romans chapter 8. We know early on, verse 1, is about those who aren't condemned.
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The antonym of justification, the word that's opposite of justification, is condemnation. And then we see in verse 28,
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God's great sovereign orchestration for things in life, for His people.
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And then we have this great chain of redemption that cannot be broken. And you tell me which word deals with your sanctification.
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For whom He foreknew, really forelove is the idea, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren.
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And these whom He predestined, He also called. So we've got foreknown, predestined, called.
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These whom He also called, He also, number four, justified. And these whom He also justified, He also sanctified.
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Well, wait a second. That's not in the Bible. He also did what after justification? Glorified. Why is there no sanctification discussion here?
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Because what? It's a done deal. When God foreloves, carves out and predestines, effectually calls by the
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Spirit of God, declares not guilty in His tribune, glorification is a done deal.
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It is going to happen. If God has foreknown you, if He has predestined you, if He has called you, if He has justified you, guess what will happen for sure?
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And we don't have to talk about your level of sanctification, how many spiritual gifts you have, how many talents you've been given or not given.
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You will be what? Conformed to His image all the way and glorified. Certainly, He tells us elsewhere, does not
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Paul, that we should work out our sanctification or salvation with fear and trembling? Sanctification is important.
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But here from the divine counsel, God doesn't need to see our sanctification because it is a done deal.
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And when He begins the work, He does what? He does what I do. I get half the grass cut, the mower breaks, and I just leave it till I can fix it the next week.
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Yes? No. He finishes His work and I'm very thankful for that.
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Well, there's so many more questions. What are we going to do? Number six.
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Well, here's one that we hear often. Other people can't take us from God's hand.
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But question number six, you can take yourself from God's hand. Remember John 10, 29?
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We were going to look it up, all these verses, but I'll just read them now. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of my
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Father's hand. I and the Father are one. You can't be snatched out of God's hand. Nobody can grab you and take you out, but you can kind of jump.
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You can kind of cannonball off. You're the one that can do it. Now, they're just playing around with things, and they're basically saying, someplace in my mind has to be a theology where people who used to follow
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Christ visually and who now don't, where do
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I put them? We'll get to that in a second as well. But here, the passage has nothing to do with who can jump out of God's hand.
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Here it says just earlier, God gives them eternal life. They shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.
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If I can't convince someone of those verses in and of themselves, what I usually do is I ask them this question.
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Are you a created being? I can't be snatched out of God's hand, but I can personally sin myself out of God's hand.
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By the way, if you could, you already would have done so, and so would have I. If you could lose your salvation, you would have lost it a long, long time ago.
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But since you can't lose your salvation, and since nobody can snatch you out of your hand, you mean you can jump off? And I usually ask this question.
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Who created you? Because if you're created, Romans chapter 8 says what? Well, it's interesting, we can't go through the verses now because of time's sake, but it does say, regarding the love of God, for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other what?
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Created thing, and you've just admitted that you were, shall be able to divorce us, or separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
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Lord. If God saves you, how can you undo a work of God?
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I tried to say that last week. Well, that gives us to the next question, number seven.
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Suicide yields in a loss of salvation. Boy, this could take us all day. That might be a good series in Sunday school.
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The questions of the faith. Where did evil come from? What about suicide?
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How can man be responsible, and God sovereign? Well, what about this? Suicide yields in a loss of salvation.
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Well, if you want to answer a question biblically, the best thing to do is, go with what you know first, and start putting that together.
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So, we start developing our theology, and we say, we can't come to this question in isolation. What do
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I already know? Well, let's start here. It would be a sin to kill yourself.
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Not that I think I'm under the Mosaic Law of Exodus 20, or Deuteronomy 5, but the negative prohibition is there.
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Thou shall not what? Whether that's a baby in the womb, whether that is your grandmother, whether that is yourself, thou shall not kill.
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God doesn't like killing other people for one big reason, besides He said it, but He said it for what reason?
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That men and women are made in what? His image. That's why in Genesis chapter 9, when there's somebody who wants to kill somebody made in God's image, yes, it's a crime against that person, but it's a sin against God.
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So, this person is sinning against God by killing themselves. Do they go straight to hell? There's no time to repent of it.
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I grew up in the religion that said, make sure all your sins are forgiven before you go to bed, because if you forgot one, you could be in big trouble.
