1 Corinthians - 07-12-10

No Compromise Radio Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author,

Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the

Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the Scriptures, verse by verse with no compromise.

You have your Bibles turned to Hosea chapter 13 where it was said of people who worship a false image of Yahweh, they're kissing a cow.

They're kissing a cow. Hosea chapter 13 sets the scene.

The kingdom has been split, the northern kingdom, the southern kingdom, and Jeroboam is the king of the north.

Problem is if you want to go and worship, you've got to go to Jerusalem which would be in the south and you'd lose your people.

So how can you as a wily king keep your people in the north? Well you can't have a new temple there so you have a cow manufactured in Dan and you have another cow manufactured and you put it in Bethel.

And instead of going all the way down to Jerusalem to worship, you can go to Yahweh God and worship him except he now looks like a cow.

If you'd ask Jeroboam, that's idolatry, Jeroboam would say no it's not, that's

Yahweh the cow, that's Yahweh the calf, and we're not worshipping some idol, we're worshipping

Yahweh. Just like when we talk to people today, you can't worship those statues, that's false worship.

No we're not worshipping the statues, we're worshipping God. If you take a look at the passage in Hosea chapter 13,

Hosea chapter 13, it says in verse 1, when Ephraim spoke there was trembling, he exalted himself in Israel, but through Baal he did wrong and died.

And now they sin more and more and make for themselves molten images, idols skillfully made from their silver, all of them the work of craftsmen.

They say of them, let the men who sacrifice, this sacrifice of humans under Baal, let the men who sacrifice kiss the calves.

They kiss cows. I'm quite convinced in evangelicalism today, the

God that many people worship isn't the God of the scriptures, it's more like a cow.

Oh they'll say it's God, they'll say it's a triune God, some of them will actually be believers, but the

God they worship is not the God found in the scriptures. You want to see the

God who's found in the scriptures? Go to Hosea chapter 14, Hosea chapter 14, verse 4.

This sentence in verse 4, Spurgeon said, is a body of divinity in miniature.

This is theology in miniature. If you want to take all the Bible theology about who

God is, focus on this verse. Spurgeon said, he who understands this verse is a theologian.

You want to be a theologian, you understand this verse. You want to make sure you're not bowing down to kiss some cow.

I've been to different countries in Africa and India, and I've seen them worship and bow down and kiss statues, and we'd all say that is horrible.

Well I don't want to be the kind of person that bows down to a God who's not found in scripture, but he's a manufacturer of my own idea.

Spurgeon said, if you understand this verse, it's a body of divinity in miniature.

You understand it, you'll be a theologian, and he who can dive into its fullness is a true master of divinity.

It takes you three years to go to seminary to be a master of divinity. If you can get this, you'll be there, and you'll no longer bow down to kiss some kind of cow

God who's not found in scripture, a God who's just manufactured in your own mind, manufactured by the culture.

If you get this verse, you get it all. Hosea 14, I will heal their apostasy, and now here's the phrase

I want you to get. This is God speaking, I will love them freely.

I will love them freely. I will love them freely.

No compulsion, no external pressure, no inducements found by anyone else, by my own free, sovereign love,

I will love sinners. That's who God is. We do something in our lives, and then we expect somebody to respond.

God with free, sovereign love loved these people, and he loves people today the same way.

I will love them freely. We've had four children, and every time,

Kim has been late in the term and in pregnancy, and so it's about 10 days later, and we have to go in, and they'll say, all right, tomorrow you show up at the hospital at 7 o 'clock in the morning, and we will what?

Induce. We will give an artificial substance that will start the contractions, and what they gave my wife, at least, was

Pitocin, and we will induce labor. Spurgeon says this, if you'd like to understand

God, if you want to grasp who God is, then you better make sure you get rid of any kind of God that has a love for people that is induced by who they are, what they've done, that there's no reason for God to love us.

Found in us, found in the environment, God has loved his people forever and for always freely, out of his own free will.

Matter of fact, that verse there in Hosea chapter 14, verse 4, that Hebrew word there is where we get the word free will offering.

