34 - The Father and Salvation, Part 2

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35 - Jesus and Salvation, Part 1 His Illegal Court Trials

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We're glad that you are with us for another lesson.

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We are continuing where we were last class. We'd like to welcome the new students that have joined us.

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We are glad to have you with us, especially those who have enrolled, where you can do that down there at the website, enrolled at the website so that they can get the syllabus that you can get.

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If you are a paid student, that's one of the benefits of being a paid student. You get to get a hold of the syllabus this way.

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Yeah, this way. Okay. I always forget which way the syllabus is on that little screen there. But you can grab the syllabus and follow along.

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The advantage of having a syllabus is you can have the notes there for you and you'd be able to fill in the blanks that you hear me give you.

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And also so that you have all the notes readily available for when you need them.

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You don't, you know, you're sitting in a discussion with someone, you can't go, oh, wait, let me go find that YouTube video. I know some people do actually do do that, but the advantage of syllabus is you have a book that you can kind of grab and pull it out and have the lesson there with hopefully your own notes as well.

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If you are a good student and you have the syllabus, you realize that we give a whole lot more information than are in the notes.

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And you'll also see that the notes sometimes have things we don't go over in class. So that's the advantage of having both.

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And so if you have that, you can take in, fill in some of your own notes and that way you'll be able to follow along.

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We are working on the next class, the next syllabus, which will be the systematic theology book number three.

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That's coming up soon, sooner than I think, because I just got it to, got the copy for me to go through and give my final edits to it.

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And I'm going, yeah, okay. But we'll get there. Oh, I'm being told

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I look like the Fonz. Okay, is that better? All right. What? I'm not cool enough.

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I'm not cool enough to be Fonzie. Okay, that's a cultural reference for you guys. I grew up in the 80s. I knew what happy days was.

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Anyway, but we are, we're here to study systematic theology.

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Why study systematic theology? I mean, isn't that something for like seminary students? No. If you're a

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Christian, you want to study theology, right? You want to know

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God better. The better you know God, the better you're going to be able to follow

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Him and, you know, practice what He desires for you. So the thing that we have, oh wait, just for our one friend out there who raids my refrigerator.

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Mmm, good. My iced tea. Someone out there likes my iced tea, so he raids my refrigerator for it.

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Mmm, he wishes he could have some. Mmm, peach iced tea too.

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I know, I'm bad. You know, hey look, if you're going to raid my refrigerator, you deserve the abuse of knowing, of seeing me drink the nice tasting iced tea, and you can't have any.

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All right, so, but we are in, as I said, we are in book number two of our syllabus.

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And we are studying, flip that back, there we go.

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We are studying actually the doctrine, or the book that we're calling it, The Gift to Man.

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Why The Gift of Man? Because we're studying, we studied man, and we're studying it in here now, we're in the doctrine, or section number three.

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So, we are, we are studying the doctrine of salvation.

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And so in that, we are in lesson number five, and we are studying the

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Father and salvation. Now, let me give you just a quick recap of where we were.

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Last lesson, because we didn't quite finish up last lesson. And so, we are looking at the fact that we saw last week that the

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Father planned it. Now that, this is referring to salvation. This is important because if you remember, we had said when we looked at the doctrine of sin, we kind of went through that, and we said that God is not the initiator of sin.

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Well, now we see an important thing because God is the initiator of something, and what is that?

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He is the initiator of salvation. So, God didn't author or initiate sin into the universe, but He did initiate salvation.

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Now, with that, we had looked into a couple of things that we saw last week.

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We saw the significance of the fact that God is the initiator with the fact that God seeks after man, and man does not seek after God.

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Now, I know I'm getting dirty looks. I understand that, you know, last week,

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I kind of went off on a little bit of a tangent if I mentioned seeker because we have this whole genre of churches.

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You know what a genre is, right? You were in the School of Biblical Harmonetics. You weren't?

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Then go take that class. Come on, it's on YouTube. The site's down there. Go there.

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Go to YouTube and go take that class. You'll know what a genre is. So, the genre or type of church called a seeker -sensitive church, there's a whole group of them that started up and it's really sad because their whole model is based off something that's unbiblical.

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The whole model of that church is to reach out to those who are seeking after God when there are none who are seeking after God.

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What they're trying to do is make church lost friendly or unsaved friendly.

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You know, make church something that an unsaved person would be enjoying and want to do and want to come out to and participate in.

