A Response to Jim Wallis Pt4

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the word of God and the doctrines of grace.

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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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And welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Today is August the 27th, 2020 and if you're following along in our daily Bible reading, you're going to be reading today from Acts chapter 26.

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Please remember to read the chapter well, go through, observe the text, interpret the text and apply the text.

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And if you have questions about the text, feel free to send me an email or you can go to our website, sgfcjacks.org.

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That is Sovereign Grace Family Church in Jacksonville, sgfcjacks.org.

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Look under our sermons and we have an entire series that I did preaching through the book of Acts, preaching verse by verse.

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You can go there and you can see our sermons on the chapter Acts 26 and listen to those if you have questions about what you're reading.

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And again, if you are in the Jacksonville area, I want to take a moment to invite you to come and visit with us on an upcoming Lord's Day morning.

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We have Sunday school at 930 and we have worship service at 1030.

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Well today we're going to be concluding a four-part series that we have done responding to the words of Jim Wallace.

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Now Jim Wallace is an American theologian, writer and political activist.

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As I have said in the previous episodes, he was a spiritual advisor to President Barack Obama.

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He is often associated with the evangelical left and the wider Christian left.

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He is a leader in the Red Letter Christian movement.

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I don't know a whole lot about Mr.

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Wallace.

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This video came to me through a news feed.

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It was put out by NowThis, which is a website which puts out a lot of videos on social issues.

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And Mr.

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Wallace has made the point through this, if you've listened for the last three days, he has made the point through this to come and speak against anyone who would support Donald Trump and essentially those who would be on the right or conservative side.

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He would say that we are supporting the policies that are anti-Christ and that's not my language.

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That's the language that he chose to use.

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He has said in his own words that there's more to vote against than abortion and same sex marriage.

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And he says we should be concerned with climate change.

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That was one of the issues that he brought up.

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He says we should be concerned with mistreatment at the border and we should be concerned with LGBTQ and we should be concerned with the people who are having abortions and we should understand that all of these people are made in the image of God and they deserve to be treated with unconditional love.

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And so, again, I understand why his message is very popular, especially with those on the left, but as a pastor who feels that it is important that we offer another perspective on this, I wanted to allow you to hear Mr.

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Wallace's statements and respond to them and that's what we've done over the course of the last three days and today is the final day.

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Now we've only got half a minute of video left and so I'm going to start back a little bit before where we ended last time just to pick up the context of what he's saying.

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I'm going to let it go to the end.

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I'm going to make my final comments.

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Today's episode may be shorter, but that is okay because I've run long on my previous episodes so this will give you an opportunity to wrap this up and then, of course, tomorrow being Friday, I'm going to finish the week with a new segment on Coffee with a Calvinist.

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I'm going to try on Fridays to start providing a book review and to go along with what we have studied this week, tomorrow I'm going to be providing a book review of The Gathering Storm by Dr.

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Al Mohler of Southern Seminary because Dr.

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Mohler comes from the opposite side of Dr.

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Wallace.

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He comes from the conservative side and Dr.

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Mohler has many things to say that would not only reject but repudiate what Wallace has said in these statements that he has made in this very short video.

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So let's start.

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I'm going to start the audio.

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You'll hear for a second, you're going to hear it come up and then we'll jump over to the five-minute mark.

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To be a Christian is more ...

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Okay, I'm jumping to five minutes and I'm just going to start at the five-minute mark and let it play and I've already dealt with up to five-minute thirty so this is just going to give us a context going in.

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Beloved by God, all human life, whether at the border or in the womb, has dignity.

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Furthermore, women who have abortions are beloved by God.

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We have to go deeper in our thinking about how we protect the vulnerable.

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There are 2,000 verses in the Bible about the poor, 2,000.

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Jesus tells us that the most important people are the ones he called the least of these, even while they are the least important ones in our politics today.

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Doesn't the church want to be remembered for its unconditional love for all ...

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I want to stop right there and I hate to have to jump in on this part because a lot of people would say, Amen, the church should be known for its unconditional love.

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Not exactly.

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The church is to be known for its love but here's a couple things to consider.

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One, the church is to be an institution of truth and how you define unconditional love, especially from Mr.

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Wallace's perspective, is almost always to, in some way, form or fashion, give up a very important truth and one of those truths is that we are to identify and repent of sin.

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We are to call sin by its name, that we are not to call good evil and evil good and that's often what happens.

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And so, right away when we hear him saying that the church should want to be known for unconditional love, I will tell you this, I believe Sovereign Grace Family Church is a loving congregation.

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I believe we are a congregation that welcomes people in and I have seen us welcome people.

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We have welcomed many different people from many different walks of life, poor and rich.

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We have welcomed people that were in all kinds of stages of situations, single parents, families, broken homes.

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We have welcomed people in and we have loved them and we have sought to minister to them but one of the ways that we minister to people is by telling them the truth.

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And if we are not willing to speak the truth, then we are not showing love.

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And the idea of unconditional love is certainly that we would not hold out a condition but at the same time we wouldn't hold out a condition to demonstrate love but the church is supposed to first and foremost love one another.

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Jesus said by this will all men know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

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And so the church first and foremost has a responsibility to love the brethren.

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This goes back to what I said yesterday about Jesus said the least of these my brethren.

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There is a reality where the love within the brethren is supposed to take precedence over the love for those in the world.

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Even though we are to love our enemies and we are to love those in the world, the love within the church and the love among the brethren is supposed to be primary.

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And this is very clear in passages even where the apostle Paul would say given the opportunity to offend an outsider or offend a brother, we would have to offend the outsider because our first allegiance is to those within the church.

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Our first allegiance is to believers.

