Questions & Answers

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When it looked like Mike was going to collapse this morning, we decided that perhaps we should send him home and that Dave and I would take
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Q &A tonight. We thought about letting us have a session of Stump the
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Elders, but we chickened out and decided that we would write the questions out ahead of time.
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So, I basically have one question that I'm going to discuss, and of course, as we always do on Sunday night, feel free to raise your hand and ask questions and so forth and so on.
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This morning, Dr. Bach made the comment, very well taken, that when
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Moses wrote Genesis, he did not have a refutation of evolution in mind, evolution that never even occurred to anybody.
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It is significant, I think, that throughout the world, in all major religions, as well as the
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Christian faith, they all assume that there is some kind of a creator. They come up with some pretty wild ideas about who this creator might be and how the steps were that led to the creation of the universe, but none of them assume that out of nothing, there was something, and it just sort of occurred.
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And so, what I want to look at this evening, the question is, can Genesis be reconciled with theistic evolution?
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Now, there are a number of explanations for creation, because we do have to answer the question, we're here, how did we get here?
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An even more fundamental question is, why is there anything, as opposed to nothing?
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It would be much more reasonable, almost, to assume that nothing had ever been created, but since we're obviously here, there has to be some explanation for how we got to be here.
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And beyond just the physical universe, when you get into the biological universe, not only is there life, but there is an almost endless variety of life, in the sea and in the air and on land, and of course, at the pinnacle of all of that, stands mankind.
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And, the Bible tells us that we are created, specifically created, in the image and likeness of God, as opposed to all of the other animal life on this world, which is not so created.
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But the question does come, and it's natural of scientists to want to ask, where did we come from?
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And so, first of all, starting with Charles Darwin, he proposed an idea called natural selection of how you might get from a very simple one -celled organism to the extremely complex organism that the human being is.
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And lots of people jumped on that for all sorts of reasons. Most of what
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I'm going to say tonight is taken from a little book that I will recommend to you, called Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Bayhe, and if you are really interested in this, or in the whole idea of what is called the design theory, the conscious design of creation,
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I would recommend that book to you. It is easy to read, it is a scientific book, there are portions of it that you can skip over if you don't want to go through the math, but the average layman, it was written for the poor layman, and the average layman can read it.
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It is significant, I think, in that he, by his own admission,
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Mr. Bayhe, is not an Evangelical Christian, and so he goes to some length to point this out.
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But his basic premise is that if you look at the human body, that there has to be a designer, that it is not possible for the human body to evolve step by step.
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Now, we reject atheistic evolution, it's completely ruled out, as an explanation for why we're here, because it is atheistic, it does not involve
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God, and since, as Evangelical Christians, we are committed to God, we are committed to his word, we are committed to the inerrancy of the word, we cannot very well accept atheistic evolution as the explanation for how we got here.
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And so we just reject that out of hand, however, a number of decades ago, the idea came up because they were trying to reconcile scientific thought with theology, and someone came up with,
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Asa Gray was one of them, there was two men, and I can't think of a second name, but a man named Asa Gray came up with this idea of theistic evolution, and that basically says that there is a
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God who created the matter that everything started from, he created the sort of wound up the evolutionary clock, and just watches it run, and sort of nudges it from time to time to make it go in the direction that he wants it to go, and he did plan where it's going, but basically he allows natural selection to work, and so that's what we want to look at, can, is that a viable explanation, not necessarily is it the correct one, but is it a viable one that we could actually adopt in good conscience as Christians, and we've got to answer some questions.
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First of all, as I already brought up, the issue of first cause, even if we say that, okay, everything developed from lower forms to higher forms, where did the lower forms come from?
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Even if we accept that the universe started with a big bang, what lit the fuse, you know, and made it go bang?
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And people come up with some really wild ideas for this, some people postulate a steady state universe in which everything has just always existed, and they just duck the question of where it might have started from.
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Stephen Hawking is arguably one of the most learned men on the face of the earth today, alive today, and he has proposed a universe which stays in steady state, and you can actually work out mathematics to make that work, but the thing about mathematics is you can prove things mathematically that you cannot actually create physically.
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Sometimes you run into this in the real world where somebody, a mathematician will design something except it can't be built, because you can't physically do in the real world what the math can do, so just because you can come up with math for something doesn't necessarily mean it's a good way to go.
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Another question that we've got to answer is how did life emerge from inanimate matter? Now, wherever the inanimate matter came from, how did life emerge out of that?
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And then, of course, how does one account for starting off from basic animate matter and coming up to human beings, which are set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom by the fact that they have a
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God consciousness. They are also self -conscious. You know, we look in the mirror and we say, you know,
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I am a man or I am a woman. Dogs, believe it or not, don't do that. The dog does not look in the mirror and say,
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I'm a dog. And so, theistic evolution, as I said, does postulate
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God, but how did we get to this step -by -step process, and is it even a reasonable explanation?
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We'll look at that for just a few minutes here. First of all, to the evolutionists, time is the answer to all of their issues.
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Billions and billions of years, you've heard that phrase, are sufficient to do anything that you need to do.
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And time and chance, collisions of atoms and billions of years and enough time and anything comes out of it.
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But would it? Would it? Well, first of all, what you're doing here, what's going on here, is an attempt to reconcile biblical truth, what we see in the
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Bible, with what is perceived to be scientific fact. You ask the average man in the street if he has any knowledge at all about science, and he will probably tell you that evolution is the accepted scientific theory for how we all got here.