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The reality is church is not for the seekers. Well, because one, there are no seekers.

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Church is for the saved. We're going to look at that when we get into the study on the church which will probably be in,

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I think it's book four. Is it book three or book four? Not sure which. One of them of our syllabus.

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So, we will get there. But if you really wanted a little, I should give you a little hint. If you go out to the website down there, you'll actually see we do have some articles.

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We do have some articles on, what? Oh, I'm being told that we lost connection but we're still recording.

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All right. So, we've been told that we lost connection but we're still recording. So, I will continue recording.

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We were told all of our, we were told from the internet provider that all of our internet problems are solved.

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Not, we've been dealing with this since December which is now going on four months of arguing back and forth where they bring people out, tell us, oh, everything's all fixed and then we find out everything's not quite fixed.

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So, we're sorry if you're watching live and you just lost us for a little bit. But you can watch us on YouTube.

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Oh, we're back? Okay. So, I was just told that I was rambling long enough to get us back. I guess

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I'm good at the rambling. So, we're sorry if that we are trying to get that fixed with the internet provider.

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We've actually been escalated and we've been bumped up and now we're dealing with some supervisors, supervisors, supervisor or something like that.

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But, I don't know. So, anyway, you think

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I don't, okay, someone thinks I don't know where we are. I know exactly where I was before we lost the internet.

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Huh. We were right here, sitting in the studio. See? I know right where we were. We were looking at the fact that there's a whole genre of churches called

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Seeker Sensitive churches when we have the fact that people don't seek after God.

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God seeks after them. Now, I know some people are going, oh no, no, he's speaking like a

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Calvinist. Maybe. But the reality is, is that we got to be honest with what

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Scripture says. And here's the interesting thing is, I find many people that will argue against Calvinism, they still agree with these points.

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Like that one. Okay? The real issue is when you start saying that you can seek after God, you got to cut out a whole lot of Scripture verses.

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I mean, like all of Romans 3, I think. Actually, probably most of Romans. Hmm. Probably a lot of Galatians too.

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Isaiah. Ooh. Cutting too much out, huh? Alright. This week what we're going to look at is the fact that God is the designer.

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God is the designer. And so, with that being said, that God is the designer, we want to take a look at the fact that, and we're not getting into intelligent design here.

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Okay? But the reality is that we have to be aware that there is a debate over intelligent design to have it or not to have it.

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Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it Christian? Or is it just quasi -Christian? Where is it? We're going to put all that aside.

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The fact is, God is a designer. But we're not talking about His design in creation, which

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He did do. But we're talking about His design specifically here in our salvation.

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Now, where do we get this idea from? Well, let's look at a little bit of a longer passage.

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And this actually, just so you know, the one reason I love this passage in Ephesians 1, 3 -14 is because I was not really good in English.

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See? I wasn't a great English student. I jokingly say that, you know,

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Basic was my first language. And those of you who are computer geeks, you understand that one.

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I'm a computer programmer by trade, so I was really good with computer languages, not so much with the English language.

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But the reason I love Ephesians 1, it's a long, run -on sentence. You know?

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If I was in a Christian school and taking grammar in English in a Christian school and they were like, you know, can't have run -on sentences,

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I'd be like, have you read Paul? Yeah, this is one sentence. I mean, in our translations, they kind of break it up sometimes.

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But this would have been one run -on sentence. Let's read it. Blessed be the

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God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

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In love He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will.

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To the praise of His glorious grace, with which

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He has blessed us in the

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Beloved. In Him we have redemption, through His blood the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which

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He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of His will according to His purpose, which

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He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time.

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To unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth, in Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His good will.

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So that we who are the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory.

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In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him were sealed with the promised

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Holy Spirit, who was the guarantee inheritance until we acquire the possession of it.

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Now one of the things that I like about that is that you see all three members of the

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Trinity in that passage. But we're focused on one member of the Trinity, really God the

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Father. And so what we see there is we see that the

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Father predestined and planned this salvation. God the Father was active in that.

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Let's look at one more verse and that's 1 Peter 1 -2. 1 Peter 1 -2 According to the foreknowledge of God the

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Father. So whose foreknowledge is it? Well it says there it's God the Father. In the sanctification of the

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Spirit. So that's the Spirit's role. For the obedience of Jesus Christ, for the sprinkling of His blood, may the grace and peace be multiplied to you.

