Ordo Salutis (part 5)

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1689 London Baptist Confession Of Faith (part 6)

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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this day that you've given to us, the rain that you're bringing to us, life -giving rain,
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I just praise you for that. I just pray, Father, that you would be with us this morning as we study your word, as we seek to learn more about you and the way in which you have saved us.
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I pray that you would be with us as we worship you in song this morning and in listening to the message being preached through your servant.
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And I just pray, Father, that you would give us hearts that would desire to look to you with perseverance until the end.
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In your name we pray, amen. So last week we talked about faith and repentance and justification, and we talked about them because unlike a lot of the stuff that comes before, where we can see these moments in time where these events clearly take place, faith, repentance, and justification, and even the effectual call before that really happen basically instantaneously.
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But the order that we have in this ordo salutis is not a chronological order, well it is a chronological order, but really it's a logical order.
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It's for us to understand what leads to what during the process of salvation. And so even though they exist as separate bullet points, that doesn't mean that they happen functionally simultaneously.
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So we heard that the effectual call demands a response. God regenerates us, enabling that response.
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We respond to it with faith, which we know from Ephesians 2 is a gift from him.
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We also see that the changed heart leads to repentance. God justifies us, declares us legally righteous through the imputation of Christ's work on us and the imputation of our sin onto him.
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We had a brief discussion about the meaning of the double imputation in justification, the imputation of Christ's righteousness on us and our sinfulness on Jesus Christ, and we talked very briefly about what would happen if Christ's righteousness was not imputed to our account.
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Does anybody remember what we talked about other than Steve, because you're going to answer everything else? Okay, exactly right.
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So without the righteousness to enter the kingdom of heaven, we're kind of effectually in this neutral state where,
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I mean, it's not a real thing, so who knows what would actually happen, but it does help us to understand why both of these things are important.
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Now what would happen, again, thought experiment, not real.
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If Christ's righteousness was imputed to us, but that was it. Right. I'm just trying to work through why both of these are important, just so we have a really good understanding of these.
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Right, exactly. So we would still exist with a sinful nature and the righteousness of Christ being imputed on us is functionally meaningless unless he has also paid for our sins.
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Again, just a thought experiment, it's kind of a weird thing. So we did talk about this also, imputed and infused righteousness.
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What's the difference between imputed righteousness, which is what we see in scripture, and infused righteousness, which is something that we would see in the
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Catholic Church or in some denominations where they believe that once you've been saved you don't sin anymore.
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See, I told you you were going to be the only one. Anybody else want to raise their hand? So infused, the idea is that that's actually changing our makeup as opposed to imputation, which is a legal declaration.
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So if you think about it like this, I'll use OJ because we all have strong opinions about OJ.
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OJ is standing in the courtroom before the verdict is given, right? He's standing there. What he has done is over.
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He's done it. It's a done deal. But when that judge opens that envelope or however they do it and makes the declaration not guilty, there's an imputation of his state.
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He's declared not guilty. Now, that doesn't change what he did or did not do, but it is a legal declaration.
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Does that make sense? So when we talk about infused righteousness, it's this idea where the righteousness of Christ is actually kind of built into us or mixed into our flesh or our spirit as opposed to imputed righteousness, which is similar to the tradition of the priest who would sprinkle the blood on the mercy seat and so God would see the blood and so he wouldn't see the law so he wouldn't judge the nation.
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It doesn't change the fact that there were sins in the nation, but the viewing of the law was blocked by the blood on the mercy seat and so the declaration was being made there.
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Does that make sense? We can see a perfect example of this in Romans chapter 7, starting in verse 14,
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Paul says, For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.
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For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing
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I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law and that is good.
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So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.
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For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good
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I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what
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I do not want, it is no longer I who did it, but sin that dwells within me.
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Right? So if we have infused righteousness, there is no sin dwelling in us, but we don't.
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Despite our desire to act righteously, just like Paul, we are still in our fleshly bodies and because of that we are still not perfect.
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We still sin and that is why Christ's righteousness must be imputed upon us because it is a one -time declaration so that God the
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Father sees us as righteous even though we aren't. If we look at Romans chapter 4, we see
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Abraham. And this is a really, really interesting thing as well because not only is this idea of imputation a legal declaration, but it also is described in accounting terms.