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You know, you would certainly get that idea reading the popular press, even the popular scientific press, you would get that idea.
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And yet, that is a long way from being true. There are all kinds of competing theories of evolution.
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There is no the theory of evolution, if you will. There's a whole bunch of competing ideas running out there, and they change practically by the week.
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Because there's some serious problems with evolution as a philosophy in what it does.
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First of all, if evolution, if we are the product of the chance of time and chance, chance collision of atoms and a long time, there's no reason for our existence.
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There's no purpose to our existence. It leads to despair, if you think about it very long.
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And most people avoid this by just not thinking about it. Another problem is that man under these circumstances is going to operate as an end in himself.
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He didn't come from anywhere, he's not going anywhere, and again, he has no purpose, no ultimate meaning.
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But while you're here, try to have a good life, you know, that sort of thing. Man becomes his own lawgiver, and there is no ultimate accountability.
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So under those circumstances, you can do anything. And the only basis for ethics becomes pragmatism, which is the statement of the greatest good for the greatest number.
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But right away, you run into a problem, who's going to say what good is? Who's going to define what that is?
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And so you've got philosophical problems with evolution. And these apply both to atheistic and theistic evolution.
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But then when you get into theistic evolution, you run into more problems of its own.
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First of all, you are postulating the truthfulness of evolution itself. You are postulating that natural selection is in fact the mechanism by which, by how we got to where we are.
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And even though natural selection certainly does take place within species, we can demonstrate that.
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We can see that happening. And if you will, within narrow limits, species do indeed evolve.
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They change over, if you, divine evolution is changing over time. They do change over time, adapting to conditions and what have you.
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But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about fundamental changes in species, how it works.
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And the problem with postulating the truthfulness of evolution, one of my physics professors in college, who later became a good friend, was also a very strong believer.
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He used to love to quote Mark Twain to us in saying that, too much of what we know ain't so.
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And you run into that all the time, particularly in the world of science. And here's an interesting quote from a man named Klaus Dose, who is a researcher in this area.
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He said, quote, more than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on earth, rather than to its solution.
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At present, all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.
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At least the man is intellectually honest. Now along comes the idea of a designer.
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And this is an idea that is coming to the forefront very rapidly now. You see more and more about it and it's entering mainstream science.
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Men like Behe or its proponent. The idea being this, stated basically, is that you have in the body, in the human body, a large number of what are called irreducibly complex systems.
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These systems could not possibly have evolved. That is, there is no way to come up with one step by step by step by making small steps to a previous model and improving it.
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You can't do it. So what's an irreducibly complex system? Well, you're full of them.
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But just two that I'll mention very briefly. One is the eye. See, what has happened over the years and how we stand different from Darwin?
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Darwin saw on a very, very high level, that there he had no idea what was actually going on inside the organisms he was studying.
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He did not have the tools necessary to get down inside to the molecular level.
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But now we have molecular biology. And molecular biologists, of which
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Mr. Behe is one, they actually understand now step by step what actually goes on in the body.
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They know what's actually happening in a cell. A cell is not a black box to them anymore.
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You all have heard the phrase black box. It's what it says. It's a black box.
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And something goes in and something else comes out, but we have no idea what's happening in the box. That's what a black box is.
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Well, the molecular biologists have pretty well plumbed the black boxes of the human body now so that they do know what's going on.
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At the molecular level, at the cellular level, they can describe step by step what happens.
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What happens when light strikes the retina of your eye, it strikes one of the little photo cones, how does that actually generate a signal that stimulates the brain so that taken together, you actually see, you see an image.
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Well, they can explain to you how that happens. And even a very limited explanation of it takes several pages.
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It takes several times reading over it before you begin to get a hang of how this is working. It involves minute chemical reactions.
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It involves the cells changing shape, physically changing shape. And it's a marvelous thing.
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Well, Mr. Behi and I share something. I'll confess to you.
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We both have a love of Warner Brothers cartoons and in particular Foghorn Leghorn.
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And if any of you are familiar with Foghorn, you know, there's always a little chicken hawk that's trying to capture him.
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And he comes up with these huge machines that involve usually bowling balls and cannons and sticks of dynamite and telephone poles falling over and all of this trying to capture the rooster.
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And that's a perfect example of a irreducibly complex system. It's complex, number one, because it has all of these inner working parts.
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But if you take any one of the parts away, it won't work anymore. Yeah, another smaller example of an irreducible, irreducibly complex system is a mousetrap.
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You're all familiar with how a mousetrap works? If you take any one of the pieces off the mousetrap, it will no longer work.
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It needs every piece there in the shape that it's in to work.
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Otherwise, you're not going to catch any mice. And the eye is an irreducibly complex system.
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Everything in the eye must be there or it won't work. So what this means is there is no way to go step by step from a little, from a simple system up to this complex system.
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Because until you get to the complex system, you don't have an eye yet. And you have no way to see until you get there.
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You cannot step by step work your way up to an eye.
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Another example is something as simple and basic as blood clotting.
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Except blood clotting is not simple and it's not basic. When you cut yourself, the reason you don't bleed to death is that your blood clots.
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And it does so very quickly. But if you look at the mechanism that causes this to happen, there are a whole series of enzymes that have to kick in at precisely the right time and precisely the right amounts to make blood clotting work.
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However, you can't let them sit in your body unused because they would clot everything.
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So what has to happen is an elaborate scheme of several dozens of steps.
