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Pastor David Mitchell
Thank you, Maddie, that was beautiful. Thank all of you for the music today, that was fantastic, because one of the things we're gonna talk about today is the joy of the Lord. And it's connected with music in the Bible.
And you know, it's funny, every Sunday is different with a small church, I guess you, it's easier to have sort of a feeling of the mood everybody's in. Big church, you got so many different moods in there, you could never tell.
But this one, it's either kind of pensive and tired, or it's just joyful and gibbering, talking by, you know, 100 miles an hour, and you can't even get their attention. And Dave stands up here and goes, I'm trying to make announcements, you know.
So today, it seems like one of those more somber days. And what's funny is we're gonna talk about the joy of the Lord. I'm thinking, well, everybody is serious today. And it seems to me, but maybe it's just me.
You know, serious, I'm serious today. But it's kind of funny, but you know, it doesn't depend upon our flesh. That's the cool thing about it, is like it's a spiritual gift, and it comes from the Holy Spirit.
And, but Kenner, that was beautiful. I love the simplicity of that. So I was talking about four hands, that one only took two hands. But simplicity is beautiful in music sometimes, and you know that, that's why you switch sometimes.
But good to have you back, Ron. We enjoyed you better than Speaker Pelosi last week. Did you hear about that? Yeah, Speaker Pelosi led singing for us last week. Did a good job, though. Kind of sound like a guy.
All right, we're in Romans chapter 15, verse 15. Good to see everyone today. We're going to dive down into the word of God, because it does not matter what your mood is. When you do that, you benefit.
You climb above this world. You climb above the fears. I mean, even the prayer requests today were heavy, weren't they? Think about that. Think about the specific requests. And I think about the different families involved in these very serious matters.
Brother John, when he was talking about Paul Abraham, his father pastored this church for two years. I was his associate pastor. And Paul is one of the sweetest, most handsome, athletic, brilliant young men.
And I don't know why he had to have brain surgery, but I need to look into that. So I'm going to call Brother John this week. But it's been too long since we've visited, way too long. But, and then a granddaughter with cancer.
I just imagine the weight that he's carrying and all of these prayer requests are so serious. And yet we know the Lord rejoices in answering the prayers and being glorified when we praise him for the answered prayers and the joy that we have when we have a major answered prayer like that.
We've seen those in the life of our church often, and we'll see them yet again. And so let's go down into the word of God today. We'll start with Romans chapter 15, verse 15. Let's pray first. Lord, we ask you to anoint us with your Holy Spirit, anoint your word, speak to us by your spirit today, be our teacher, be the one who draws us to worship through your word.
We ask it in Jesus name, amen. Worship is not a result of something that we do here in this room. Neither is joy, by the way. But worship is not brought about by something that we cause to happen in this room.
If you study the scripture and you see the great revivals in the Bible, many of them you see in the Old Testament times, you will see that they were caused by someone standing and merely reading the word of God all day.
The greatest revival of the Bible is what happened. They just read the Bible. They didn't give the sense of it, but it's not like they're preaching a sermon. They're just reading it. And when they come across a difficult word or something, we give the sense of the word, of what God meant by that phrase, and then keep going all day.
And at the end of the day, revival broke out. So it's the word that brings it, the word of God and the spirit of God that brings it. And we can have revival in our hearts in a somber mood today, or in a joyful mood, doesn't matter.
We may all be dancing by the end of the message here. Who knows? That would be a scare me to death if you do that. And it might be me scaring you. You just don't know. Romans 15, 15, nevertheless, brethren, I have written the more boldly unto you in some sort as putting you in mind because of the grace that is given to me of God, that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, and that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.
And so today we're actually going to get to a point where we see what makes that happen, why it is that the offering of the Gentiles could be acceptable to God. But before we get to that, let's review just a little bit.
We've talked about what some of the sacrifices we as believer priests can give in this day and time on this side of the cross. We don't offer little lambs anymore. So what can we offer? Romans 12, two says we can offer our bodies as a living sacrifice.
Philippians 4, 18 says that our love offerings, when we give money to help other people that are in need, that is an offering unto God and acceptable to Him. Hebrews 13, 15 says praising God with our lips is a sacrifice, an offering to the Lord.
Hebrews 13, 16 says that doing good works and once again, giving, those are sacrifices to the Lord when we do them, led by the Holy Spirit. And then 1 Peter 2, 5 and 1 Peter 2, 9 through 10 and John 4, 22 through 24 talked about the fact that worshiping God is a form of spiritual sacrifice that we can offer.
And we had in last time in 1 Peter 2, I read verse nine and a dear friend of mine that's one of our members from online pointed out a word study he did while I was preaching. And I would criticize him for that because he wasn't listening if he was doing the word study, but I can't do that because I sit back there and do it with you when your son is teaching up here.