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We see that in Romans 4 verses 1 to 5. What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh?
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For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.
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For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him or reckoned to him as righteousness.
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Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but what is due.
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And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.
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So Paul takes wages.
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Wages are something that are due to you. It's something that you deserve. It's something that is paid. And the righteousness of Christ in this example is not something that's worked for.
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It's not something that's deserved. It is something that is reckoned. It is an imputation onto the account of.
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So we have this declaration of not guilty. And then we have this kind of financial accounting term where belief is reckoned or counted through belief, through faith.
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And I just, I love that passage that I read before from Paul because that is very much the struggle that we go through, right?
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After we've done something dumb and we're like, what is wrong with me? Why am I doing these things?
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Why am I sinning in these ways? I know better. You know, why am
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I so dumb? Right? This is how I talk to myself all the time. Maybe that's a commentary on my character.
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But, you know, just this, why is it I know that I shouldn't be doing these things that are sinful and yet I regularly succumb to this temptation or whatever it might be.
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What's going on? I do not do the things that I want to do. And I do the things that I do not want to do.
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So as we grow in our faith, we become more like Jesus Christ.
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Paul, many times in his letters, writing to his disciples, would say what?
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Imitate me as I imitate Christ. We see it in 1
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Corinthians. We see it in Philippians. We see it in 2 Thessalonians. And we seek to know
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Christ more and more because, as it says in Romans 8 .29, which is one of the great passages that has some of these components of the
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Ordo Salutis in it, that we are to be conformed to his image. We are to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
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And if we look at our list, our Ordo Salutis list, this is sanctification.
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This is what comes after justification. Now, sanctification is a funny word, the way it's used in English in the
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New Testament, because it means a few different but related things. And when we look at it, it's one of these cases where we can look at the context to help us understand how the word is being used.
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Generally speaking, if we see the word sanctification or sanctified used in what's referred to as the
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Aorist tense, which means past, it's past progressive. It's this idea of something that happened in the past but didn't necessarily have a defined beginning or end.
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Past progressive, Aorist tense. That's going to be things like you were justified, right, or you were sanctified.
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It's something that happened in the past, but it's got this kind of ongoing time to it, and so there's no defined start and end other than the fact that you know that it happened, past tense.
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And when we see that, what we see, what we can understand from that in the text is that this is very much this declaration of righteousness.
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So, in this case, it's coupled with regeneration. It's coupled with justification.
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We are declared not guilty. We are justified with the penalty of our sin being imputed to Christ, but we are also declared righteous.
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We are declared holy. We are declared sanctified. The word there in the
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Greek is hagios, which means holy. Well, that's the root word. There's lots of different conjugations of that depending on the text, but when we look at the word sanctified, the root word there is hagios, which is talking about holiness.
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Yes. Yes, please. Yep. Yep, no problem. It's a legal term. Sure. Yep. Yep. Sure.
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Yep. Well, so that's what purgatory is for. Purgatory is sort of burning off the spare sin cycles that you've got kind of laying around so that the righteousness that you've earned or that's been infused into you can sort of not be stuck with the trappings of sinfulness that were left behind when you die.
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Do you want to add? I thought I heard some. Do you want to add something? Oh, okay.
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Any other questions? Well, thank you. Any other questions or anything?
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Don't be afraid to yell out if I'm not seeing hands or anything. That was perfectly fine. I have no problem with that at all.
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All right, now I've got to figure out where I was. Yep. Yep.
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That's a big paragraph, though. So when we do see sanctification used in this sort of past progressive aorist tense, that's really referring to our moment of salvation, our declaration of holiness, and it's the beginning of the sanctification journey.
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And when we think about sanctification in this church, I think rightly we think about the process of becoming more like Jesus Christ over the course of our life as a believer.
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But I just wanted to mention that to avoid confusion because it is used that way in Scripture, and so it's important for us to understand what
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Scripture is saying when we see that. 1 Corinthians 6 9 -11 is a perfect example of this.
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Paul says, Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will enter the kingdom of God.
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And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our
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Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. So that's that past progressive tense referring to sanctification as a declaration of holiness.
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MacArthur talks about this passage and says that, Sanctified speaks of new behavior.
