My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 3)

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 4)

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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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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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If you're following along in our daily Bible reading with Sovereign Grace Family Church, today is August the 5th, 2020 and you should be reading Acts chapter 10.

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We had been going through these readings and doing a Bible study on them, but as many of you know who have been listening for the last couple days, I'm taking a different direction with the podcast now, but I do want to continue to encourage you to read the text.

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And one of the things that I do, this is just a little benefit, maybe help for you.

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One of the things that I do is I have an app on my iPhone to where not only can I pull the text up and read the text, but I can also have the text read to me.

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The iPhone has a, the app, the ESV app has a nice soothing voice that will read the text to you.

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And so sometimes if there are names of places or names of people that I may be having difficulty pronouncing or understanding how to pronounce, listening to it will help me with that and it helps me not only become a better internal reader of the Word of God, but to be able to read to my family and ultimately to read in my sermons to the church or to my studies.

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So that might just be a little bit of a benefit to you in your daily Bible reading is not only to read the text, but to hear it read by a person who is, who has been trained to read it.

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And so I would encourage you to do that.

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Well, again, we're continuing with our overview of my pathway to Calvinism.

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That's what we're calling this week.

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And this is my opportunity to share how I became a Calvinist.

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And again, this is just a new format for the show.

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It allows me to look at some passages that I think are very important for us to know as a Reformed church.

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And again, this podcast is primarily made for the members of Sovereign Grace Family Church, but I know some of you are not members of the church.

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So if you're benefiting from this, I'm thankful for that.

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But primarily, like I said, I'm hoping that the members of our church will hear this, be encouraged by it.

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And maybe you're a person who's been thinking of visiting with us.

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Maybe you're a person who has been visiting with us, but you're not yet a member.

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This gives you a little bit of a history of the church and a history about me and the teaching that we have at Sovereign Grace Family Church.

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We are unashamed to identify ourselves as a Calvinistic church in our understanding primarily of the doctrines of grace, the five points of Calvinism.

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We believe in the five points of Calvinism.

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We believe in total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints.

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But like I said in the previous lessons, my introduction to Calvinism wasn't really through the doctrines of grace.

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It wasn't as if somebody came up and gave me a list of five doctrines.

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Here's five doctrines that you need to believe.

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But rather, it was through a friend who simply asked me the question, what do you think about predestination? And that was like the small domino that fell that ultimately took down the rest of my dominoes because up until that point, I was thoroughly in the camp of the Arminians, even though I didn't know it.

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I wouldn't have known that language.

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I wouldn't have known to call myself an Arminian, but I certainly was one because I believe that God chose me because I chose him.

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I believe that God looked down the corridor of time, saw what I was going to do, and chose me based on that.

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Now yesterday, I talked about how my study into the word predestination, my study into the word foreknew does not bear out that understanding, and so one of the initial dominoes to fall was the domino of the idea of God foreknowing and basing his choice on what he foreknows.

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And if you want to go back and listen to yesterday's program, if you haven't heard that, I would encourage you to.

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But like I said in yesterday's program, what I want to talk about today is how it was ultimately Jesus who convinced me of the doctrine of predestination and election.

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And so today, if you want to open your Bible, I want to take you to John 6.

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I've taught on this several times at church, and so some of you may be saying, oh boy, he's going to go over John 6 again.

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John 6 was so influential to me, it had such an impact on my understanding of salvation that I can't talk about it enough.

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I mean, it was just so influential because there are three particular verses in John 6 that are very important.

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It's John 6, verse 37, John 6, verse 44, and John 6, verse 65.

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All three of those verses, very important, and all three of those verses were very formative for me.

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They helped me understand what Jesus was teaching, because the context of John 6 is that Jesus had just recently fed the 5,000, and they are now coming to him to be fed again.

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They're following after Jesus because they know that he is able to feed them.

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And we come across some very interesting passages, not even the three that I gave you, but just the fact that, like verse 36, he says, I said to you that you have seen me, and yet you do not believe.

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He's telling this to a group of people that's following him.

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It's like walking out to a group of people who identify themselves as believers.

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Imagine walking into a big Baptist church and saying, you know what, you've seen Jesus, but you don't believe.

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That would be very insulting in one sense to say to a big group of people, you don't believe.

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And that's what Jesus said.

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But then in verse 37 he says this, he says, all the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.

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All the Father gives me will come to me.

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Now, that may not seem like a very important statement, but that statement is very important because what Jesus is saying is ultimately there will be some people who come to him who really believe in him.

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Because the context of this is there are people who came to him, but they didn't believe.

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But all that the Father gives the Son in the sense of giving them the ability to believe, and we'll talk about that in a minute, but that's what he's saying.

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He says, all the Father gives me will come.

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And the idea of coming here in John 6, verse 37 is the idea of coming for salvation.

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The Father gives the individual person to the Son as a gift, and it's the giving of the Father which causes a dead sinner to come to Christ for life.

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It is the giving of the Father, in fact I would argue that it's the giving of life to the sinner that causes him to come to the Son.

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Because he is, up until that point, he is spiritually dead.

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Ephesians chapter 2 says you were dead in your trespasses and sins.

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Dead spiritually.

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And so we see, such as in Romans chapter 8, where it says those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

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So the person who's dead spiritually is in the flesh, because they can't be in the spirit because they're dead spiritually.

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They can't please God.

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They can't come to Christ.

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And that's what we see in John 6.

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Jesus is saying all the Father gives me will come.

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Why? Because they're given by the Father.

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And so we go down to verse 44, and this is the same context.

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Jesus is continuing to talk to these people.