So it's great that we have the ability to do that, but I'm glad this one happened because it says, but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. And I was saying that that word in the Greek meant more like holy, different from the world.
And in other places in the New Testament where that word peculiar is used, it does mean that, but this word is a different Greek word, which I didn't catch, my mistake, but I want you to see what it does mean in the context.
It's richer than that. It's amazing actually, because this word peculiar here in 1 Peter 2, 9 is a word that literally means a possession or a purchased people. Now think about that. A purchased people makes you peculiar.
Yeah, it does. It's a pretty good English translation, but it's in the old English. And that word has changed a little bit over time, but peculiar in the sense that your own family, I mean, we wouldn't use this word in modern English, but in the 1600s, if they said, well, I peculiarly love these people because they're in my family, that's what it means.
And that's what the Lord has for us. He loves us in a peculiar way, a close way, because we're his particular children. So I thought that was great. Appreciate that, Brian. That is beautiful. So we learned a little bit about spiritual sacrifices last time.
And I believe that brings us to the seventh way that we can sacrifice to the Lord. And basically it's this, through giving thanks, we've already talked about praise is an offering, but so is Thanksgiving and they're different.
We talked about that already. So they're a little bit different, but Thanksgiving and praise and included in this are gonna be what we'll call sacrifices of joy. And that's why I said what I did about joy a while ago, but you'll see that in this passage.
Think about that, a sacrifice of joy. What can that even mean that that's a sacrifice we can offer up to the Lord being joyful because circumstances don't always make us happy. And when we can be joyful in those circumstances, that is an offering to God, because it's impossible for humans to do that unless they're filled with the Lord, the Holy Spirit walking with Jesus.
So it is a spiritual offering that brings glory to God when we can have joy in the worst circumstances. So we'll see that here. First Psalm 116 verse 17 says, I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving.
So there we see thanksgiving is considered to be a sacrifice to God when we give him thanks. And I will call upon the name of the Lord. And then in Jeremiah 17 verse 26, and they shall come from the cities of Judah and from the places about Jerusalem, bringing sacrifices of praise unto the house of the Lord.
So there we have thanksgiving and praise, both listed as sacrifices that we can give to the Lord. Then in Psalm 27 five, for in the time of trouble, he shall hide me in his pavilion. In the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me.
He shall set me upon a rock. And remember, he's talking about when you're going through trouble is when he will do these things. He will set me upon a rock. Who's the rock? Jesus Christ, right? Peter was the little pebble, little stone, and Jesus was the rock.
And now shall my head be lifted up. Remember, we're still in a time of trouble here, right? Now shall my head be lifted up above my enemies, round about me. Who are our enemies? We know David says, my enemies are many and they hate me with cruel hatred.
But what are our enemies? We have three. Who can name one? The world system. What's another one? The flesh and the other one, the devil, Satan. So he says, and now shall my head be lifted up above my enemies, which are round about me, especially in the case of the flesh, right?
He talking about your enemy being round about you. Isn't that the case? Therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy. Look at the context of that. Joy offered up to God in the midst of our enemies attacking us while we're under attack.
That is perhaps one of the ultimate sacrifices we can give to the Lord, is to show him that we're thankful, we are praising his name, but we're also joyous even in the midst of the attack. And we better be because we're going to be under attack until the rapture.
And the attack is gonna get stronger and stronger until the rapture. And we can't let the news affect our joy. Maybe it can affect our happiness where we're not just bubbling over with outward happiness, but it cannot affect our joy because our joy is an offering up to the Lord.
Now shall my head be lifted above my enemies round about me. Therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy. I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord in his tabernacle. Now that shows us that it is important to meet together.
Let us not forsake the assembly of ourselves together as the manner of some is, and especially as we see the day approaching, what day? The day, which we'll get to that day a little bit later in this message.
And so there we have why it's important because listen, where is it that you can come when the Lord blesses you with a great blessing and you want to praise him and lets people know about an answered prayer.
You come to his meeting place where his people are so you can tell everybody. And that is a sacrifice to the Lord in itself. And so these things are beautiful things that he's given us to be able to offer up to him.
Now that pretty much is what I wanted to cover on those, but now I want to go a little deeper. I want to talk about how it works. Turn with me to Hebrews chapter nine and we'll be in this area for a while.
I think the Lord especially likes it when the little ones offer up praise because they usually lift their hands. Sometimes they're picking their nose when they lift their hands or sucking their fingers, but the Lord loves that even better.