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To be sanctified is to be made holy inwardly and to be able in the Spirit's power to live a righteous life outwardly.
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Before a person is saved, he has no holy nature and no capacity for holy living. But in Christ we are given a new nature and can live out the new kind of life, since total domination is broken and replaced by a life of holiness.
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And he references Romans 6 where Paul says, So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
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And so when we look at this, we can really understand this is something that's very, very similar to regeneration.
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I mean, fundamentally, regeneration begets sanctification. Wayne Grudem, when he talks about sanctification, he says that there's really three stages of sanctification.
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The first one is, is this a definite beginning at regeneration? And the second is what we classically think of when we think of sanctification in our lives.
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We see sanctification as a progressive process, this idea where we are justified and then we are continually made more sensitive to our sin.
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And I touched on that last week. And when we look at verses like Romans 8, 29, which talks about our ongoing conformance to the image of Jesus Christ, that is exactly what that is referring to.
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Second Corinthians 318, talking about the New Covenant, Paul says, Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts.
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Referring to the law. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.
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Now the Lord is the spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the
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Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
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For this comes from the Lord, who is the spirit. So, as we live our lives as Christians, and as we see people come to the faith for the first time, we know that they are regenerated, we know that they are sanctified, but they don't look like Jesus.
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And I think it's one of the conflicts that we have in relevant
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Protestantism right now. There's a lot of people that come to Christ and maybe they're actually saved, maybe they think they're saved and they're not, but the
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Lord's working on their hearts, or who really knows except God. But Christians don't all look the same.
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We're very different. Our congregation is probably more diverse than West Boylston is. And there are things that people do that maybe they're sins that they're still struggling with or whatever.
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They are saved, but they are not sanctified.
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They don't fully look like Christ. They are not perfect. And so that is why
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God is working on the hearts of those who are his children to make them more like him as they grow in faith.
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Last week, when we were talking about faith, I talked about this sort of three -tiered component.
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There's three different components of true saving faith. Does anybody remember this? Hopefully a couple nods, maybe.
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Okay, well, you weren't here. It's okay, you can shake your head. There were three things. There was knowledge.
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We talked about, I know the chair is going to hold me. Remember this? There was knowledge, there was approval or agreement, and then there's belief or personal trust.
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And so these are three components that we must have for our faith to be a saving faith, and they build on each other.
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Right? And so what that meant was that as we grew in faith, by necessity, we would be growing in knowledge.
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We're learning more about God. We're learning more about what he has done for us. And, I mean, these might not be, you know, academic terms, but we're learning more about how
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God is working in his church and in us. And so what is necessarily coupled with that is that we are becoming more sanctified, because if God has truly changed our nature to want to submit to him and to obey him, and he has called us to become more like him, and Paul has called us to imitate him as we imitate
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Jesus Christ. As our knowledge grows, as our faith grows, this is a perfect example of sanctification.
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But God doesn't work alone. There's lots of examples in Scripture of our responsibility to act in a right manner.
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Right? We know that salvation is all of God, but that doesn't absolve us of our responsibility.
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Romans 8, 13, For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
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So we are enabled to do righteous things by God, but that doesn't mean that we don't also share the responsibility to do those right things, continually putting to death the deeds of the body, it says here.
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But when we look at sanctification specifically, I think it's in the book of Philippians that we see probably the best example of the cooperation of God and us in sanctification.
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Philippians 2, verses 12 and 13 says, Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
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For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
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John MacArthur had a two -part sermon series on these two verses, and obviously
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I'm not going to be able to get into that level of depth, but he really breaks this apart.
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Verse 12, talking about the believer's role in sanctification, and verse 13, talking about God's role in sanctification, and he breaks it apart into five truths that believers must understand to continue to press on towards a more sanctified life, and also five key features about God that we can focus on in verse 13 to understand what he is doing in our lives as he works to sanctify us.
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So we'll go through these a little bit to take a look at them.
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The first one, in verse 12, is to understand your example.
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Remember, these are five truths believers must understand to continue to press on toward a more sanctified life.
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Understand your example. The verse starts, So then, or therefore, in light of verses 1 -10,
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Philippians chapter 2, which talks about the humility of Jesus Christ, understand the example that we've been called to imitate.