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So what you see here is you see a case where we see again the Father provided this.

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The issue of God's election in salvation is going to be covered in more detail when we get to lesson number 8.

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And we're going to deal with God's sovereignty and human responsibility. Notice I'm not using the terms

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Calvinism or Minianism that so many often think of because we're not going to deal with it in the way of saying

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Calvinism or Minianism. Those are kind of heated terms that a lot of people don't even understand them.

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And let me, since I brought that up, I was talking with somebody. Oh wait, that reminded me.

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Talking with someone this weekend. Yeah, I was talking with him who stole my tea.

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And we were talking about different theological positions. One of the things that we were talking is that what we often see, and maybe you've had an opportunity to see this with different professing believers, where what you see is people who will go and study something out.

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And they study one side of an issue. And what they do is when they want to study the other side, they get a bunch of people that already agree with their position that are attacking the other position.

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And then they go, oh, I can't agree with that position because these guys I agree with say that's bad. That is bad what you just did.

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If you want to understand someone's position, read what they actually say about it.

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Because what you end up with is you end up with some people that don't fully understand another person's position.

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And what they actually do is they go out and argue against a straw man.

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And you don't realize that when you pick up their argument, you're making a straw man argument as well.

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A straw man argument is when you use a different definition or a different way of explaining things so that you're easy to knock it down.

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So that's kind of the idea there. So with that, you don't want to do a straw man argument.

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And how do you know if you have a straw man argument? If you believe in Calvinism and you're reading a bunch of Calvinists knocking off Arminianism, or if you believe in Arminianism and you read a bunch of Arminians knocking off Calvinism, guess what?

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You don't know if you really understand the positions that you're opposed to. Because they may not be properly explaining those positions.

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So what you want to do is study both sides of the issue from people that hold to that doctrinal belief.

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So you want to study what Calvinism is? Read a bunch of Calvinists. Now don't read a bunch of Calvinists that are arguing against Arminianism.

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Read a bunch of Calvinists defending Calvinism. Read a bunch of Arminians defending Arminianism. You get a bunch of Arminians attacking

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Calvinism? Don't read that one. Read the one where they're defending it and trying to explain what they do believe.

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What you often find is that these people tend to agree more than they disagree.

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But they focus on those areas of disagreement way more than they probably should.

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And that becomes the problem. So with that said, we're going to get into those issues.

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And we'll try to see if we can get through that without anyone chopping off my head, calling me a heretic.

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Because basically I've been told that I'm a heretic because I'm not a Calvinist. I've been told I'm a heretic because I am a

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Calvinist. So I'm not sure which I really am. I guess it depends. See, and that's the whole thing. It depends on your definition of those terms and those labels.

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That's why we're not going to use those labels when we get to that lesson. But we do want to let you realize that there are differing views that you need to study out.

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And make sure you understand what it is you believe, why you believe it. And don't criticize someone else's view unless you are willing to take the time to understand their view.

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So take the time to read both sides of the argument and make sure you understand what they actually say.

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I was at a conference not too long ago where it was mentioned about someone who was a friend of mine who has chosen a topic in this area of Calvinism and Arminianism who has decided that everybody that holds to a certain view or is even friends of people that hold to a certain view is no longer saved.

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And the reality is when I sat on the phone with him once, it was like a 3 -4 hour conversation and I started going through and I started saying, well, do you believe this, do you believe this, do you believe this?

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I said, you know, brother, you actually hold to the view you attack.

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You just don't realize it because you have a wrong definition of what they actually hold to and what they actually believe.

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We want to be careful of that, alright? So that's something we just need to be aware of.

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We can all be guilty of that. Now, does that make our study harder? Yes. It makes it a lot harder because now you have to study both sides.

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I mean, if you've ever, I know this is a tangent, so if you ever read or heard of Martin Luther's book,

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Bondage of the Will, it's a great book, really is. And people go, oh man, you know, he just hammered

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Erasmus. I mean, he blew Erasmus away. I mean, he just totally destroyed Erasmus in the book.

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Oh, you know, and I hear that a lot from people. And I ask people, did you ever actually read Erasmus' book,

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Freedom of the Will? No, never read it. Well, here's the reason I ask that.

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If you read Erasmus' Freedom of the Will, you realize that the first 75 pages, Erasmus sits there and destroys his own book.

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I mean, he served it up for Luther. I mean, he's sitting there going, I don't even understand why I'm debating this.