At least grandpas do. And I think we get that from the Lord. All right, Hebrews chapter nine, let's start with about verse eight. And let's talk a little bit about why it is that God himself has made it be so that our meager offerings are sanctified.
Why are they acceptable to God? And why are they a big thing to God? They seem so small to us because we seem to be able to not give God much, right? How can you give the one who owns everything and who's given us everything, anything, right?
But these little things that he's given us are big things to him. And it's nice to know too that the Holy Spirit magnifies our words and takes it into the heavenlies and puts it in the words in the communication mode of the father and expands our meager little adjectives.
That's in the book of Romans, verse eight, where it talks about that, by the way. It's the greatest passage in the whole Bible on prayer in my opinion. But let's look at this. This is amazing information that the Holy Spirit's given us in this world, pinned by human hands, preserved by the power of God unto the last generation, the Bible.
Hebrews 9, eight, the Holy Ghost, this signifying that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest while as the first tabernacle was still standing. Now this goes back and refers to the wilderness tabernacle, which had an outer space for the Gentiles to worship.
It had a middle area where the altars were, where the sacrifices were done, the blood was shed. And then it had the Holy of Holies, the innermost place where only the high priest could go once a year and not without blood, right?
And commune directly with the Shekinah glory, which is not all of God. God, listen, the father does not dwell in time or space. He's not even in the third heaven. Most people think God's in heaven. God's not in heaven because there's time in heaven and wherever God is, time and space and stuff would flee.
It would disappear. So he's outside of it all, the father. Jesus is in heaven and he is at the right hand of power. And the power is signified above the Holy of Holies, which was also in the wilderness tabernacle, a model of it was there.
And the Shekinah glory dwelt above that mercy seat, which was only a mercy seat because the blood had been applied to it. Before that, it was a judgment seat. And the priests dare not go in there without blood.
And he sprinkles the blood on that mercy seat first before he sets foot in there. And then he walks in and he's in the presence of a resemblance of the glory of God. Now it really was God letting a little bit of his glory being seen.
It's not just a resemblance. I shouldn't call it a resemblance. I only mean in that sense that you like, you cannot imagine all of God. Have you looked out at the stars lately? You know, the telescopes we've been able to put in space lately have revealed even more and more galaxies way beyond the ones that we thought were the edge of the universe just in recent five years.
They can't even count the new ones. They couldn't count the old ones. They sure can't count the new ones and the old ones. God is outside of all that, bigger than all that. No, you don't know. That might look like the tip of a pen compared to God's size, all of that.
He's enormous. He's untouchable. He is outside of sin and beyond sin and not anywhere around sin. And yet Jesus is God with us. Jesus is God in time. The Holy Spirit is also, now he is God omnipresent.
And the only place I can figure out where he's not is in the heart of a goat. But anyway, I mean a human goat, but he's everywhere else. And so he can be in time, but he can also go to the father, to the mind.
He's the only one who knows the mind of the father is the Holy Spirit. Read Romans chapter eight and find that passage on prayer. You'll understand what I'm talking about. But so you've got this holiest of places in the wilderness tabernacle where God the father let a little bit of his resplendent glory show through and hover above that model.
It wasn't even the real mercy seat. It's a model of the one that's in heaven, the actual. Now, when we go to heaven and we look at it through the inspiration of the apostle John who was transported there and allowed to see it, we see many things that are amazing.
We see Jesus represented as a lamb with the seven lamps and seven bits of oil, which represents the Holy Spirit attached to Jesus. And you can see them in his eyes when you look at his eyes. And then we see he was at the right hand of the throne of power with the Shekinah glory, that little bit of God that we're allowed to see in heaven, the glory that shines through above that mercy seat, which to me is a vortex that goes out of time and space, wherever you have to say, wherever it's not aware, but where God is.
And there you see the same seven spirits attached to the Father. So the Holy Spirit connects Jesus to the Father, us to Jesus, and all of us to each other. So we're connected to God the Father and can come directly into his presence because of this, because of Jesus and what he's done for us.
So now I want you to think about that. We worry about the news sometimes. I only watch it. I don't watch it. I only read it because I have to, because of stock market stuff, I have to know, and it takes me into stuff I don't even want to be reading sometimes, but you can't really let it get you down.
I mean, you look at a little puny thing like Nancy Pelosi, for example. Imagine as far as you can see out into the universe and a God who that could be tiny to him, obviously it is. He's outside it, beyond it, all around it, all in it, all through it.
He's all in all. And he's the one who's in control of all that. And you, because of your relationship with Jesus can go out there into his presence there in unison. That's awesome. You see, I was wrong when I said we didn't have the joy of the Lord today because the little ones are bringing it to us.
So when you see this where it says, in the way to the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, even when they had the model and the high priest could walk in there and see what to him looked like the glory of the father.