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You cut yourself. The fact that you have now exposed the inner layers of skin to air triggers off what is called the clot cascade.
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Things start happening. Enzymes that have been stored in their dormant forms suddenly kick in and become into their active forms.
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And they come to the site very quickly. They come to the site and they start making a mesh just like that.
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They start meshing it all together to catch the blood cells so that they can't come out.
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And this has to happen very quickly. And it does happen very quickly. But then the whole thing has to shut off to keep the process from clotting every drop of blood in your body and killing you.
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And so here is this elaborate system which runs through all of these steps very quickly, does its job and shuts off.
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If you miss any one of the steps, you won't get a blood clot. In fact, if you suffer, if you know anyone that is a hemophiliac, actually what they do is they miss one of the steps and their blood doesn't clot and they are in fact in danger of bleeding to death with the smallest cut anywhere on them.
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If they don't have medication to stop that, they will in fact bleed to death. It's a marvelous system.
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But again, it's an irreducibly complex system. Every step in there has to happen.
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It has to happen in the right order. It has to happen in the right amount for the whole thing to work.
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Any piece of it, you remove any piece of it, it doesn't work anymore. And once again, there is no way to ease up to this.
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There is no way to ease up to this. And so Mr. Bahey has come to the conclusion that these systems and other systems like them in the human body must have been designed.
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Now when you design something, those of you who are engineers, you know what you do. When you design something, you have an end state in mind.
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You know what you're going to, you know what you're trying to build. And you work from there backwards to the components that you need and then everything is assembled and put together and hopefully it works.
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That's what it means to design something. And all of these irreducibly complex systems in the body scream that there has been a designer, that it didn't just happen, that someone, some entity, whatever you want to call him, has put conscious thought, intellect, has been behind this.
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And of course, we know who that is. And another thing that this system designs, the conscious design has by no means been adopted across the board in all scientific circles.
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But one of the most telling arguments about it is when someone says, well, we just evolved our way from point
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A to point B. No one has ever explained exactly how did we do that.
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Precisely what are the intermediate steps that we went through to get from A to B, whatever A and B happened to be.
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And exactly what were the intermediate states. Evolutionists hate questions like that.
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They don't like to work with that. So what else? Back to our basic question.
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What about theistic evolution? The theological problem with theistic evolution and why to me the answer is, is this a viable explanation for creation for a believer, is no, is that it presupposes a deistic creator.
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But a deistic creator is not the God that is shown in the Bible. A deistic creator is remote.
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He's out there maybe watching what's going on, he wound up the clock, but he's not doing much more than that.
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But God says he is approachable. God says he is approachable.
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John chapter 12 is just one of the many, many instances.
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In this case, God the son, verse 32, he said, if I be lifted up from the earth,
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I will draw all men unto me. He is interacting with us. This is a
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God who interacts with his creation, not one that's off remote somewhere. Another problem with a deistic
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God is that he is unknowable, but God says of himself that he has revealed himself.
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And there's many texts for that, but Hebrews 1, 1 and 2 is one of them. God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in times past unto the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son.
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He speaks. Or as we saw just in this weekend, the children of Israel gathered around the foot of Mount Sinai heard
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God speak. God spoke to them. God has given us his word.
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He speaks to us. Another problem with a deistic God is that a deistic
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God and deistic creator is beyond the reach of prayer. But our
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God says that he is there and he takes a personal interest in his children. Psalm 91,
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Psalm 91 and verse 15, he shall call upon me and I will answer him.
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I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him. And then he goes on with long life.
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Will I satisfy him and show him my salvation? Again, God reveals himself as one who interacts with his creation.
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He interacts with his children. He has a personal interest and takes care of every one of the sheep.
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He personally watches over them. Jeremiah 33, 3 is again, call upon me and I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things that thou knowest not.
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And finally, a deistic God is silent. But as we've already said, God speaks. God speaks.
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We saw that in Hebrews. We saw it in Exodus. We saw it in many other places. For God has revealed himself.
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In short, the whole problem with deistic evolution is that it postulates a non -biblical view of God.
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That's your problem with it. Are there any questions, comments?
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Yeah, Nate. Say that again.
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Yes. I'm still not sure that I understand the significance of your question,
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Nate. See, this is why we write the questions out ahead of time. Oh, okay.
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All right. I see what you, yeah. Yes. Now, basically the answer is that deistic evolution, evolution is not a valid theory.
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It is not a valid theory for anyone really, but especially a
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Christian to consider. You know, one,
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I don't think I've said before to other people, never in here, but you know, even if I was not an evangelical
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Christian, I would not believe in evolution because of my background as an engineer. It's an absurd theory when you think about it.
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If nothing else, it violates the laws of thermodynamics and right there, because in the universe, you just look around you, things run what?
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Down. Things do not run up in the universe. Everything proceeds from order to disorder.
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If you want to say that in a scientific way and sound learned, you can say entropy increases.
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You can use that one. Mark. Yeah, that's true.
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It is interesting. It is interesting that several of the people that I've read who are pushing the design, the conscious design theory of creation themselves, they're not willing to go the rest of the way and say,
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I mean, they come to the point and say, there's got to be a creator. There's got to be a designer, but they are unwilling to take the next step and say, well, that designer must be divine because the designer is always greater than what was created.
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Yeah, Mark. Of course, the philosophical answer too is why would you not want to, what would you not want there to be a creator
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God? Because if there is a creator God, then we are accountable to him.