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All my friends want me to challenge Luther, and I don't even understand what the big deal is.

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I don't get the issue. You know, it's like, duh. I mean, this guy was the worst one to probably have right on.

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It was just he was a big name at the time. But he really did a horrible job of proving his own points.

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So yeah, it made it easy for Luther. I'm not saying that Luther didn't serve it up to him maybe, but you've got to understand that Erasmus didn't do the best job in proving the points that he was claiming to.

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Let's look at the promise, though. Looking at God planned salvation. He actually promised it.

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How far back? Well, take a look at this. Genesis chapter 3. What happened in Genesis chapter 3?

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That's right. That was when we had the fall of Adam and Eve. And just after the fall, when

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God is giving them the curse that is going to be on man and woman and creation, we read this.

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He's explaining to them. He says in verse 15, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.

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He will bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

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Now what that's talking about is that is talking about this idea that Satan would bruise the heel of Christ, but Christ would destroy the head of Satan.

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In other words, he's going to conquer him. So what we have there is the fact that we see that the promise came right after the fall.

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I mean, almost as soon as Adam and Eve fell comes the promise of the

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Messiah. So it wasn't too long. Yes, Adam, Eve, you violated

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God's law, and there is a curse that is now going to be on the whole universe. Think about that. Romans chapter 8, we don't have that on there, but Romans 8 talks about the whole universe is groaning.

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It's groaning, and yet we have that there, and it's all because of sin.

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So when we look at this, we see that God promised the Messiah salvation. Now, Genesis chapter 3 was about 4 ,000 years before Christ.

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In other words, God has a long -term plan. You and I, we live like 70, 80 years.

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To us, that's like 20 years seems like a long time. I mean, to our kids, when we turn 40, we're over the hill.

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I mean, we're old, but when you get 40, suddenly like 80 looks pretty old, but 40 is not so old anymore, is it?

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No, it's not as old as it looked when we were 15. Why is that? Because for us, we have these long, these really what we think of long periods, they're really short periods to God, right?

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And this is what is meant when it says in Peter that to God a day is 1 ,000 years and 1 ,000 years is a day.

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The idea is that for God has a long -term plan. He's eternal, so He can say, hey, a

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Messiah is coming and 4 ,000 years later, that's when the Messiah shows up.

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All right? So, we have this promise. And in Genesis 3 .15,

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let's look at what you have in your syllabus, in your notes there. The moment that sin entered the human race and corrupted all of mankind, yeah,

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I know, there were only two people in mankind. I understand that, but you and I were corrupted, if you remember those lessons on the doctrine of sin through Adam.

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You see how these things become important and build upon each other. God promised to them a victory over sin and Satan.

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It would be in the future, that's your first blank there, it would be in the future, so your first blank is future, and would be the seed of woman.

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That's your second blank, seed. So, it would be in the future and it would be the seed of woman.

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This is a clear promise of the Messiah. Where does the seed of human beings come from?

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So, He's spoken of as from the man. The woman has the egg, but the seed is from man.

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The seed of the woman is very special. It speaks of this one who is going to be virgin born, virgin conceived.

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So, there wasn't going to be a seed from the man. It was going to be without a human father.

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We talked about the importance of that in a previous lesson. But, what we see there is that God promised to Adam and Eve that in the future there would be this one that comes without a human father that would come and destroy

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Satan. Also, later we see in Isaiah and in Jeremiah and others that this one who is going to come would be one that would destroy sin, that would conquer sin and give us, conquer the penalty of sin.

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So, first when we look at God as the designer, the first thing we see is that He promised it. Second, we see that His provisions for that salvation,

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His provisions, and that's what we're going to look at now. Now, as we look at His provisions, we're going to look at several different things.

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First, we want to look at His grace. God's grace is a provision of salvation.

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Let's define this first because I think some people have a definition of God's grace and it's usually a simple

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God's unmerited favor. But, let's give you a definition here a little bit more.

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In both the New Testament word, which is karyos, and the Old Testament word, chen, both of them have the concept of a condescending favor.

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Now, I like that better. Is grace an unmerited favor? Yes, it is. We don't deserve it, we're given it, and we really don't deserve it.

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Totally agree. But, I really like the idea of, and that's your blank there, a condescending favor.

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You see, the idea that that has, when we look at these Greek and Hebrew words for what we call grace, it is this favor that God condescends.