And it was a little tiny bit of the father showing through this vortex thing, however that works into different higher dimensions where God is. And he could go in there with the blood of the lamb, which represented whose blood?
Jesus's blood. And it was a representation. And then verse eight begins to speak of the real mercy seat in heaven that John saw where Christ is at the right hand of power. And he speaks of that. And he says that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest.
You couldn't get there yet before the cross. Even the Jews who had died and gone to Abraham's bosom were not allowed into the place to see the real holy of holies yet because the blood had not yet been given for them or us yet.
And then as soon as Jesus gave his blood for three days, he went down and preached. I don't know if he's there the whole three days, but he preached to those saved Jews that were in Abraham's bosom in the center of this earth, by the way.
And he then took the blood and presented it, sprinkled it on that mercy seat, the real one, and then went back and got those Jews and took them to heaven for the first time. So they're in heaven now, but they weren't.
They were in Abraham's bosom, which was paradise. And God gave them a beautiful place to be in, but now they're able to be in heaven. But when this time that verse eight speaks of, they weren't yet able to do it.
The holiest of all was not yet manifest while the old wilderness tabernacle yet stood. So in the times of the Jews, they could only see the representation. That's what I see in verse eight. Verse nine, which was a figure.
Now this word figure, I better find my glasses. This word figure in the Greek is parabola, which sounds like parable, doesn't it? English word comes from that. It means a similitude, something similar.
It comes from a smaller Greek word that means to throw alongside, two Greek words actually, to throw alongside. So it gets the contact, the component of a comparison of two things that are alongside one another and they're similar and one can kind of depict the other.
And that's where we get this meaning. But it really means to liken to something else or to compare to something else, but it's like a model of the real thing. A model of the real thing. So this wilderness tabernacle that had the holiest place with a curtain that divided everyone from the priest and the Lord.
And the priest was only in there one day a year. That is a figure of the real one that's in heaven, you see? So this all was a figure for the time that was present back in the Old Testament days during the laws of Moses, during the time of Moses, I should say, in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices.
Now, listen though, this is where the legalist gets in trouble because the legalist likes to focus on the things that God has them to do that picture the real thing. And they don't focus on the real thing.
They focus on the model. You see the problem? Same way in our churches, when we get legalistic, we're focusing on the outward things, not on the spiritual truths that really matter, the really important big issues.
And so here they had this figure of the real glory of God in heaven and the mercy seat, and Jesus at the right hand of power, and the Holy Spirit depicted there, tying everything together and everyone together.
And they were offering up both gifts and sacrifices. Now listen to this, that could not make the person offering them, could not make him that did the sacrifice perfect. They could not make him where he could actually come into the real presence of God.
He could come into the place that depicted it, the model where the Shekinah glory probably would have frightened us if we'd have seen even that, but it was not. It was not the father. It was not all of the father.
It was not much of the father, but it was awesome. But none of what he did in that day could make him be able to go into the presence of God, the father, because Jesus said no man has seen him in any time except the son of man.
So Jesus had dwelt in his presence for all what we call eternity past, which is a funny word. Eternity, you can't have a time word with it, but for all of that time, Jesus was with him, but none of these Old Testament people could come into the presence of the father, even with the blood of these little sacrificial animals.
And it goes on to tell why. They could not make him that did the service perfect as pertaining to the conscience. Not even his conscience was made clean by this. It helped. He kind of rolled his sins forward another year and another year and another year until you got to the cross, as brother Otis used to say it.
Verse 10, which stood only in meats and drinks and diverse washings, talking about all the legalistic things. And they weren't really legalistic for them to do it. They were told to do it, but for them to focus on that more than the God who gave it to them was not right.
And it led to the Pharisaical movement 300 years before Christ was born, which stood only in meats and drinks and diverse washings and carnal ordinances. In other words, fleshly, things that pertain to the flesh, ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation.
Now, I love that little phrase, the time of reformation. To the Jew, that meant the time when the Messiah would come and set things straight. The word itself in the Greek, at least, means to set something straight.
The time of reformation, the time when the Messiah would come and set everything straight and rectify everything. And so, until that time could come, they had to do these carnal offerings of little animals.
Now, it's interesting because we know with hindsight, the Jew had trouble with this at the time looking forward, but we can see with hindsight, and Jesus really taught the Jews this, but they didn't get it.
Remember when Jesus was in the temple and he took the parchments and he read, not the parchments, but the scrolls, and he read part of the prophecy about him coming and he stopped and didn't finish the whole Old Testament prophecy.
So he only spoke of the first coming. But if you go and you read the rest of the sentence that he left out, it speaks of his second coming. They should have caught that, but they didn't. But we, with hindsight, see it very clearly that when we talk about this time of reformation, it had two components.