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Instead of counting the sheep, or counting and looking at the one shepherd, we had to count all our own sins, and what did
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I do? Boy, I would have been in a heap of trouble back then, because I just thought about sin as something that I did.
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I didn't think about sin as stuff that I was supposed to do, but didn't, and I didn't think about transgressions, and iniquity, sins of omission, all these other things.
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I just thought, well, you know, did I obey my parents today, and that kind of thing.
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What about suicide? Now, I'll finally stop it, and allow an answer. Any questions, and why?
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Why does suicide condemn someone, or not condemn someone?
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Yes, Steve? Okay, at Calvary, if that person's, we're talking about that person's really saved, right?
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There are unbelievers who commit suicide, but we're talking about someone who's saved. If, in fact, they were saved, and God had regenerated them, made them born again, was that sin covered by Christ's death, when
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Jesus paid for all our sins, past, present, and future, when the triune God of the universe said, I declare them righteous, based on the work of my
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Son, I now look at that person, through the lens of Christ Jesus' perfection, because they have no sins to bear anymore,
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Jesus bared them, and they also are perfect, because I look at them like they lived Christ's perfect life.
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So, since God knows that, how could, in fact, God make them pay for that sin? Jesus paid for all the other ones, but you have to pay for that one.
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Okay, good. I like it. Yes, Peggy?
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Well, if you can't lose your salvation if you sin, then why don't we just all sin? You know, God is glorified when
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He bestows His grace. So, if we sin, He's going to have to bestow His grace a lot more. Just to kind of work out, well,
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I like to sin, God likes to bestow His grace. Romans chapter 6,
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King James says, God forbid, the Greek says, may it never ever be. We don't want to do that.
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Now, if I walk through justification by faith alone, I think I could convince you. Sadly, we don't have enough time to do that.
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I can only find one man in the Bible that I know killed himself and who I know is in heaven. Positively, absolutely in heaven.
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And you say, well, it wasn't like a knife to the throat or he didn't do carbon monoxide in the garage, but he knew what he was doing and it cost him his life and his name was
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Samson. Did Samson have time to repent of his sin of suicide? Well, it wasn't a suicide until he was actually dead, right?
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It was attempted suicide. He might be forgiven for those transgressions. How do we know
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Samson's in heaven? Hebrews chapter 11, it says he's there. He says he's there.
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Here's the real issue with suicide. Obviously, we should not do it. But if a Christian for 35 years, let's just use
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Charles Feinberg who did not commit suicide, but just for sake of illustration, he was a Jewish rabbi,
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God saves him. He's a seminary professor. He is the man most influential theologically to John MacArthur.
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He has two sons, one who's just now with the Lord and another one's still alive, the Feinbergs. And he became, towards the end of his life, he got
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Alzheimer's and he could not remember he was a Christian. He reverted back to Orthodox Judaism and the only vestige of knowledge he had about seminary life was that every week he would call the nurses together for a staff meeting.
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As he would call seminary professors together, he would now call the nurses together for a staff meeting. We're not talking about somebody who was in a big trouble and he cried out to God and then went on living his own life after he was out of the foxhole.
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We're talking about a man who for 30 or 40 years with his right mind teaches that there's salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, through Christ alone, for the glory of God alone, through the
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Bible alone and he teaches that and he pours his life into that. Certainly none of that saves him but as the evidence of his salvation, he pours his life into the
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Christian cause, turns his back on Judaism, his parents kick him out of their family and he raises his new family to worship
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Jesus Christ. And then he begins to lose his mind and he did not but let's say he committed suicide.
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Would you think Charles Feinberg was going to heaven or not? And the issue is not what he did in his life or did in his death.
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The issue is if God calls you, his calling is what? Irrevocable is what his calling is.
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So suicide cannot yield a loss of salvation because we do not believe as the sacramentalists do that you have to confess your sins after you commit them in order to get to heaven.
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It is good to after committing sins confess them to God so you will be restored to a parental relationship but you are always restored to God in terms of eternal life.
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Well, it's time, time's up. I'm always thinking why is the adult Sunday school so late and here
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I am. Number nine, all people struggle with assurance of salvation.
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Yes, if you sin, you will struggle. Spurgeon struggled, Lloyd -Jones struggled and I'm not trying to say
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I'm next to these guys at all. I struggle. Everybody struggles with assurance.