You won't find free will in the Bible any place except for a free will offering, and used here, I will of my own free will love them.

You don't understand the God of the Bible until you get this picture, that God with no inducements, with no external compulsion, with nothing except his own good pleasure, loves people.

He doesn't look down some corridor of time to see what you might have done. God's love is eternal. He has loved before there's a corridor of time.

God is the eternal God. He's the immutable God, and he loves people freely.

Perfect spontaneity, no restraint, no constraint. It's a free love.

Growing up in the 60s, free love was something else. Free love was with no moral restraint.

Free love here is the free love of God without any kind of constraint or restraint from anyone or any person.

And when you get to heaven, you will not get to heaven and sing with the angels and the saints anything except,

God, you freely loved me. Because if you would, the angels would, this is just a hypothetical, but if you were to say,

God, I'm here because I believed, because I was faithful, I repented, I did all these things apart from you, you kind of helped me along the way, and I did them, and I take responsibility for getting myself into heaven.

The angels would throw you over the gates of heaven if you would say something like that. And I think that evangelicalism is kissing, and that cow is a cow that says, that they say is

God, but it's a God who can't do anything without the permission of man, bound by man.

You say, what does this have to do with 1 Corinthians? It has everything to do with 1

Corinthians, because the reason why we're harping and going on and on about the

God who calls Christians is because you need to have the right view of God so you worship the

God of the Bible and not. If you go to Israel with us, we probably this year won't go to Bethlehem, because when we go to Bethlehem, you go down into this church, and you go down to this building, and then on the very bottom floor, there's this star, and this is the place where Jesus was supposedly born.

And it's just rubbed smooth with the lips and the saliva of cow worshipers, bending down, bowing down, genuflecting down, kissing this star, kissing this, for what?

I don't know. I just thought, I don't, I've had enough cow kissing in my life.

Tozer was right. The most important thing about you is what comes into your mind when you hear the

Word. And if you can get your arms wrapped around this revelation from God that says

God loves people freely, you'll understand

God. You'll understand His sovereignty, His immutability, His eternality. God loves people freely.

And now let's go to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, where we're focusing on this love called in 1

Corinthians, the call. The call. We say, oh, what you're calling in life,

I'm a missionary, I've been called. But when it comes to Paul and his New Testament epistle definition for calling, it's

God with free love calling people to Himself and making them alive.

You say, pastor, you've been going on and on about this because you must think the call is important. Yes, I do.

Just take a look at chapter 1 alone. Have you ever connected the dots? Chapter 1 of 1 Corinthians, verse 1,

Paul called by the will of God. 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 2, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, what's the next word?

Called saints, called to be saints. Verse 9, same chapter. God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of his son.

And verse 24 of 1 Corinthians chapter 1, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

The reason why some people worship trees and the other people worship the

God who was killed on a tree is because God called them. The people who now say,

I don't want to worship trees anymore. I want to worship my Messiah who was hung on a tree. Only do that because God called them out of his free love.

He has loved them freely. So that's why we're focusing on it. That's why it's turned into an extended series.

My wife tells me that this is the church of the two -parter. And so we're many parts to this because it's so crucial.

And you know Paul being at Corinth for 18 months would teach them of the free spontaneous love of God.

I've loved them freely. Paul says in chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, we can't have division.

And if you think of the cross properly, you think of wisdom properly, you'll all think along the same line and line right up underneath that thinking.

Unless God intervenes of his own free will with his own free love, everyone would say to themselves, the cross is stupid.

It's foolish. Look at verse 22. Before we get to our outline today, 1 Corinthians 1, 22, for indeed the

Jews asked for signs. We want to seek some kind of child prodigy, some kind of, you know, make the mountain turn upside down.

We want some kind of sign, manna from heaven. And the Greeks searched for wisdom.

But Paul said in verse 23, but we preach, we proclaim.

This isn't sharing. This isn't kind of talking. This is, here's my message to you, town crier, hear ye, hear ye,

Christ, the Messiah, what? Crucified. And the emphasis in the

Greek is on the word crucified, the crucified Christ. And how do these people respond without God calling them?