It had a first advent and a second advent, and it covers both. But specifically in the context of this, it is saying that the Old Testament Jews had to do these carnal offerings until Jesus came the first time, until he came the first time and set things straight.
Now, he did set things straight de facto because when he died, he slew Satan. He brought him down, took him off of the dominion that Adam and Eve gave to him. He got it by right of conquest, but Jesus won it back by right of conquest when he rose from the grave that day, right?
So he really did set things straight, at least spiritually, but when he comes again the second time, he's gonna set it straight physically also with a rod of iron. And yeah, like Dave was teaching this morning in Psalm 2, yeah, you will serve him in fear, but in joyful fear because he's gonna be so awesome is what it means by the fear.
I mean, anyone who ever saw God in the Bible fell right on their face, did they not? It didn't mean they don't love God or God doesn't love them. It's just so awesome. We don't know how to deal with that in this body that we're in, and it'll be like that.
But now we see that with his first advent, all of a sudden something changed in a huge and magnificent way. The way that man worships God changed. Do you know that the Jews from the time of the very moment of the crucifixion where the curtain that separated the middle portion of the tabernacle from the Holy of Holies was torn from the top to the bottom by God himself, making it symbolizing that we now could come into that room.
We even as Gentiles can go into that room, which really doesn't mean we go into that room. It means we go into the room in pictures, which is a dimension we can't even comprehend or even think about, but it's much larger than any of the known universe we can see.
It's where God is. We can go there any nanosecond that we choose to be spirit-filled because when we're spirit-filled, that's our spirit choosing to connect with the Holy Spirit who lives in there too.
And when you become connected, you're connected with the Father and you don't even have to ask in Jesus' name. Jesus said that. He said, you don't have to pray in Jesus' name, amen. You can pray straight to the Father.
You remember that? Means you can go into that, can we call it a place? He's pure spirit. We don't even know what that is. It doesn't have to have a place, but where he is, you can go. There's a good way to say it.
Bill would have been proud of that. I miss Bill. We were talking about that today. From the point of view of this church, it's like he was raptured. Like he's there and then he isn't. Y 'all didn't know Brother Bill.
You might've heard him online or something teaching. And we've got lots of him on our website. But it's a whole nother story. It's like he got raptured before we did. Hope it wasn't the real one. We missed it.
Anyway, imagine being in the very presence of the Father and we have that ability any second that we choose to be spirit-filled rather than carnal. We can make that choice. Many times a day, we can even connect those moments together and have long periods of time when we're spirit-filled if we choose to.
It's our choice. You see, believing in the sovereignty of God and election predestination doesn't mean you don't believe in responsibility of man and that man makes choices and that they're of ultimate importance.
Because man chooses what he wants to choose and God holds him responsible for it. So we will be held responsible for how many times we choose to be spirit-filled as opposed to carnal someday at the judgment seat of Christ.
It all works together all at the same time and yet God is over it all. And here we see, this is just a figure and they did all the things with the meats and the drinks and the washing until the first advent of Christ there at the end of verse 10.
Now, verse 11 says, but Christ being come a high priest, a good things to come by a greater and more perfect tabernacle. See, now that's talking about the real one. And it does talk about the third heaven where you have the mercy seat and the shekinah glory does dwell as probably far more glorious than the one at the little dab of it, of himself that God allowed them to see in the wilderness.
You probably see a lot more of it in the third heaven but even that is not where the father is. It's much, it's unspeakable. We can't even, we don't have the words to talk about that but we're connected to the father through the Holy spirit.
So this greater tabernacle is a reference to the one in the third heaven. It's not made with hands. Now the one on the earth was Moses and his people made it, didn't they? According to a model that God gave them and the whole thing was a model and it's made by hands.
Verse 11 now begins to speak of the one that's not made by hands. That is to say not of this building and that word in the Greek is titsis and it means not of this, not of human creation. It's of God's creation, not of this creation, not made by human hands.
Neither by the blood of goats and calves but by his own blood, Jesus entered in once and I always have that underlying circle in my Bible. He entered in once into the holy place having obtained eternal and I have that circled in my Bible, redemption for us.
Now what's interesting about that, if it only happened once and once it happened, it was eternal. How long does eternal last? Okay, so by definition, when can it stop? So how can you lose your salvation?
You can't lose, if you already have it in the present tense which in the Greek it is, you have it now and it's eternal, you can't lose it. So anyone that teaches that is a false prophet. Anyone who believes it is duped by the false prophet.
But we have friends that are in places that believe that, the Roman Catholics believe you can lose it, the Pentecostals believe you can lose it, the Church of Christ believes you can lose it, the Methodists believe you can lose it.