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He comes down to our level to give to us. He has to bring this down to us because we're so beneath Him.

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I know that's hard for some people to accept, even some professing believers, because they think very highly of themselves.

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And it's a real problem for them to think that God is so much higher that He's got to condescend to come to our level.

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Some churches, if you go to their church services, yeah, those seeker -sensitive churches that we were talking about earlier, you go to those services, and you'd be wondering if, you know, maybe it's us who condescends to God in those churches.

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It sure seems that way, especially if you go to the prosperity gospel churches. We're going to be going to a, next weekend,

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April 5th, we're going to be going out to Lancaster with Justin Peters, listen to him talk on his

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Discernment Conference. But one of the things that you hear in those word of faith churches is they lift man up where man's a little god.

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And you listen to them, and God has to obey what you pray for.

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Well, who's the superior in that? The superior one is man, and we condescend to God in that situation, right?

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That's the whole issue that we have a problem with. That's why I like this definition of a condescending favor, because it reminds us that God is the great one.

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God is the holy one. God is the one up on high. We are the ones that are lowly.

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We are the ones that God has to condescend to. See, our pride lifts us up.

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Puts us on the pedestal. Brothers and sisters, those of us that truly know

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Christ, we need to get off that pedestal. I mean, seriously, get off that pedestal.

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You don't belong there. You think you belong on a pedestal lifting yourself up?

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You are robbing God of His glory. Think about that when you praise yourself and not

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God. So, we see

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His provisions. Let me explain His grace. So we have the definition, both Old Testament and New Testament, both have this concept of a condescending favor.

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And the explanation there, in relation to the salvation, in relation to salvation, grace may best be understood as God's favor to sinners who do four things.

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Ready? Here's your blanks here. God's favor to sinners, those are the sinners, those are you and I, who do not deserve it, cannot earn it, cannot repay it, and don't even want it.

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Let me say this again. This is God's favor, this condescending favor that God gives to sinners, like you and I, who don't deserve it.

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We do not deserve the grace that God gives to us. That's why when people ask me, how are you doing?

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I always say, better than I deserve. I keep being asked if I know some guy, David Ramsey. I don't even know who the dude is.

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I guess he says it on the radio. Sorry, don't know who you are, dude. But I just know he doesn't like open air preachers because he commented about that, is what

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I was told. But we don't deserve this grace. We cannot earn this grace.

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This is a grace that we don't deserve it, and we can't earn it. Our works can't make up for it.

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We can't repay it. We can't do enough good to outweigh the bad. And this last one kind of throws people, but realistically, we don't even want it.

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We don't want it. When we're unbelieving, we don't want God's grace.

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We're enemies of God, and we hate God. We want nothing to do with Him. Okay, I'll move on.

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I'm being told if I don't move on, I won't finish this lesson again. And we're going to finish this lesson this week because we're going to get on to the next lesson next week.

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We're going to. No, we're not going to run long. I'm being told that he doesn't think I can do it.

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All right, we'll see. So we see that God's provision. We saw His promise. We see His provisions. The first provision was

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God's grace. The second provision is His sacrifice, His sacrifice. Now, when was this sacrifice planned?

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Well, we saw that it was planned before creation.

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Now, we saw Genesis 3. The promise was right after the fall. But what we have is that it was planned before creation.

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Before man fell into sin, God foreknew His plight because, remember, this goes back to those attributes of God that we first studied in this class, right, in this school.

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That God is omniscient. He knows everything. He didn't have to look down the tunnels of time because that would put

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Him in time and give Him a limited knowledge that He had to see what would happen. God knows everything.

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He just knows it. And He's outside of time. He didn't need to. So foreknowledge doesn't mean He looked down the tunnels of time to figure it out.

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God foreknew. In other words, in His way of knowing things, He knew everything. Before time began, meaning that God being outside of time, knowing everything, everything that ever happened in history, in time, is the same eternal second to God, God supplied a provision for men to be reconciled to Himself.

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Let's take a look at Ephesians 4. Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love.

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One of the interesting things, I have to laugh at that, is someone told me

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I was a Calvinist, that I was a hyper -Calvinist, actually. And I asked him where he got that because I don't often speak that way.

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I don't say I'm a Calvinist unless someone's going to have the same definition of Calvinism that I do,

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I guess. But what ends up happening is I don't use that term. I said, why do you say

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I'm a Calvinist? And he quoted that verse from our doctrinal statement.