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And again, over and over again, this is something that Paul regularly commands us to do, commands his disciples, those who have learned from him to do, is to imitate him as he imitates
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Jesus Christ. Jesus said to us that if we love him, we will do what?
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We will keep his commandments. We will desire to obey him. And so that really is the first key for us to understand when we look at what our responsibility is in this process of sanctification, is to understand our example.
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The second one is to understand that we are a loved people. In this case, we see
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Paul saying, Therefore, my beloved. We know the affection that Paul had for the
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Philippian church. He loved them. And we know that the
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Lord loves us. We're not a particularly lovable people. Sorry, especially me.
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But how much more should we desire to be like the one who loved us to the point of death, even death on a cross?
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We're working through the book of Matthew in our home group, and the focus in the book of Matthew is on Jesus Christ as servant, as the suffering servant.
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And we see over and over again in these first two chapters which we've gone through, Jesus is working to heal all of these people.
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I mean, it's this exhaustive thing. He goes from city to city, and there are crowds at the door, so many people that you can't even get in.
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We just looked at chapter 2 where the paralytic is lowered through the roof, right, because there are so many people at the door to get into the house of Jesus Christ that there's no other way that they can get this man to Jesus.
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And when we first talked about that, I remember saying, when was the last time that you were at an event or at a place or whatever where there was so much excitement for what was happening inside that there were just crowds of people outside and pressing to get in?
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I went to Fenway Park yesterday, and I hate crowds. I really do. And that's exactly what it was like there, going to the
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T. I mean, it's just this crush of people. Everybody wants to get to the same place. So many people clamoring for the attention of Jesus Christ.
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I mean, he must have been exhausted. I can't even imagine it in his humanity. And yet, still, he continued to function as the servant.
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He loves us with an everlasting love. And the third thing to understand coming out of this verse is obedience.
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Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, he's not just our
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Savior, Jesus, he's also our Lord. He didn't blankly call us to salvation. He said, remember, he said that he will give us rest, right?
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Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And so we know that he called us to come to him, and we know that he promised us rest, but he's also our
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Lord, and we need to obey him. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. So we need to understand obedience.
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We also need to understand personal responsibility. It says here in this verse, Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence.
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It's really easy, I think, to kind of do the right thing when you know someone's watching you, right?
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You're driving on the road, and you see the little end of a police cruiser sticking out, way down the way, and what happens?
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It's like, oh, do I need to hit the brake, or do I just coast? I got to slow down a little bit, because we know that we're being watched.
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Maybe I'm the only speeder here, I don't know. Right? Or, you know, we were all kids once.
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What's the classroom mood when the teacher walks in versus right before the teacher walks in, right?
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All right, I got a reaction out of some people. Okay, okay, okay. And maybe you're not even being bad or disobedient or whatever, but it's like, oh, you know, it's this presumption that we need to be more obedient because we're responsible for our behavior when we're cognizant of the fact that there is someone standing there watching us.
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I kind of joke sometimes about teaching Sunday school and teaching home group because I'm a lot more aware that if I sit in front of people for 40 minutes and I have nothing to say, that it's probably not going to go well.
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So it really keeps me even deeper in the word than I normally am. It's the same thing.
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It's so easy to act rightly when we know that we're being watched. But we need to remember that, first of all, we are being watched all the time, right?
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Christ can see us. God is everywhere. He is omnipresent. He knows everything.
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But secondly, that it's not our responsibility to obey simply because we're being watched, right?
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Our responsibility is to submit to and obey Christ internally. It's our heart.
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It should be our desire to do those things regardless of whether or not anybody can see them. You need to understand personal responsibility.
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And finally, number five, we need to understand the consequences of sin. And when
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Paul says, work out your salvation in fear and trembling, there's certainly two aspects to that.
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Certainly as we come to the throne of God, we need to be aware that he is a mighty and powerful
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God and we should not approach him in a cavalier way, but also to be aware of the consequences of sin.
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1 John 1, verses 8 and 9 says, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
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If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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We need to be very aware of our position in Christ, the ramifications of sin, of unconfessed sin, and where we stand in light of sin in our lives.
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We are called to have a continual attitude of repentance. And we talked about repentance, I don't know, last week or the week before, something like that.