We're surrounded by friends who believe you can lose it but there are literally into the hundreds of verses that prove you can't. You know, I've got to stop and tell this story. Let's start saying Elnora Allen but Charlotte, what's the sweet lady's name that I met at the trailer house when I was knocking on doors one day and went in there and she invited me in and then she came to church here for a while and then she, Bess Reynolds, yeah.
You couldn't get Elnora Allen's name, Bess Reynolds. And she, a total stranger, she invited me into her house and she said, well, it's amazing you came to visit me today because I'm thinking about looking for another church.
I don't like the church I'm going to. And I said, well, I wouldn't want to steal you from that church. And on the inside, I was saying, great, super. But it was real, we had a sweet talk and she was all lined up to come Sunday, right?
And then she asked me a question. And my first thought was, oh man. And my second thought was, hallelujah, it means this visit's not over yet. Because she said, well, you don't believe in that once saved, always save stuff, do you?
And listen, my mind freaked out for a second because I thought this whole thing's gone now. We'll never see her at church. This is what I, I mean, in a nanosecond, I'm thinking that, right? And then the Lord put in my mind exactly what to say.
So I said, yes, ma 'am. In fact, I believe in that more than anything else in life. And I really emphasized it. And it stunned her because she thought I would at least be smart enough to say, no, I don't believe in that.
It stunned her that I said it was zeal. And she said the thing that the Lord wanted her to say, guess what she said? No, better than that. Why? Why do you believe that same thing, right? So I sat back down and literally in this Bible, every Bible years ago, Lord had led me to go into Genesis and find the first eternal security verse I could find.
And then beside it, I put where the next one was in Exodus and Leviticus and all. And then that one had numbers and it went all the way through, all the way to the book of Revelation. Every single eternal security verse that I could find were all attached together.
And I had that Bible with me and I started the first one and I took her through for two hours, I bet. It seemed like maybe that long, read every single one to her. And she never tried to stop me, never asked a question.
I would look at her to see if she wanted to say something. Nope, sorry, went to the next one. I went all the way through. And when I got done, I said, that's why I believe in eternal security because the Bible teaches it from the front to the back.
She said, I'll see you Sunday. So I walked out and she had a door that had glass on it where she could watch me walk to my car and drive away. So she shows up Sunday and we were in this, we call this the new church.
It's not new anymore, but we were in a storefront before this one, but we were in this one. And she shows up and she told me, and Charlotte might've been standing there. I don't remember. I know we know the story so well.
Don't know if you were standing there or I told it to you, but she just said, well, I got saved the other day when you were at my house. And I said, well, I just was sure you were saved. I mean, you've been going to church your whole life and you're such a sweet lady.
She said, no. She said, I never saw anything like what you showed me. And she said, when I saw that, that's when I knew I was really saved. So I got saved. And she said, I was watching you through that glass, get in your car and the Lord saved me.
And I said, praise the Lord. So you think about that. Now, this was one of the verses that I showed her right here. And so, you know, when the Bible is so clear, when it says by his own blood, he entered in once, it means he doesn't have to do it again.
Hebrews chapter six is a verse that those very people try to use to prove you can lose your salvation. And if you just read it really carefully, it teaches the opposite. I believe it's verses one through three or something like that.
One through six in Hebrews chapter six. It teaches the opposite because what it teaches there is that if you could lose your salvation, you could never get it back again because you would have to recrucify Jesus on the cross and put him to open shame, which is blasphemy.
And that ain't going to happen because in chapter nine, it said he died once, right? So you have to pretend that the Roman Catholics, the church of Christ, all these people have to pretend that they're putting him back on the cross.
You know, that's why the Catholics keep him on the cross. You know, they do. They never have an empty cross. We used to have one here. Wish it was still there, but we show them empty, right? They always have him on the cross.
Why? Because they have to recrucify him every time they do their sacraments. And it puts him to open shame and it's blasphemy. And they don't even know it. And they think it saves them. And the very thing that they think saves them is killing them.
It's very, very sad. He died once and he obtained eternal redemption. Now, the for us is in italics. It's not in the original Greek, but it's a very good translation because it doesn't mean for everybody.
It's for us. And you'll see this as we continue. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean sanctifies to the purifying of the flesh, made their conscience feel better, right?
How much more shall the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God? How much more can that purge your consciences from dead works to serve the living God? Well, there's so much in that little passage.
But you remember in Romans 15, 15, the little springboard that took us into all this, where it said that Paul was telling the Jews, hey, God will save a Gentile too. In fact, he makes their offerings.