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And so the concept of we want to be known for unconditional love, what that means, what that means is we want to be known for unconditional acceptance of sin and we cannot be known for that.

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We cannot be known for unconditional acceptance of sin.

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We just can't do it.

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People, how do we find our way forward together? Elections are very important but winning an election isn't enough.

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It's time to not just go left or right but go deeper, allowing our faith and our values See he says don't go left or right but go deeper.

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But if you've listened to this video and you've listened with ears to hear what you have heard is he is espousing all of the things that are leftist.

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Not just love of people that are downtrodden, not just love of least of these but climate change.

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He has made an issue of that because that is one of the central issues of the left because it establishes that businesses and corporations are evil and they're the ones that are destroying the planet.

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Therefore they have to be governed by an all powerful government and it's a pushing for a more of a more bureaucratic control over the government or over the businesses by the government.

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And so when he says we don't go left, we go right, we go deeper, that sounds good but it doesn't really fit with what he said.

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He has been espousing a clearly leftward trajectory throughout this video and I just think it's important to point that out.

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Determine our politics rather than the other way around is a great place to start.

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Alright so that ends the video.

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I want to hear that last, just that last ten seconds again, make sure I didn't miss anything there.

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It's time to not just go left or right but go deeper.

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Allowing our faith and our values to determine our politics rather than the other way around is a great place to start.

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Now I would agree with that and I would agree with that we should not let our politics determine our faith but we should have our faith determine our politics but I think the very same accusations that he is making against the right could be easily made back at him.

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It's obvious that his politics have directed his faith.

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It is obvious that his politics, his leftward leaning politics have had him, he has a view of Jesus, that Jesus was a leftist radical and that's his understanding.

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Jesus would march with Antifa, Jesus would march with BLM, that's who Jesus was, this is the kind of person Jesus was and so he has allowed himself to see a picture of Jesus through the lens of his political understanding and he is accusing someone else of doing the same thing.

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He is accusing those on the right of doing the same thing.

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And again I want to clarify because if I haven't been clear enough already I want to be clear now.

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I am not in this podcast supporting everything that our president does.

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I do think that there are things that the president does that are wrong and I think that some of his attitudes are wrong.

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I think that his spiritual advisors I have noted have been ungodly people.

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I believe Paula White is a spiritual advisor to President Donald Trump and she is an awful heretic and so I am willing to say that there are things about Donald Trump that are that I do not support and would not support.

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But at the same time if one says well your faith is your politics are determining your faith I would say no my faith is primary because my faith is focused on what I think matters and the things that matter one is truth, the ability to speak the truth, the ability to have the freedom to speak the truth and to do so without the fear of reprisal from the government.

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And I am going to tell you something the left is not about that.

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From what I have seen those especially on the far left are more interested in closing the mouths of their political and ideological dissidents.

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They don't want to hear it.

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On college campuses which are very liberal they don't want to allow conservative speakers they don't want to allow people with other opinions to come on campus and have those conversations and so I lean towards those who would support the freedom of speech.

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Even if it is speech I don't want to hear because that is the idea of freedom of speech because when freedom of speech is recognized then ideas of all types are spoken and the truth is allowed to be broadcast the truth is allowed to be proclaimed and so there is a reason why I consider myself to be a conservative.

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There is a reason why I would say that I support conservative causes and are those reasons abortion and same sex marriage? Well that is a big part of it I am not going to lie because that is a road too far.

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You are going to tell me that the murder of babies is not enough to make you have to judge your opinion.

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You are going to tell me that that is not enough.

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We have killed I believe the last number I saw 60 million infants in the womb since Roe versus Wade.

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That is enough to say there is no way we can support that.

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When I see a candidate get up and say I support the right of a woman to choose and that right must be unfettered.

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What I hear him saying is I support the right of people to murder children in the womb and I am never going to support that.

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Jim Wallace as I said I don't know the man personally.

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I never met him and will probably never meet him but I felt the need to respond to this.

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I am sure many more people saw his video than will hear this podcast but my podcast this week has been dedicated to responding to what he had to say and I encourage you if you haven't listened to the other three episodes go back and listen to them in a row.

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You will be able to hear everything that he said.

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I played it in its entirety and now you have the opportunity as the listener to judge what he has said, judge by what I have responded.

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But please know this.

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It is not as if he is coming from neutrality and I am coming from the right side.

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No he is coming clearly from the left side.

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He is definitely lifting up a leftist cause and he is painting Jesus with a brush.

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He is creating a caricature of Jesus and saying this is what Jesus looks like.

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He looks like me and Jesus looks like a leftist radical liberal and that is not the case.

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That is not the biblical case.

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Did Jesus say things that could be understood from that perspective? Yes but when looked at as a whole Jesus taught the word of God is the truth.

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That Jesus taught that we are to repent of our sins and trust in him.

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Jesus taught that we are to forsake sin, to pick up our cross and follow him.

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These are not the things that you hear from those on the left.

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And so I would encourage you to consider that.

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Who is Jesus really? Jesus was and is God in the flesh.

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He is God the son.

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To misrepresent Christ is a dangerous road to go down.

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So this ends my response to Jim Wallace.

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I hope that the last four days have been encouraging.

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Trying to show you how to civilly and respectfully respond to someone.

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I think that I have tried to do that as best as I could.

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I hope that it has been an encouragement to you our listeners.

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Again thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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I look forward to seeing you as we end the week tomorrow on our Friday program.

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Where I am going to be doing a book review of The Gathering Storm by Dr.

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Albert Moeller.

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Again thank you for listening to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist.

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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 6.30am on YouTube and Facebook.

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If you enjoyed this lesson, please take a moment to respond by hitting the like button, leaving a comment, and subscribing to the channel.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.

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May God bless you.