To the Jews' stumbling block and to the Gentiles' foolishness. I mean, really, how are you going to be saved by someone who can't save himself?

How are you going to be saved by someone who Isaiah says was despised and forsaken of men? This doesn't sound like a rescuer to me, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and like one from whom men hide their face.

He was despised and we did not esteem him. Our sorrows he carried, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.

Oh yeah, that guy who just gets crucified naked on the tree. He must have done something wrong because he's getting his due now.

How can anyone say the cross is now lovely, that Jesus is God? Verse 24, but to those who are the called, called by God's free love, both

Jews and Greeks, Christ now, who used to be weak, is now the power of God.

Christ who used to be foolishness is the wisdom of God. Because verse 25, don't miss this, because the foolish thing, that is the cross, is wiser than men.

And the weak thing of God, the cross, is stronger than man.

You want to see the greatest exhibition of power in the universe?

It looked like Jesus was weak on the cross, but he was powerful. So we've been talking a little bit about the call.

Today we'll finish our message, Lord willing, about the call, the effectual call. Remember, when we preach the gospel, we give a general call.

Repent. If you're not a Christian here today, you ought to repent of your sins. You must believe in Christ Jesus.

You must believe in his provision made for sinners at Calvary, Jesus Christ who died for sins and was raised from the dead.

There is hope in no one else. You must believe. That is a general call. And that was enough, by the way, for Adam.

Before Adam fell, only a general call was needed to Adam. Adam obey, Adam name these animals,

Adam, you know, work in the garden. That was fine. But when the nature of Adam was corrupted by the fall, something more needed to be done.

You could not just tell Adam now, here's what I want you to do, because he was unable spiritually to respond to God.

Oh, he could make decisions on what to eat and what to wear, but he could not do what God asked him to do because of the fall.

So now we have something called the effectual call. The general call is repent. People can say, no,

I don't want to repent. And now there's the effectual call where the spirit of God comes along, like with Lydia in Acts chapter 16, and then opens the heart of the sinner.

And that's the call here in the New Testament epistles. Every time in the New Testament epistles you see the word called, it's the second call, the effectual call.

Here's a good definition of the effectual call. According to A .A.

Hodge, that is an exercise of the divine power upon the soul, immediate, spiritual and supernatural, communicating a new spiritual life and thus making a new mode of spiritual activity possible.

The repentance, faith, trust, hope, love, etc. are purely and simply the sinner's own acts.

But as such are possible to him only in virtue of the change wrought in the moral condition of his faculties by the recreative power of God.

Matthew 2 says Christ was called out of Egypt. It's the same kind of thinking. Jesus wasn't called out of Egypt by someone going,

Jesus, time to leave Egypt. Everybody come. No, it was the effectual call. It wasn't just an invitation where God pulls, brings

Jesus up out of Egypt. He ushers him out. That's the effectual call. And so we started a series last week, just let me give you reasons why you should marvel at God.

Reasons you should worship God because of his effectual call. That you should stand in awe of him.

The best way I could describe it, I guess for an outline, is with Roman candles. Roman candles, fireworks.

Have you ever played with fireworks? Lay on ground, light fuse, get away. But it's fun to hold a Roman candle like that by the stick, you know, because you could, this was like pre -Star

Wars, you know, lightsaber kind of thing, and you could get the eight -shot Roman candle, and you'd hold it, and it would go, boom.

I don't want you to hold fireworks. I don't even think you can buy fireworks here, can you? Sparklers are illegal.

Okay, don't get me going. I gladly submit to the sparkler rule, externally.

Now, Roman candles aren't that big a deal now, because we see these fireworks displays.

But I love going to hear people at fireworks displays. I like seeing them, but I like hearing the people, and the people do this after every big explosion.

What do they do? Ooh. You guys, you know, if this was another kind of church,

I'd say, turn to the person to your left and say, ooh. These could be several oohs, if you will, to stand back and look at God and to gawk and to gaze and say, it's his free love.

He didn't owe it to anyone. Grace by definition means he doesn't owe it. We in evangelicalism are so caught up in works, merit.