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I said, because God foreknew before the foundation of time that makes me a Calvinist? He said, that's right.

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I said, Paul wrote that. God wrote that. I mean, if that's the case then, if that's your definition, then guess what?

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God's a Calvinist. I mean, by that definition, right? God wrote that. What does it mean is the question.

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Alright, let's look at one more. What it means is this. It means that God is outside of time.

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That's the emphasis there. That God's outside of time, but that before there was a time.

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In other words, that it is not based on you and I because it was God making this decision before there was time.

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Alright? Revelation 13 .8 And those who dwell on earth will worship it.

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Anyone whose name is not written before the foundation of the world.

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In the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. So, when was it written?

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Before the foundation of the world. That's when it was written. So, now, it was planned before creation.

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That was your blank there. The next thing is that it's pictured in the Old Testament sacrifice.

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That's your blank there. Pictured in the Old Testament sacrifice. And here's how we're going to finish class up because I'm not going to look up all the verses here.

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Alright. The Day of Atonement. Leviticus 16. We're definitely not going to read all that. But you can read

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Leviticus 16 and see what the Day of Atonement was. The Passover Lamb in Exodus 12 and verse 3.

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The daily sacrifices in Exodus 29 verses 39 to 42. We see as we look through those that those were pictures of the sacrifice that Christ was going to make.

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Now, this gets us into the discussion that we're having this weekend or this week.

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What was the sacrifice? Did the sacrifice actually remove sin? No. Christ on the cross removed sin.

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The sacrifice looked forward, was a picture of what Christ would do.

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And so, we had someone that we were discussing in a Bible study this weekend with someone accidentally,

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I think, said that the high priest, if he was to be in sin, it would be like bringing sin onto all the people.

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So, the issue there is we got from that into a discussion of the high priest going in once a year on the

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Day of Atonement. Did that actually remove sin? It was a picture of a sacrifice that was to come.

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And that picture was, if you look in your syllabus there, was provided in Christ.

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And so, the idea was that in the Old Testament, they're doing these sacrifices that it didn't remove the penalty of sin.

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They had to look forward. So, in a sense, some people think of it as a temporary removing. But it removed in a sense of picturing or leading to what

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Christ would do. And Christ was that perfect lamb that was the sacrifice for sin.

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You can look in John 1 .29, John 1 .36, 1 Peter 1 .19, Revelation 5 .8,

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Hebrews 9 .14. You can look those up. In this topic, we're going to end up covering how

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Christ provided this in the following lessons. So, I'm going to kind of skip some of those things that we'd get into discussing how

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Christ actually provided that salvation when we look at lesson number six next class.

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So, let's look at one more provision of Him. We've got two more to go. So, we see His grace is one provision.

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We see His sacrifice is another provision. And now we see

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His revelation. His revelation. We can look at this in 2 Timothy 3 .14

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-17. We're not going to have time to finish that or to read that I should say.

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But the scriptures which were... Well, you know, that's an important one.

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I do want to put it up. But as for you, continue in what you've learned and have firmly believed knowing that from whom you learned it and how from your childhood you've been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ and Jesus.

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All scriptures breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness that the man of God may be complete and thoroughly equipped for every good work.

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So, the scriptures which were inspired by God are able to make a person wise unto salvation.

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That's your blank there. Wise unto salvation. Why is this important? This is important for this reason. There are some who feel that when they share the gospel it is important to have their words really getting like flowery words or not mentioning things that people won't want to hear.

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They focus all on the manner in which we convey the message. I was in church this week in Sunday school and this became a topic of discussion.

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You know, is it the way we... Someone said it is more important the way we communicate the gospel than anything else.

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And I said, I disagree. Because the manner in which you and I convey the gospel, though it's important, it doesn't make a person wise unto salvation.

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What does? The scriptures. You want to share the gospel? You should be using a lot of scripture.

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Not your illustrations. Not your really cool quips that you come up with and you have this great illustration that you use.

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That's fine. I'm not saying not to use them. But the scripture is more important than your words.

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God's word is more important than your word. The scripture is more important than your illustrations. Scripture is also more important than your desire to be pleasing to the person.

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Your manner. I mean the manner in which we do it. If you know Striving for Eternity teaches ambassador evangelism.