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Number ten, you are to give assurance to other Christians. You've come up to the front and I want you to know that don't let anybody ever tell you that you're not a
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Christian. We don't know. We can say if you really have trusted Christ you will be saved to the end but we don't somehow say we look at the heart and we know.
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Matter of fact, the parable of the soil says that some people receive the word with what? Joy! I'm glad to hear the word and later they turn their back on it.
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We are not to give assurance of salvation. If you come into my study and say, Mike, I don't know if I'm a Christian the way
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I've been acting. How could I call myself a Christian? You know what I'll say to you? How could you call yourself a
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Christian? And we'll work through it and maybe eventually I'll say, you know, let's deal with the sin in your life and then now let's remember back how
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God has changed you. You're different. You want to serve in a different way. Your life is different. Your actions are different.
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Your speech is different. Number 11, there are both objective and subjective aspects of assurance.
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The answer is true. And what do I mean by that? Objective, Jesus died in my place.
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Subjective, the Bible says Christians confess their sins. I confess my sins. The Bible says that Christians confess
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Jesus in front of others. I confess Jesus. The Bible says that Christians don't love the world. I don't love the world when
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I do. I'm sad about it and I repent. The Bible says Christians love their brothers and sisters. I wish
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I could do better, but I do. And so you say, here's what the Bible teaches Christians do and to some degree I do it because before I was saved
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I didn't do that at all. So that's what I mean by subjective assurance. Also Romans chapter 8 where the
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Spirit does what to your spirit? Testifies or bears witness in the context of suffering for Christ's sake that in fact you are a
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Christian. I think our assurance levels would go way up if we were persecuted in this country. First of all, we'd get rid of a lot of the people who are only here because they're forced to.
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They get some benefit or some kind of bad reason. But if we were persecuted, can you imagine you walk into the door and you've got to give your social security number to the
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IRS guy when you walk in because you're going to get taxed more. The elders met with the deacons last
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Thursday and we were trying to figure out what do we do with all the people here? A year ago last week we had 169 people here.
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Last week we had 239. We can't fit all the people. What are we going to do? Well, that would sure decrease attendance, wouldn't it?
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If you have to pay to be a Christian. Last story, I got a call a few years ago.
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Pastor, would you please get on the radio and tell us about why it's so bad for Christians to play soccer on Sunday.
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All these soccer teams are on Sunday and we need to kind of unite. There's strength in numbers and we need to tell these cities and towns in West Boylston and Sterling and Lancaster no
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Sunday soccer. And there was a pastor down the street. He said, yeah, that's bad.
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We shouldn't do it. And I just said this. When does Christianity ever cost our kids anything?
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One of the reasons we have a lot of unregenerate kids running around is because they've never had to make a stand for Christ. It costs them nothing.
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I can't play soccer on Sunday because every game is at 11 o 'clock. It costs you something to be a
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Christian. If you want to play a game once in a while on Sunday, I'm not going to chase you. Other elders will, but I'm not.
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Christianity costs. And when it's costing, Romans 8, the Spirit of God comes and bears witness to your spirit that you're
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His child. It's worth it. He loves you. Nothing can separate you from the love of God found in Christ Jesus.
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If ever He's loved you, He's loved you forever and that you are a child of God. Well, many questions to be answered about assurance.
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If you would like the most help I could give you on assurance, would you please read the Book of Romans and you will find out that it is
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God's salvation to be given and therefore it is not your salvation to be lost.
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And that is the promise from God. If you believe you can lose your salvation, you're certainly welcome to attend the church, but may
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I just throw this little hand grenade into your theology. You have a man -centered theology if you think you can lose your salvation.
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Or, if I was nicer, I could say, your theology may be God -centered, but on this particular view, more man -centered because you believe you can undo what the triune
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God of the universe has done. And I don't think you can do that. And if you've ever done it, Hebrews 6 says it is impossible ever to get it back.
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So, let's pray. Father, we would ask today that you would seal salvation to our hearts and minds if we in fact are saved.
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What a wonderful work of the Spirit that is. And Lord, for those who aren't saved here, we would ask that you would not give them any rest until they find their rest in thee.
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And Lord, for those of us who struggle with assurance, and some maybe even today, how could I call myself a
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Christian? Lord, would your Spirit in a wonderful way minister to them, helping them to be convicted of sin, helping them to forsake their sin, and finding mercy in you and in your word, and that you would give them that assurance that they might know that they have eternal life.