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So when we look at sanctification, when we look at this process where we necessarily have a role, we can look at these five things that MacArthur's drawn out here out of this one verse and really get a good understanding of our position.
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And then when we look at Philippians 2, verse 13, we can see five key features about God that remind us of his work within us.
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And the first one is his person. It's a very
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Pastor Mike thing. The first point is the first word, God. There is no more holy, more perfect, more powerful, more complete, more able, more holy one than God.
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He is the true and living God of the Scriptures. Everything that we know about him we have in the Scriptures. And as a
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Christian, we know that he is at work, the creator of the universe is at work inside of us with an incorruptible love, so much so that we can't even fathom.
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I think sometimes about my kids and how much I love my kids. And Elliot came out this morning, and he was wearing a waistcoat and a tie, and little kid pants,
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I don't know, they were like dress pants, and his little shoes. And he just kind of came out, and I was like, man, I sure love that kid. Because he was obeying, that was helpful.
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But the love that we have for our children is, when we think of the idea of the cup overflowing, we can really imagine that when we think of how much we love our children, and yet the love that God has for us is so much more than that.
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It's something that we cannot even fathom. It is unfathomable.
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We can also look at his power. He is at work within us. He is actively working within us.
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He never tires. He's always working. He's always doing these things. And he has this incredible ability to focus all of his attention on all things at one time.
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It is something that we can't comprehend. Right? I mean, this morning
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I'm pouring coffee. I can't listen to your question because I'm pouring coffee in my mug. You need to wait.
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Right? But for God, God can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. Colossians 129,
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Paul says something interesting. With regards to presenting everyone mature in Jesus Christ, he says,
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For this I toil, struggling with all his energy, that he powerfully works within me.
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If you look at the life of Paul, and if you look at the three missionary journeys of Paul, it is difficult to imagine a human being who could do all of that.
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And certainly God was lifting him up and preserving him and keeping him going. And so he was struggling with God's energy.
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And I touched on this already, but the third thing on here is his presence. Right? God dwells within us.
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If we look at the verse, we can see, For it is God who works in you.
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We see Jesus Christ sends the spirit to us to be with us forever.
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1 Corinthians 3, verse 13 talks about the spirit of God within us. We know the spirit of God intercedes for us.
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His indwelling spirit works within us in the process of sanctification to perfect us.
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The book of Galatians, which gives me comfort sometimes because Paul is so frustrated with the actions of the Galatian church, and yet they're a body of believers.
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Paul says in chapter three, Are you so foolish having begun by the spirit?
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Are you now being perfected by the flesh? God's presence is within us.
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Number four, we can look at his purpose both to will and to work. As we have responsibility to understand what
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God is doing for us, we need to understand he's actively working within us to will and to work for his glory.
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When it talks about this, this isn't... I think we talk about this sometimes in the context of giving, where we need to purpose to give, and not to just be like,
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Oh, the plate's coming, let me see what I have in my wallet. Okay, I'll throw something in there, we're good to go. But when it talks about this idea of to will and to work, it is a purpose -driven will focused on an endgame to bring glory to Jesus Christ, to bring honor to Jesus Christ.
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A godly will with a godly focus produces godly work. And as we purpose to give glory to God and to honor
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God with our will, the works that come from us are by consequence godly. MacArthur writes about this, he says,
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It cannot be overemphasized that only God can produce in believers the will or the work that he commands of them.
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James notes that every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the
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Father of lights. Just as believers are not saved by good works but wholly by God's grace working through their faith, so also they are sanctified by his grace working through their obedience.
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They are God's workmanship. And the fifth thing is that we are his workmanship for his good pleasure.
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A lot of the struggle that the unbelieving world has with Christianity is because the unbelieving world is a man -centered world.
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And it's understandable, right? It's wrong, but it's understandable. But we know that everything in this world is for the glory of God.
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Everything in this galaxy, in this whatever, hyper -cluster,
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I don't know what all the astronomy terms are, but everything exists for the glory of God.
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The sovereign God of the universe takes personal pleasure in what he himself inspires and empowers his redeemed children to do.
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Sanctification takes effort from us. It takes work from us, yet it is still dependent on God's power.
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It's hard to understand this idea that God is sovereign and man is responsible, but it is clear in Scripture that it is so.