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Where we teach not only to have a proper message but to conduct yourself as an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Conduct yourself in a manner that's a good

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Christian manner. Reflects well on Christ. So we're not against that. Having that attitude and the way you communicate.

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But it is the scriptures. God's revelation that we must use. 1

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Thessalonians 1 .4. We're not going to look at there. But Paul was sure of his election because of the word.

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That's your blank there. The word came in power and in connection with the Holy Spirit. So what do we see there?

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Paul's making the argument it's the word of God. The word of God. The word of God that we must use.

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We don't use our words and ignore scripture. This is why it's so important to memorize scripture.

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So that you're ready. When someone's sitting there and they ask you questions on the street. You may not know where to look it up.

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You may not have a Bible with you. Oh wait. You got a cell phone right? Okay so you probably have a Bible with you.

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Open that app instead of open that Bible. I understand. But if you don't memorize the scripture so it's readily available.

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Tip of your tongue it'll come out. But if you don't memorize it you're not going to know it. That's just a simple reality.

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And we want it to be from God's word. You want to be able to sit down with someone and explain what

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God's word says about their state. And what God's word says about what Christ did. And what

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God's word says about His resurrection. And what God's word says. Because that's what's important.

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It's not our words. When it comes to salvation God provided His word for us.

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So that we have an absolute authority to use to speak to others.

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Okay? Let's look at one last thing that God provided in salvation.

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And that is the Holy Spirit. And we're going to look at this in more. But it is the Holy Spirit of God who convicts.

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That's the first blank. Convicts of sin and draws the individual to the Father. That's your second blank.

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Draws. It's the Holy Spirit who convicts of sin and draws the individual to the

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Father. Now this, the work of the Spirit we're going to look at more in lesson 7. It's going to be discussed in more detail then.

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But until then we just want to go over this briefly. And you can see this in John 16 verses 7 to 8.

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Or you can look at John 6 verse 44. And you see that the Holy Spirit's role. But the

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Holy Spirit was provided to convict sinners of sin. That is the very first act in a human's life when it comes to the issue of salvation.

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The very first act in the process. You know, people talk about the order of salvation.

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The first act is an act of God, the Holy Spirit, who convicts the sinner of his sin.

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That's the first step. The second step is He draws that person to the Father.

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Now I understand that some people talk about this drawing as the individual seeking. But in the case, who's got the action?

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The Holy Spirit does. It's the Holy Spirit drawing that person. And part of that drawing process may be that the person is thinking of the things of God.

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But it's really a matter that what you see there is, you see the Holy Spirit is the initiator and controller of that.

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Okay? So we see here that God provides, okay, four things.

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His grace, His sacrifice, His revelation, and Himself in the Holy Spirit. Okay?

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This is the work of God as designer. Now next lesson, as I said, we're going to get into looking at Jesus Christ, the

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Holy Spirit. And we're going to see the role that as Holy Spirit He has. Now if you have a syllabus,

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I hope you will also fill in your thought questions. I'd love to be able to do a dialogue back and forth with that.

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But that's what we have the Facebook group for. So you can go on to Facebook group, search for Striving for Eternity, join the group.

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There's the Striving for Eternity page and the Striving for Eternity group. Now the group is one where there's easier dialogue because the way that Facebook does the pages.

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You should like the page, join the group. That way you know which one's which. But if you have any questions about anything that we teach here, you can email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org.

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Academy at strivingforeternity .org. Now I am going to announce that we are, registration is underway for the

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Ohio Fire. I want to encourage you to sign up for that. Even if you're thinking about it, sign up.

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Be posting on Facebook about it. Be letting others know about it. It's going to be May 30th and 31st of 2014.

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We have, I got to remember we're starting to have so many of them I can't remember who's speaking at which ones now. But you can go to ohiofire .org

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and find out all the details. Where it is, when it is, who's speaking. We're going to have

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Mark Spence speaking, Carl Kirby Jr. speaking, myself speaking. We've just added

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Pastor Eric Kunin speaking. So if you're familiar with Pulpit in the

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Streets, Pastor Eric is one of the guys that preaches on Pulpit in the Streets. And so they're all going to be talking, the topics are going to be the topic of the family.

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We're going to be talking about the family, how that affects our evangelism, things that we need to be doing about the family.

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And so we need to be aware of how the family affects a good

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Christian balanced life. And so we do encourage you to sign up, let your friends know, attend that.