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If we are his creation, then we are accountable to him. But on the other hand, if there is a creator
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God and we are made in his image, then we do have meaning. We do have purpose. There is more than what's right here.
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There is a future. There is, our lives become meaningful.
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This is what Solomon said in the book of Ecclesiastes. Without God, nothing has meaning, but with God, everything becomes a gift from the
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Father's hand. And now it's Dave's turn. I said to Louis, this is like the tag team here.
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Got Louis the bagged down brown and Dave the Starbucks kid. Last time when
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I taught Sunday school, I gave the example of an illustration. You know, what if Pastor Mike came up to you and said in 10 minutes, ladies, you had to come to one of the ladies and said, you have to teach the ladies tea in 10 minutes.
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Or one of the men, what if you had 10 minute notice, you got to preach at the Memorial Day Parade downtown
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West Boylston. Well, at least we had all day, Louis. I mean, we had three or four hours to prepare, which is good.
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It's good for us to be able to be here tonight, to be able to look at and consider these things. I always consider one of the things when
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I think about evolution, I always think it takes, if you really study it and look at all the pieces, parts, and as Louis said, and how it all has to fit together and everything has to go just perfectly right.
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And yet it happened by chance or some explosion. It takes more faith to believe that than it does to believe the account is when you open the scriptures and it says in the beginning,
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God created the heaven and the earth and created man, and created the animals. It's just a wonderful gift that God has given to us faith, repentance and faith to believe upon him and to take his word and see that we are fearfully and wonderfully made as Psalm 139 tells us.
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Well, what would a Sunday night be without a recommendation on a book? Have you ever seen this book, 101
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Hymns Stories by Kenneth Ausbeck? If you don't have it and you would like to know a little bit more about hymns, it's the volumes that I, the ones that I have is two volumes set.
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And particularly I wanted to just read something to you this evening from it because of the special music that was sung this morning by Elaine Crane.
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She sang, come thou fount of every blessing. And in that hymn, in the original versions,
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I don't think it's in ours, in our hymn book in number two, second verse in that, in the old version says, here
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I raise mine Ebenezer. Here I raise mine Ebenezer. And you've sung that.
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Now we're supposed to sing Psalm 47 .7, I believe says that we're supposed to sing with an understanding.
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And here, here we are, we open our hymn book. And if we were to have the one of the old ones and it says, here I raise mine
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Ebenezer. Okay. What does that mean? Anybody got an idea?
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I mean, some of you might be right on, you know, the music, but I mean, I hate to do this and I'm not going to put anybody on the spot, but do we have, do we have folks that don't know what that means?
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I mean, there was a time when I did not know what that meant. Here I raise mine Ebenezer. Okay. We have a few hands.
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Good. I'm glad you would go ahead and let us know that by raising your hand.
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Well, somebody tell me the old Testament account. You remember Doug? Okay.
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Anybody in, in, in, you don't have, if you want to write this down, you can. It's in first Samuel chapter seven and in verse 12,
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I believe the Philistines had come against the people of God. The people go to Samuel and they say,
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Samuel, pray for us. Samuel offers, offers a sacrifice, and then he prays to God and God delivers them out of the hands of the
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Philistines. And it says that Samuel, the people, they raised an
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Ebenezer. And in your margin, in your Bible, it may say a stone of help.
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And what it means is, is that God, in the last part of that verse, hitherto has the
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Lord helped us, or we have, God has delivered us. God has helped us and we're raising the stones and they raised memorials in the old
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Testament. They go through over the God parts, Jordan, and they go into the promised land and they take 12 stones out and they lay them, place them on the other side.
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And why did they do that? So they could bring the children back to those stones and say, God had brought us over on dry ground over Jordan.
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It was a stone of memorial, a stone of help. And, uh, and that's where that is.
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And the songwriter, uh, Robbie Robertson wrote that, um, when he was 23 years old.
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And he said that in that we can see in those words that he knew if you, you know,
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Oh, to grace, how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be. God is his savior.
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God is his help. And he's raising a stone in his song here. I raise it. It is God that has brought me to this place.
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He's the old song I used to hear on the radio. We've come this far by, by faith, leaning upon the
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Lord. God has done the work. Robbie Robertson, I believe is his name.
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Robert Robertson wrote, as I said that him when he was 23 and in here, it says before that his father, he was born in 1735.
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His father died when he was eight years old. He took up to learn the trade of barbering cutting here, here for the next few years.
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He did that, but then he was associated with wrong people and he lived, lived a debauched life.
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One day he heard a preacher preach. Now it's 1740 and it's in England.
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Who do you think it was? Hmm. Who's his contemporary
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Whitfield? He hears George Whitfield preach and God saves him. Robert Robertson.
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He's, he's, um, yeah, this is this a little bit later. He becomes a pastor, theologian, writes hymns.
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And, um, I don't know if you know this part of the story of his life, but you remember the last verse,
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I think one of the verses, it says prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Well, one day he was riding on a stagecoach when he noticed that a woman on the stagecoach was engrossed in a hymn book.
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And during the conversation that came up, the lady turned to him and asked him what he thought about the hymn that she was humming.
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And he burst into tears and said, madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many, many years ago.
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And I would give a thousand worlds if I had them to enjoy the feelings that I had then, because in his life, he had strayed into unstableness, lapses of sin, and even involvement in Unitarianism.
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But you get that type of stuff in a book like this. So it's a, it's a good one. Okay. Um, for, for,
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I've got a couple, three questions. I don't know how far we, we can get, but let's see what happens. One of the questions that I have is in Dr.