He sanctifies their offerings and makes them acceptable. Well, look at this. This ties in with that because it says, how much more shall the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God purge your conscience from dead works?
You see, anything that we would offer to God, whether it be singing or praising or speaking or doing good works or whatever, all of it is just dead works and meaningless to the Father, unless we're connected to the Lord when we do it.
Unless we do it because the Holy Spirit led us to do it and did it with us. Otherwise it's a dead work. And so this is the very thing that makes it not be a dead work, that makes it be sanctified and acceptable to God, all of these sacrifices and offerings, spiritual offerings that we can give him.
And it's all because of the blood of Jesus Christ that was given for us. Now, notice it speaks of the blood of Christ. Christ, like Dave was saying in Sunday school, Dave was the word, wasn't he? The living word.
So here you have the word of God, which is Jesus, the true living word mentioned, but you also have the eternal spirit. So you have those same two components who kind of talked about the last two or three Sundays that must be involved for salvation to happen and for growth to happen, which is the water and the spirit, the water being the word of God, the water being the living word of the written word and the spirit being the Holy Spirit.
Both components are here again and again. The theme runs throughout all of this. Look at verse 15. Can someone tell me what time it is? Okay, I'm glad I asked because my watch is not working. I noticed it back there.
My watch says 1120. So let me put it up here so I'll know when to quit. All right. Okay, just a little moment longer. Look at verse 15. And for this cause, he is the mediator. Now, what does it mean for this cause?
It refers back to the previous verse. For what cause? Because by the Holy Spirit, he offered himself on the cross and gave his blood. Because of that, he is the mediator of the New Testament that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressors, that's the Old Testament saints and the New Testament saints, them and us, that for the redemption, and what does redemption mean?
They had to be bought back from Satan with a price. And that price is his blood. That's why the verse starts out. And for this cause, he gave his blood so that he might buy these transgressors and buy them and purchase them back with his blood.
That's what redeemed means. That by means of death, for in order to cause the redemption for the transgressors that were under the First Testament. So there's your Old Testament saints. They which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.
Now, why do you think it says they which are called? It doesn't mean everybody. It means those who are called. Remember how in Sunday school, Dave was talking about the general call and this talks about the effectual call.
This only happens to sheep. Goats don't ever get this call because this call is irresistible. I mean, Calvin had it right. Calvin did not invent these things, by the way. He was just a good teacher who made it easy to remember.
That's all he was. He was Charles Spurgeon's favorite Bible scholar, by the way. But irresistible simply means when the Holy Spirit opened our eyes and showed us Jesus at that moment, we found him irresistible because prior to that, we always resisted him, didn't we?
Every minute of every day of our life till that salvation moment, we did resist him. But when the Holy Spirit caused us to see him, all he had to do was open our eyes. We made the choice, but we made the choice because he made the choice first.
He made the choice to open our eyes. And because of that, when we saw him, we could not resist him and we received him as our personal Lord and Savior because we were called. And there it is in the Old Testament.
I'm sorry, the New Testament. It's also in Isaiah 53. It's everywhere in the Old Testament. Hebrews 9, verse 15. So those who are called receive the promise of eternal inheritance. And once again, if it's eternal, it can't stop.
Now, in verse 11, it says, where a Testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. Have you ever wondered why God made the plan this way? Would you have done it? Would you have created a universe with beings in it and allow them to kill your son?
Or would you have done it differently? I mean, I would say in the room, most of us would have done one of two things. We'd have killed them all and started over. Who's in that group with me? And then, or you just saved everybody, which is what a lot of people think God does.
He loves everybody, just saves everybody. You would do, but no one would have done it the way he did it, where he allowed Adam and Eve to have a will and they chose to eat the fruit and to now have evil along with the good, not just to have good only.
And we've had that ever since. We talked about it in the prayer requests this morning, evil. But I know Paul, Abraham, the joy that John Abraham had raising that child was infinitely more important than the fear that they're going through now.
I mean, there was so much good in that relationship and still will, because we're gonna pray that the surgery is successful, but the evil came with it, didn't it? Risk return. In order to love our kids and grandkids, we have to risk that things can happen.
Even our spouses, even each other here. I mean, Bill's not here, but he's here. Right? So think about it. Why did God choose to do it the way that he did it? Well, for one thing, you couldn't have had an Old Testament and a New Testament because you can't have a Testament.
It means a will, by the way, like a person leaves when they die. Did you know that a will has no force on anything in this world until that person dies? It's worthless. It's meaningless until they die.
And that's called the testator, the person who died, who wrote the will. When they die though, that will comes into force. And so that's just one of an infinite number of reasons Jesus chose to die in our place and for us.