God can do this as long as we do that. And the first ooh, if you will, reason why you should marvel at God is, is that effectual call of God teaches that God is sovereign over the human heart.

We dwelt on that a long time last week, that God is not going to be stopped in his sovereign hand by sinful, finite man.

He does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, with hearts to harden, our hearts to open. For the will to stop

God means that the will of God must be superior to God in power or equal to God in power, and neither one of those could be true.

God does not bow to the will of man. He does not kowtow to the will of man. There's nothing greater than God, and therefore he is sovereign over the will.

Number two, I think we only got to one last week. Number two, you should marvel at God because God's effectual call teaches that God is sovereign over the salvation of sinners.

God is sovereign over the salvation of sinners. Thomas Arnold said, the

Puritan, the distinction between Christianity and all other systems of religion consists largely in this.

You want to know the difference between Christianity and every other religion? That in these other religions, men are found seeking after God, while Christianity is

God seeking after men. That's right. And God's sovereign. Please turn with me, if you would, to James chapter 1.

We're going to go on a little detour on some of these marvels. James chapter 1.

You need to get James chapter 1, 17 and 18 down pat. You need to turn there often and regularly, and so we're going to take a look at whose will is responsible for the salvation of sinners.

Whose sovereign? And James is going to do something very interesting. James is going to say, the way

I want you to think about God's sovereign recreation of the human heart should be thought along the same lines as how

God made the world. How did God make the world? He made it freely, spontaneously, out of nothing, with no cooperation from the stars.

And the way God makes the universe is the way God makes sinners Christians. Of his own free will, of his own sovereign pleasure.

He didn't have to do it. He didn't owe them anything. And look at how James does this. Just earlier, people were saying, you know, maybe

I should blame God for my temptation. And James says, don't blame God for temptation.

Everything good comes from God. Verse 17, every good thing bestowed and every, look at the supreme generosity, and every perfect gift is from above.

God gives everything, holds back nothing. Anything that you've received, you've received from God. Coming down from the father of lights, just wonderful Hebrew -influenced

Greek language, with whom there is no variation, our shifting shadow.

God's will alone creates the moon, the sun, the stars, and the universe. As I just said a moment ago, no cooperation, no inducements, no constraints, no have -tos, no musts.

God, out of nothing, creates with his word. Verse 18, in the exercise of his will.

Now, you've read this before, but if you're like I am and you stop for a second and not read any farther, you'd anticipate

James say, in the exercise of his will, he made the sun and the moon and the stars and all these things he talked about in verse 17.

But now he changes. In the exercise of his will, his free love, his sovereign love, he brought us forth by the word of truth.

He creates the universe with the word. He creates new life with the word, his own sovereign pleasure.

He does it so that we might be, as it were, the first fruits among his creation. The word for choose in Greek is having purposed.

He chose, just like the creation of the stars. There was nothing in the stars because they didn't exist.

And in God's eternal love, there was nothing in us because we didn't exist, yet he put his love on us.

His decree before the foundation of the world, according to Ephesians.

You see the text, verse 18? He chose to give us birth. He doesn't tempt, he gives birth.

Divine fiat created the world and by divine fiat, he creates new life in a sinner.

That's why Jesus called that in John chapter 3, everyone who is born of the spirit.

Think of Lazarus, the same kind of thing. Lazarus, come what? Forth. And as one scholar said, good thing he said

Lazarus, otherwise everybody in that cemetery would have got up. Lazarus, come forth by his own pleasure, by his own decree, with no inducements, no constraints, no restraints, no have tos.

Jesus says, Lazarus, come forth. That is a good physical picture of what's going on here spiritually.

Lydia, you're a pagan worshiper, come forth, be alive.

Paul, the Christian killer, be alive. I'm so glad this is true, because it affects our relationship with the

Lord so we can trust him. It'd be one thing to think, I know he loves me, but what if he's not sovereign in control?

I know he's powerful enough, but what if he doesn't control everything by his own will? No, saints have always said to themselves, the sovereignty of God gives me comfort.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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