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Block's Sunday school class this morning, do you remember when he put the foil up, projected it?
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And he said, this is the, what my college students think of the God of the old Testament, wrath and fury and vengeance.
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And then he says, this is what they think of the God of the new Testament. He's love, he's mercy, and he's compassion.
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And then Dr. Block went back to the old Testament to show how God is full of compassion and love and forgiveness and, and, uh, and that in the old
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Testament, but he didn't go back to the new Testament. And my question is if we go into the new
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Testament and most people have a low view of God, they have a, we, we don't have people bowing down and worshiping totem poles in our, in our country.
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Uh, we don't have a whole lot of that going on. We do have some physical idols, but the ideal, the idol that we have in our country is that people fashion a
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God of their imagination. They make up a God that they want because it's easy to worship the God that they make.
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And, um, of course you have that when you have these different views as a different God in the old Testament as there is a new.
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So he had brought up that in the old, he showed that back there, Joel chapter two and the
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Psalms, that God is full of compassion, of great kindness and mercy, ready to forgive.
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What about in the new Testament? Are there any verses in the new Testament that show us, yes, we, we know that God is love and God is, is compassionate and he forgives and we see that and he heals and, and, uh, he's so kind and Jesus wept, uh, over Jerusalem.
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But what about in the new Testament, are there verses or thoughts in the new Testament that deal with this old
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Testament type thinking that the students had that are opposite of what I just said?
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Any thoughts, Bruce? Hebrews 12. Our God is a consuming fire.
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Yes, right. It's a fearful thing. That's, that's in chapter 10,
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Hebrews chapter 10. It's a fearful thing. And that whole context right there is talking about judgment.
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It says it's a fearful thing to the fall into the hands of a living God. Yes, Wes. Yeah. What about the woes to the
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Pharisees? And he got so upset. He was upset with the way that they were leading people astray and, and that they, they were taking their doctrine and make the, they would make in the, the, uh, tradition of men more important than the scriptures.
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And he, and he lashed out at that. Also we went into the temple and what did he do on two times, cleansed it, overturning the money tables and, and they had a whip going through there.
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Yes, Lewis. Yes. And more on it, or in other words, more on, on hell than he did heaven.
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Yes. Is he in Matthew 25, 46, but these shall go away in everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal
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Dallas. Yes, that is, I was thinking today, is that the first mention of church discipline in the
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Bible? I mean, in the, in the, in the book of Acts chapter five, in an
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IS and Sapphira, when it comes to selling their property and, and lying to God, the
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Holy spirit about it, Peter didn't pull out a 47 Magnum and shoot them.
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They, the elders didn't bring them up front in, and I'm not trying to be funny, but they didn't bring them up front of the congregation and guillotine or more, whatever form of, of punishment they use back there or death.
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They lied and they drew their last breath and it was God that took their life from them.
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I mean, that was, that is the God of the old Testament, the God of the new Testament. Yes. Any other examples you think of Doug?
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Yes. Yes, exactly.
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I mean, we looked in revelation and you know, we, we see the, the lamb that was slain and we, and we, we see, you know, he has redeemed us as our brother aptly put it this morning, but then you go forward a few chapters to revelation 19 and you see this rider on a white horse and you see him there in righteousness.
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He judges and makes war. His eyes are a flame of fire. His clothing is dipped in blood.
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He's got a long lethal sword coming out of his mouth and with a rod of iron, he rules the nations and he's treading on the wine press of the wrath of God.
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I don't know. He thought, thought about that, but you, you go through the white and it in, in even today, they still do it, making wine, stepping on the grapes and the grapes bursting.
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I think Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon on that when it had to do with as far as that wine presses the wrath of God upon sinners, treading upon them to their, to their eternal doom.
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So we see this in the, in the scriptures, our God has not changed. Peter said in first Peter one versus 15 and 16, but as he, which has called you is holy.
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So be ye holy in all manner of conversation as for, as it is written, be holy for I am holy.
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God has not changed. So we must be careful. Don't, don't, we need to be careful that we can't, we don't want to ever be caught with putting
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God in a box and saying, you know, like these people do, there's a one God in the old Testament and one
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God of the new Testament. He is the same yesterday and today and forever.
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And if you go all the way back to the book of Genesis, from the very beginning, Noah found what grace in the eyes of the
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Lord. And it's through the Bible. And yet you see through the Bible that God is of such pure eyes that he cannot look upon iniquity from Genesis all the way through the books, all the books of the
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Bible. So we must be careful. And I just kind of wanted so that we could kind of, it helped me as far as just finishing up that little bit of Sunday school.
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Wasn't Dr. Block wonderful. It was such a, a tremendous blessing to have him here. I got to get the CDs. I was at school
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Saturday, missed them, but boy, I heard, I heard that it was even as good, if not better on Saturday.
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It was super. Amen. Okay. Let me ask you this question. This is my, my next question.
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Um, we cannot see, uh, with the naked eye, at least in this room, we don't see oxygen.
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Um, we don't see when we go and let the air out of a tire of a car, we don't see that air coming out of that.
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We don't see the invisible gases on the, um, on the periodic chart of the elements is invisible gases.
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We just, you know, carbon monoxide. I, I don't believe we can see that some of these, you know, that we hear about, but when we think, we think about that something that cannot be seen,
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I have a question about something in the Bible. Can the grace of God be seen?
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Think about the question. Now, can the grace of God be seen? What do you think?