So that all of God's children could be brought into the heavenlies. But there had to be this testator, and that is Jesus. Verse 22 says, and almost all things are by the law purged with blood. And without shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.
You cannot remove the sins of the people without blood. Never could, never will be able to. And so that's another reason Jesus died was to give that blood. It was therefore necessary. Now, when you read a phrase like that, it's not just a phrase.
God the Father ordained that there is no salvation without this plan. When it says it's necessary, it doesn't mean anything other than without it, there is no salvation. It's necessary. It has to happen this way.
So in God's infinite wisdom, there was never another plan. There was always only one plan. And Jesus therefore was slain before the foundation of the world, the scripture says. It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these better things.
But the heavenly things themselves are purified. I'm sorry, the ones on the earth were purified with the earthly things. But the heavenly things themselves have to be purified with better sacrifices than these.
For Christ is not entered into the holy place made with hands, which are the figures, the pictures, the types of the true things that are in heaven. But he's entered into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God for us.
Not for everybody, but for us, the chosen children of God. Nor yet that he should offer himself often as the high priest had to do. For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world.
This is why they depict him on the cross. They crucify Jesus again and again, which is impossible. It's ridiculous. And that's what this passage is teaching. It's ridiculous. For then they must often have, he must have often suffered since the foundation of the world.
But now once in the end of the age, has he appeared to put away sin by the sacrificing, by the sacrifice of himself. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this, the judgment, so Christ was offered to bear the sins of many.
And I want you to underline that word in your Bible. And I'll remark about it in a second, then we'll be done. So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many. This is the Greek word polous, and it means many, okay?
And unto them that look for him, shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation. Now that means we will appear with him and we will be without sin because of what he's done for us. But I want you to look at the word many and think about this.
Some of you took logic in high school or college, probably under the philosophy department, logic, right? God says, come, let us reason together, that's logic. We should all study it. But I will say this logical statement and prove me wrong if you can, but you can't.
And this is the statement. All can sometimes mean many, but many can never mean all. He died for the many, not for the all. So that fifth point of Calvinism that everyone's afraid of, it ain't Calvinism if you leave it all.
Because Calvin didn't invent it, but he did believe it. So don't call yourself with Calvin if you don't understand that he did not die for everybody. Listen, use a little logic if you have any. If he died for everybody and you're saved by the blood plus nothing, then everyone is saved.
If you're not saved by work, then everyone is saved. And yet Jesus says, narrow is the way and few there be that enter in. So you cannot have it that way. You have to be a five-point Calvinist, but don't call yourself that.
Call yourself an Augustinian, that's what we are. We put it on the sign once, but nobody would join. So we took it off, Augustinians. Because Augustine believed it, what, 1400 years before Calvin? Same thing, then he was a Catholic.
If the Catholics had gone with his argument, we'd all be happy Catholics. But they didn't. They rejected it just like they do in the Baptist church and everywhere else. Because they want man to have something in it.
Oh yeah, we believe in Jesus, but you gotta. And there it is. You add the humanism. But you can't add it when you know the scripture and you really believe that every word is inspired, such as the word halluc, many.
He died for the many. But let me, instead of worrying about that, think of it this way. Think how special that makes you. Not because of anything in and of yourselves, because you had nothing to do with your spiritual birth, just like you had nothing to do with your physical birth.
The parents did all the loving and all the stuff to make you happen. Together with God too, because it's a miracle, right? Physical birth. Spiritual birth is pictured by that according to Jesus. And you had no power over that.
You just awakened one day because God, your parent, wakened you and showed you, you're my child. I love the way Brother Otis used to say it. He notified you. That's what salvation is. You were always his.
He let you know you were his on the day you were saved. Don't tell people that. They'll think you're a cult group. Wait, they'll think we're a cult group. But you can use it in this room because we know what we mean by it.
But I mean, it is kind of how it is. And listen, that's the effectual call. You got to deal with it. I mean, like the great Charles Spurgeon, Prince Preacher said, you can't remove election from this Bible without taking a pen knife and cutting on every page in this Bible.
So anyway, it's glorious. Think about it. He's known you since before he made anything and none of us would have come to the Father or come to him without the Father drawing us, right? But of him, I will lose what?
Nothing. Internal security is everywhere. Well, let's stand and pray. I got you out by 1135 today. That's a new record. And I need a new watch. Lord, thank you so much for your word. Thank you for the depth of the book of Hebrews and the Lord for giving that to us and preserving it for us.
And the wonderful voice of yours that we hear as we read it together. And thank you for encouraging us even in the last days as we see things growing more and more towards the prophecies of old. It's both frightening and exciting all at one time.
So give us the strength that we need from your word and your spirit. And go with us into our time of fellowship now. Bless the food and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. You're dismissed.