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It's going to be a really good event. If you were there last year, it's going to be better. Just invite all your friends, bring a whole group over.

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Okay, alright. So I'm being told the Ohio Rep for Living Waters will be there. Ryan Munich, who has

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Witness Radio. Do you know what it is? Is it Witness Talk Radio, I think?

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I think it's witnesstalkradio .com or .org. I think it is what it is. But Ryan, if you're in the chat room, just post that and you can send that over to me so I can see it.

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And so I can get that right. But Ryan's a good friend of the ministry here. He will be out in Ohio.

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He usually has some witnesstalkradio .org. Okay, thanks. witnesstalkradio .org.

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So you can listen to his radio talk show, encourage that.

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And so the Ohio Fire is going to be something you want to make sure you sign up for.

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Don't just show up. The reason for that is we have resource bags. I don't know what we're going to have for Ohio, but I know in New Jersey last year, everyone who attended and registered got themselves a brand new

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MacArthur Study Bible. Don't know if we're going to be getting those again, but boy, was that a sweet deal.

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So different ministries provide different things, books and things like that. Hopefully, that will be expanding.

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And so, yeah, okay. Maybe Ryan, oh, I'm being criticized in the way I pronounce his name.

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Muniek, is that Muniek? Okay, Muniek. Ryan Muniek, since we're, you know, maybe

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Ryan will provide some free resources for the 100, 150 people that will register.

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Not to put you on the spot, Mr. Ohio State Rep, but maybe. So now what we want to do in the, see,

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I finished class and we still have time for the Brother of Encouragement. We have a Brother of Encouragement that I want to encourage you with.

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And I want to encourage you because somebody else kind of, unfortunately, kind of dissed him.

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And let me tell you how. It is, and now we're going to get a name I really probably won't pronounce right.

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I just call him Jay because it's easier. But Johan or Hanon Heno, Heno?

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Would that be a, Heno? Okay. But he's with Wrath and Grace who will be a new vendor, at least to Jersey Fire.

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If not, we hope at all of them, Ohio Fire, NorCal Fire, or Jersey Fire. But I got, hey, this looks better when it covers my face.

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Can you see that? Yeah, you can. So that is the t -shirts that, see what happened was is he gave a t -shirt to Todd Friel at the

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Compelled Conference. And Todd Friel gets on and says, man, this is a great shirt. And he's bragging about the shirt that he got from striving for eternity.

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And we didn't give him the t -shirt. And so we quickly shot off an email over there to Wretched and said, hey, that was

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WrathandGrace .com that did this t -shirt, not us. But this is a cool logo.

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You see it? The little lamb with the lion there.

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And it says Wrath and Grace and has it in the inside cover there. These are really comfortable shirts.

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I'm just telling you, dude. Some people don't do comfortable shirts, but we busted on Johan a lot at one of the conferences because the shirts were running tight.

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But the shirt that he gave me, which is a large, fits just fine.

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And I'll tell you, it was super comfortable. I mean, I'm the type that I don't wear a lot of t -shirts.

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But if I get a t -shirt like this, dude, I wear it. Why? Because it feels good to be wearing.

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So we actually may want to work with him on creating some t -shirts for us. But this is a guy who, if you like t -shirts,

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I know he does rap music. Not exactly my thing. I understand. Some of you like it. But I know he does some music as well.

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But his t -shirts, his son, he's trying to do one of the things he has here on the back.

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Although this probably won't show up too well. You definitely can't read the words there, can you? No, I don't think so.

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But that is, basically what that is, is a gospel track. Okay?

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He basically has the gospel. Let's see if I put it up. If I do that, can you read that?

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It just says the gospel. Yeah, okay. So, but he basically has a gospel. It's a walking gospel track.

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He's got one shirt that has the QR code. That's kind of neat. So, I encourage you to go to Wraith and Grace.

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Man, I can't talk. Wrathandgrace .com. Get to know Johan. Get some of his shirts.

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They're really comfortable. Really good. He's going to be a new vendor at the events. At the

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Striving for Eternity events. So, I encourage you to go out and encourage him this week. Because anybody who knows anything about trying to start your own business, it's really hard.

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Especially when you're going to limit yourself to like biblical Christians. Okay? Not a lot of people to buy your products.

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And he's trying to really do some top notch stuff. So, I encourage you to encourage him this week.

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We'll be back next week with the lessons on the

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Holy Spirit. Until then, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.