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Yes or no? Let's start there. Can the grace of God be seen? I heard a yes.
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Anybody want to say no? Okay. Mark says no. That's okay. Can the grace of God be seen?
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Now, if we think it can be, give me some examples. What do you think along that line?
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Mark. Okay. All right.
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I'll go, I'll, I'll go that. That's what, that's where we were going to head. Okay. Let me, let's ask this.
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Is there a Bible verse then that says that the grace of God is seen, that we can see the grace of God?
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What do you think? Good question, huh? Isn't it?
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Somebody's got their flipped out their PDA concordance and they're looking grace of God be seen.
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How about let's turn to Acts chapter 11, Acts chapter 11.
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In Acts chapter 11, I'd like to begin reading in verse 19, Acts 11, verse 19.
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This is from the King James. If you'd follow along with me and in your Bibles as you, as you look in Acts 11, 19.
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Now they, which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch preaching the word to none unto the, to none, but unto the
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Jews, Jews only. So there's been a persecution and the Christians are spread out and they're going to these cities.
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And one of them is Antioch and they're preaching to the Jews. And some of them, verse 20 were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which when they were come to Antioch spake unto the
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Grecians preaching the Lord Jesus. And the hand of the Lord was with them and a great number believed and turned to the
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Lord. So the gospel comes to Antioch and many believe they turn to the Lord.
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Verse 22, then tidings of these things came unto the ears of the church was, which was in Jerusalem.
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That's the home church, the, the, where it all began. And they send forth
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Barnabas that he should go as far as Antioch. They hear this great account of this testimony of the preaching and people being saved.
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So they commissioned Barnabas and he goes out to Antioch. Verse 23, who, when he came and had seen the grace of God was glad and exhorted them all that with purpose of heart, they would cleave unto the
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Lord. That's the verse that I, that I kind of hold on to as far as what I'm, where I'm trying to get at what
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I'm, what I'm saying. And you're right. When it comes to the wind, we can't see the wind, but we can see the effects of wind.
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We can see leaves blowing around, trees bending, grass is shaking.
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My brother lived, he lived in Iceland for a while. He was stationed there in the
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Navy and he said it's very windy in Iceland. I don't know if anybody's ever been there. And he said that when it, when you go outside, your coat, your jacket, you want to make sure that there's nothing loose on it.
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No little flaps or anything because it'll just flap you in the face and just keep hitting you and it's really miserable.
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He said one time he was leaving his office going home and he dropped his satchel with his papers in it and the papers went flying and he never got all of those papers back.
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Now he didn't recommend this and he did not do this, he said, but there were some people who were, who were not obeying the law and they were a little bit lazy and they didn't want to put their trash out and what they did was they opened the back door of their house, threw the trash, and within seconds it was gone.
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It was that, that windy. So you can see the effects of the wind. Grace is, is favor from God.
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We looked at it, the last question and answer, Mike, Pastor Mike spoke on that. But here it says that we can see it and he went into this area and he saw the grace of God.
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So what do you think, what do you think you could see or Bruce, I saw your hand up earlier, he's just chomping, go ahead.
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Yeah, well it is, and it specifically is speaking about that in the context that they were going, they were going to these, to the
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Gentiles and going to the Grecians. I was thinking of Titus 2 where it talked about the grace of God which bringeth salvation is a fear unto all men teaching them that denying ungodliness and worldly lust they should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world.
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God's grace, effectually working in our lives, brings about a wonderful change, doesn't it?
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We, as we even heard this morning, if we were, if we were Barnabas and we went to this, to this area, we would see that these people who were idolaters, people who were far from the, the commonwealth of Israel, so to speak, they were, they were without Christ, without hope, graceless.
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God's grace had come and now we see a people who are cleaving to the Lord, loving the
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Lord, they have a hope in the Lord, and these are the people, this grace just didn't end here, these are the people who the disciples were first called
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Christians in this area, in Antioch, and as we go down the road a little further, we see in Acts chapter 13 that they are the hub from where the missionaries go out from.
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Paul and Barnabas going out and then Silas and John Mark and all them leaving from Antioch and then coming back to this place where the gospel went, where Barnabas had first come and he had seen the grace, he saw what
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God's grace did in their lives, he saw the effects of grace.
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So, indirectly, it was kind of like a question, no, you can't, you can't actually see it, just like you can't see the wind, but you can see the effects of it, and is it not something that we should see in the life of every person who names the name of Christ?
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We should be able to see the effects of the grace of God. Paul wrote to the
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Philippian church and he said, make sure, I'm paraphrasing, but make sure that your behavior or your conduct is becoming or befitting to the gospel.
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Make sure that the way that you live matches up to what you say that you believe in, because it is something for us to claim that God, the
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God of heaven, has reached down and he has plucked me up out of a horrible pit, he has called me to himself, he has forgiven me for all of my sins, the penalty due my sin, and he has saved me from my sins.
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Romans chapter 6, where we're no longer servants to sin, from sin, out of sin,
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God has done that. Now, what do we say to a person who says, I'm saved, but the life doesn't change?
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They go on doing the same old things, the same old passions, the same old desires. Then we could question, is this really the grace of God?
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Do I really see God's grace in this person's life? Because when God favors someone, he changes them, and we are new creatures in Christ, old things are passed away, behold, all things have become new.
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What else do you think about this? As Christians, you mean?
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That's a whole message. We need to bring Dr. Block back, that's a whole other conference, with the question of what you're bringing up.