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He's saying some very hard things about himself being the bread come down from heaven, eating of his flesh, and drinking of his blood.

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He's using some figurative language.

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It's very hard for them to accept and understand.

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And there is a longer study that goes along with, a broader study that goes along with the whole sermon here, but I'm pointing out some very simple statements that Jesus made.

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Because not only did he say all that the Father gives me will come to me, but he says in verse 44, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

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So he says not only will all the Father gives me come, but no one can come unless he is drawn by the Father.

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So we have two sides of the same idea.

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One, all the Father gives me will come, and two, anyone who no one can come unless the Father draws him.

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And just in case we don't understand what the word draws means, he says it again in verse 65, but he uses a different word.

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He says, this is why I told you, and he's saying, this is what I'm repeating.

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What am I repeating? I'm repeating verse 44.

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This is why I told you, no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.

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So in verse 37, he says all the Father gives me, all the Father grants, if you want to take it that way, all the Father gives me will come.

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Verse 44, he says no one can come unless it is granted to him, or excuse me, unless he is drawn.

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And then verse 65, no one can come unless it is granted him by the Father.

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Now, I will never forget hearing Dr.

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R.C.

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Sproul teach on this passage.

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Dr.

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R.C.

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Sproul was a consummate teacher and man of God, and what he said about this passage always kind of stuck with me because he compared it to the way that many of us remember our English teachers.

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If we would say to our English teachers, hey, Miss Smith, can I go to the restroom? And she would say something to the effect of, of course you can go, but that's not what you're asking.

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You're asking may I go to the restroom? And she was distinguishing between ability and right.

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Can is a word of ability.

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May is a word of right.

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Can I go? Well, of course you can.

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That's not what you're asking.

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You're asking may I go? Well, when we get to John 6, that's what we see.

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We see the idea of can, the idea of ability.

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Jesus said no one can come to me.

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And he uses what's known as the universal negative.

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The universal negative, no one can.

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I've often described this as if I said, if I said no one can ride a bicycle, and then I see a child go by, ching ching, and he rides his bicycle by, zoom.

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Well, I was just proven wrong because I made a statement of universal negativity.

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I said no one can do something and a little child went by and proved me wrong.

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That would be disproving what I said.

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So when Jesus said no one can come unless he is drawn by the Father.

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No one can come unless the Father grants it to him.

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That's a word of ability.

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We have a we have a spiritual inability to come to Christ unless the Father does something on our behalf prior to our coming.

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Unless the Father gives us the ability to come.

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And that's what we see in John chapter 6.

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And he says no one can come unless he's drawn.

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No one can come unless it's granted to him.

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And all the Father gives will come.

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That, my friends, is very powerful evidence for the fact that salvation remember we talked about yesterday.

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People who say well God saw what I was going to do and he responded to me.

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But this says I wouldn't have done anything if God had not given me the ability.

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I did not have the ability to do this outside of God.

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Therefore the foreknowledge view that God looked down the corridor of time saw what I was going to do.

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It doesn't work because God is the one giving me the ability to do it in the first place.

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I wouldn't come unless he draws me.

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I wouldn't come unless he granted it to me.

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And all that are granted all that are given will come.

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This is a very important verse when it comes.

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It was for me.

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I remember thinking wow Jesus is being very clear here.

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There is no doubt that he is teaching the absolute inability for a person to come to him outside of the grace of God.

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And so this passage was important.

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And I want to end with a story.

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Yesterday I mentioned Pastor Roy Hargrave, River Bend Community Church, former pastor now retired.

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And I remember him.

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He was at a conference on a boat.

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They were on a ship.

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And I listened to the recordings.

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I didn't get to go on the cruise conference, but I listened to the recordings.

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And he was tasked with preaching on Calvinism and Evangelism.

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And he walked into the room and he said okay I've been asked to teach on Calvinism and Evangelism.

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Everybody open your Bible to John 6.37.

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All the Father gives me will come to me.

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That's Calvinism.

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The one who comes to me I will never cast out.

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That's Evangelism.

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Alright that's it.

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Let's all go to the pool.

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Well of course it was a joke and he didn't really end there.

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But he did do a very important lesson on understanding that even though we believe in predestination and election, it doesn't mean that we don't share the Gospel.

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It doesn't mean that we don't believe in Evangelism.

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In fact, one of the hurdles that many people have with Reformed theology is the idea that Calvinism makes us non-evangelistic.

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But some of the greatest evangelists in history have been Calvinists.

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So this ends our lesson for today.

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Tomorrow I'm going to talk about another passage of Scripture that as I've already said, I was convinced by Jesus and I was at this point in my pathway to Calvinism I was 9.5 through 10 of the way there.

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I was basically all ready to call myself a Calvinist.

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But it was one final section of Scripture that really was the final solidifying thing.

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Even though like I said, Jesus was really who made me a Calvinist because this passage I just couldn't get past, John 6.

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And there are other passages where Jesus says in the Gospel of John my sheep hear my voice, they know me or I know them and they follow me.

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You don't believe because you're not my sheep.

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All those passages were important.

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But John 6 was really so important.

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But there was one other passage that I'm going to talk about tomorrow that was huge.

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And I remember sitting in my house, hollering across the house to my wife saying, baby, this is it.

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And I'm going to talk about that passage tomorrow.

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So I hope today has been an encouragement to you.

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I hope that this whole week has been a blessing getting to know a little bit more about how I became a Calvinist.

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Maybe answering some of the questions that you have had as you as we all do struggle with our own understanding of God and theology.

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So again, thank you for listening to today's episode.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.

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May God bless you.