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And it is something that I think that we will never really understand until we get to heaven. Any questions so far?
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We're getting close to the end. Does sanctification ever end? I have a yes. Do I have any dissenters?
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Yes. Does it ever end on earth? And so I mentioned before that Grudem kind of has these three stages of sanctification.
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And the first one is that it begins with regeneration. And the second one is this process throughout our life where we become more and more sanctified.
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And the third one is ultimately this end in glorification when we die, when we are absent from the body but present with the
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Lord. And we know that nothing unclean will ever enter into the presence of God or enter into heaven.
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And so we know that at that point our souls will be glorified. And I know it kind of looks like I'm skipping over perseverance on the outline.
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I promise I'm not. All three of these things at the point of death really kind of all come together at the same time.
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And so we'll sort of talk about perseverance and glorification together in the four minutes that I have left.
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Philippians 3, 20 and 21 says, But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the
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Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like our glorious body by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself.
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We know that he will glorify us. And perseverance and glorification really are extensions of sanctification.
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We must persevere until the end, until we are glorified. True sanctification is rooted in perseverance because of the conviction that God puts within us.
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It's not ever something that we stop doing. We don't ever stop becoming more sanctified.
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Again, going back to Paul writing to the Philippian church, he says this, Chapter 3, verse 8,
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Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my
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Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain
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Christ and be found in him. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.
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That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible
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I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this, or already am perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
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Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,
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I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
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Jesus says in the book of Matthew, whoever endures to the end will be saved. John 10,
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Pastor Steve was just preaching through John 10, talks about the Father's hand. What does it say about those of us who are in the hand of God?
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No one, nothing can snatch us out of the Father's hand, not even ourselves. In order for us to be saved we must persevere to the end, and so in concert with that the idea that not even we can take ourselves out of the hand of God the
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Father is a very comforting thing. The book of Hebrews tells us to persevere in light of our full assurance of faith.
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Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
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Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
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I think we sort of, again with the mental sort of games, or really thinking through these thought experiments, we think through this idea of, well,
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I know Adam ate the fruit, but what would I do if I were in his place, right? We've all thought this question, don't tell me you haven't thought this question, come on.
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What's the answer? We would have done the same thing, right? We want to tell ourselves that we wouldn't, but we would have done the same thing.
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And similarly, we don't need to worry about other people causing us to fall away, because if we're going to fall away, it's going to be us that are going to do it.
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And the temptation that is within us, in the flesh, is far more powerful than anything that anybody else can do to us or say to us or whatever, and so we don't need to live our lives as Christians paranoid that someone is going to cause us to fall away from God, but rather to be aware that it is our own self and our own sinful heart that is more likely to pull us away from him.
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And so in light of that, we can be comforted by passages like John 10, that refer to the perseverance of the saints through the outpouring of God's power.
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It's driven by the power of God, by reliance on him and by trust in his word. He keeps us in his hand.
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We don't keep ourselves in God's hand, he keeps us in his hand. And even though we are commanded and instructed to persevere until death, when we are glorified, we know that it is through his power that we are able to do that.
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Glorification is what happens to us after we die. God changes us into a glorified believer in heaven.
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And I think at this point, the only takeaway from that that I'll give you is to remember that our souls are glorified when we die, our bodies will be glorified when he returns.
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The scripture talks about the resurrected body after the return of Jesus Christ. And so from a doctrinal perspective,
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I guess that's the one point I'll draw out of that. I think that we have a healthy anticipation for glorification, especially as we get older.
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I turned 35 on Friday, I'm old. I feel it every day, especially with kids.
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I am looking forward to the return of Jesus Christ. So in light of this, as we,
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I guess, come to the end of the study and the end of our time here, I just want to leave you with this. This is the testimony of Paul writing to Timothy near the end of Paul's life.
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He says, for I am already being poured out as a drink offering and the time of my departure has come.
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I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. Henceforth, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the
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Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day. And not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing.
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Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this study. It is so wonderful to look to your word to understand how it all works together.
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Lord, I just pray that this has been a beneficial study. I pray that you would use what we have worked through to help us to understand you better.
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Help us, Father, to earnestly desire to work out our salvation in fear and trembling that we might see you on that day.
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Watch over us as we worship you today and as we go home and go about our lives this week.