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Yes, the old prophet, until he saw the consolation of Israel.
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Yeah, well, I guess it's the definition of what grace is.
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Jesus Christ is full of grace and truth, and he dispenses, or he's gracious.
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But it's not like, I come from a Roman Catholic background, and to me, the terminology of grace was, if you do something, grace is wrapped up within that sacrament in the church, let's say.
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And if I do it, I receive grace by what I do. But grace is favor from God.
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It's God favoring us and doing something for us that we should never receive. And certainly, we don't deserve what he does.
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That's what grace is. And Jesus saves those who don't deserve to be saved.
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He is gracious. But it's not like it's something that we do, that we unlock this grace, or it comes from us and we're the one that source it.
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Or, to answer the first question, there's so much, we won't be able to go into all of it. But when it comes to choice, you see, before we were saved, our will was bound because of the nature that we're in.
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Our nature is fallen. And our will is only able, our choice is only within the realm of our nature.
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And our nature is fallen, and it's corrupt. There is no man that seeketh after God, Romans 3 tells us.
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There's none that understands. They've all gone out of the way. They have together become unprofitable. I believe it was
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Ecclesiastes 7 .20, there is not a just man upon the earth that does good and sins not.
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It's kind of like a fish in the water. A fish, by nature, because it is a fish, it's bound to only choose within the water.
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Going to Lewis's study, a fish could not, of its own accord, say,
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I'm going to get out of the water and I'm going to go live on land. It can't do that. It's bound by its nature.
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Man is bound by his nature. Because of the fall, because of sin, and we're corrupt.
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And we can only choose within that, and we will only choose sin. We only choose opposition to God.
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God must come, and our will needs to be changed. That's regeneration.
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The Holy Spirit comes and quickens us. We're made willing in the day of God's power, and we're able then, by the gracious work of God's grace upon us, to be able to choose properly and to choose
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God. I know that's a whole lot in a little paragraph, but that's kind of like,
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I just wanted to try to answer what you were saying. Not that we're, and we're not robots, we're not puppets on strings. You did say that too.
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We're not puppets on strings. We are making choices, and we are doing these things and making decisions, but it is based upon our nature.
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Go ahead. Yes, and we'll learn and be instructed.
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Yes. Right. Yeah. We believe that He was saved.
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Yes. Right. And certainly, yeah, it was grace and mercy.
01:00:11
And He was spared, but He paid the price. And He was chastened for it.
01:00:17
And all those that are God's people, in the name of Christ, that don't walk in the way of God, of course, we will be chastened.
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God corrects us to bring us back to the place that He wants us to be. And the good part of it all is that when
01:00:30
God saves us, we now have the Spirit of God living within. We have this, we have the new nature, and we can now choose spiritually and choose for God and choose for good.
01:00:41
And that's something we could not do before. Any other comments? Any other things about this one?
01:00:50
Okay, I have one more. I think we can do this. One more. This is pretty quick.
01:00:57
Just get you to think about this. I really had two, but we'll skip the other one. We'll use this some other time. If you think about the
01:01:03
Christian life and being a believer, there are some things that we cannot lose.
01:01:11
Name some things that we cannot lose. Salvation. It's eternal life.
01:01:17
How long is eternal? It's everlasting. Thank the Lord. Jesus said, if you verily, verily, or truly, truly,
01:01:24
I say unto you, he that believeth on me has everlasting life. He can't be taken away. We're in His hands. We're in the Father's hands.
01:01:30
John 10. No one can pluck us out of His hands. Yes. What else can't we lose? We cannot lose these things. Holy Spirit comes to live within.
01:01:39
Yes. The earnest of our inheritance. The down payment. The promise that the full salvation is to come.
01:01:46
What else is eternal when it comes to our salvation or being a child of God? Say again?
01:01:55
A love for God? How about the other way around? God's love for us. We don't lose that. He loves us. I have loved thee with an everlasting love,
01:02:03
Jeremiah put it that way. What else is eternal that we can't lose? It begins with an
01:02:09
R. Go ahead, Mark. You had one? Yes?
01:02:17
Okay. That's okay. Alright. What else do we have? Part 2 of Dr.
01:02:23
Block's message this morning. It begins with an R. It's an eternal. Eternal, I believe it's spoken of in Hebrews.
01:02:31
Eternal redemption. We have an eternal redemption. We've been purchased. We've been bought out of the slave market of sin that's forever.
01:02:38
And we're adopted into God's family never to be cast out. And we have an eternal inheritance that fades not away.
01:02:47
Now, we can't lose that. Let me ask you a question. Is there anything Christians can lose? Is there anything?
01:02:54
Think about it. Is there anything Christians can lose? Not that we want to, but either that we can.
01:03:01
There's somebody maybe who hasn't said anything yet. Did some other people? Yes? A crown.
01:03:07
Okay. Rewards. Yeah, you look in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, and if you look in, it speaks in there about that if you have, the works that you do, wood, hay, and stubble, they'll be burned up.
01:03:23
But if it's gold, silver, and precious stones, they will remain. In 2
01:03:29
John, verse 8, look to yourselves that we lose not those things which we have brought, but that we receive a full reward.
01:03:42
And imagine we know that there's going to be a degree of rewards in heaven based upon the quality of the labor that went behind it as far as the wife that would live in it.
01:03:54
So reward is one thing, yes. But what do we want to do? We want to be careful. To be diligent.
01:03:59
To be sober. To not get caught up. To not get busy doing other things so that we don't lose that full reward.
01:04:08
Not that we're not going to be in heaven, no. But I believe there are going to be well done, good and faithful servants, because you are faithful over little, you shall be over much.
01:04:17
This idea of degrees. So, rewards. How about another thing? Joy, yes.
01:04:26
We can lose our joy. What verse in the Bible do you think about? Psalm 51.
01:04:34
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation. We can lose our joy, the joy of our salvation, not the salvation itself, because if you can lose your salvation, you don't have biblical salvation.
01:04:48
You don't have true biblical salvation. It's losing the freshness, the wonder of it all.
01:04:54
Losing the rejoicing, just that joy that you have of the full and complete salvation that God is bringing to you, has brought to us, and given to us.
01:05:03
And David prays and cries out to God, God restore unto me the joy of thy salvation.
01:05:09
What else? What else can you lose? Kind of related to that. Because of sin, we can lose fellowship with God.
01:05:18
Fellowship. We can. We can't lose our what? It ends with ship. We can't lose our relationship.
01:05:28
Yes, we can't lose our relationship. He's our Father. We're His children. But we can lose fellowship.
01:05:37
Where do we see that from the beginning pages in the Bible? We go back to the garden and we see that Adam could walk with God in the cool of the garden and speak to God face to face and yet when he and Eve sinned, where do we see him next?
01:05:53
He's hiding. And God comes to him. He's afraid. And he's trying to cover up himself.
01:06:02
The remedy then is 1 John chapter 1, if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
01:06:10
And the verse is right before that. If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.
01:06:20
What else? You think of anything else? We're coming down the horns right there. Hang in there. What else couldn't we lose?
01:06:29
I'm thinking of a book at the end of the Bible that begins with an R. And it has an
01:06:36
N on the end. E -V -E -L -A -T -I -O -N In the middle.
01:06:42
Chapter 2. Church of Ephesus, I believe, was spoken to. And they lost their first love.
01:06:51
Yes. It says in there, they were doing really good. Think about this.
01:06:58
The Lord comes and He commends them for their works and their labor and their patience. They've borne those which were evil.
01:07:04
They had a hatred for sin. He says, you've tried those that say they're apostles and they're not.
01:07:10
They had borne. They were faithful when it was rough. They had patience. They endured. For the sake of the
01:07:15
Lord, they worked and they had not quit. Nevertheless, I'm somewhat against it because you've left your first love.
01:07:22
Not lost it. No, not lost their first love, but they had left. In the Greek, it is your first love you have left.
01:07:30
Kind of like how it actually goes. That passion for the Lord. That affection.
01:07:37
The fire that was once in the fireplace of the heart is gone. And we can get that way as we labor and we just go on and we just start doing and we get wrapped up in the doing and the duty of it all.
01:07:53
And we ought not to forsake all of that, but we just don't have the passion for Christ that we ought to.
01:08:01
Have that heart glowing for Him. And I believe the remedy is here for us. Look, remember from where you fell from.
01:08:08
Remember where you were. And repent. That means turn around and go the other direction 180 degrees.
01:08:14
Go back and it says, remember, do the first works. What was it that you once did?
01:08:23
Where were you at when you fell from that and you'd left your first love? And go back and do that.
01:08:28
Maybe it was that you were having a great quiet time and you purposed to have that in the morning. Whatever it is, you were just reading more.
01:08:35
Now it's kind of like, you know, Dr. Block said, it's the old virtual, you know, daily bread like, oh, here it is.
01:08:45
We've stopped and we've languished in things and we've left our first love.
01:08:50
Well, there are other things. Can we lose something that begins with a T? Very, very important for a
01:08:58
Christian. Has a Y on the end? E -S -T -I -M -O -N in the middle?
01:09:07
Testimony. Yes. Because it was our testimony. We ought to have a brilliant testimony for Christ.
01:09:15
Do I have any others? How about this last thing? How about the ground? It's kind of related to others.
01:09:21
The ground that we've gained. You know, we struggle and we strive to learn and to go on for the
01:09:30
Lord and to lay up treasures in Heaven. And then the temptation comes and we say, it won't be that bad.
01:09:40
And we've gone a foot forward, but we end up going a mile backwards. We need to be careful not to lose these things.
01:09:50
Aren't you thankful that the Word of God says that He is the author of our salvation?
01:09:58
He is the Alpha and the Omega. We go from faith to faith. And what that means is it began in faith.
01:10:05
The faith that the Lord has given to us and it ends in faith. It is His hand. Salvation is of the
01:10:11
Lord, Jonah said. And I was thinking of a verse in the
01:10:16
New Testament. Jude says, now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling.
01:10:23
God is able to keep us from falling. And to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.
01:10:32
To the only wise God our
01:10:38
Savior be glory and majesty both now and forever. Amen. Something like that. I'm sorry if I messed that up. But God is able to keep us from falling.
01:10:45
And the psalmist wrote, the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord. He delighteth in His way and though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down for the
01:10:56
Lord upholds him with His hand. That's the God whom we deserve. So if we've lost things, if we've lost some things, let's just be careful by calling upon the
01:11:07
Lord to ask Him to restore these things and to fire our hearts once again so that we are back in His ways.
01:11:15
Confessing our sin and knowing that He does forgive us and that He will help us. And He is a great and wonderful Savior.
01:11:23
Any other comments before we close? Any others? Okay. All right.
01:11:30
It's been great to have been able to be together with you here. Why don't we sing one more song brother and then close in prayer.