Transactional Christianity (Part 1)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is

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Mike Abendroth. Glad you're listening. I don't know how many downloads we have per show.

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I don't know, 1 ,000 or 2, 25 ,000. I should probably check.

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But it doesn't really matter. If you have been blessed, I'm thankful. Many blessings have come to me personally through the show.

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Got to meet lots of wonderful people, still meeting people, and a good supplement to the ministry here.

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We used to call it No Compromise Radio because there are so many people compromising. We didn't want to. We realize that we, royal we,

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I, and Pastor Steve, too, that we do compromise, but we don't like it when we do.

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Well, we've switched a little bit, and we talk more about the Lord Jesus now because he's the one that never compromised.

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So that's the way I kind of redeemed and rescued the title of the show. I mean, after all, the trademarking and the copyrights and the no -co radios and the, you know, no -co a day keeps the craziness away.

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I mean, what are we going to do with all those things? I guess we keep them no -co radio. I think I am going to change the bumper music eventually, but just this is kind of like the afterthought stuff.

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I just thought to myself, you know, what could no -co radio be like if I actually spent time on it?

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I do spend time on it in the sense that I'm studying in the word, reading things, things pique my interest, and then

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I talk about it. But I don't, like I used to in the old days, study for the show in particular.

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This is kind of like the extra of my life. For instance, today I'm in a particular passage that I'm going to be talking about this

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Sunday, so it's actually related to work, as it were. But anyway, mine is Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio, just back from Pennsylvania, Evans City slash

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Butler slash Cranbury with Pastor Dave, and Gospel Life Church.

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I've never been in a church called Gospel Life. I'm glad to be at such a church.

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Wonderful people there with the elders, and got to see some friends, and so it worked out really well.

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Thanks for praying for me and my health. I had a lung test last week, and still not perfect, but slowly getting better.

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I've been out of the hospital since late September of last year, 2021. So that gives us what?

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October, November, December, January, and almost February, so we're almost five months out.

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I used to walk 22 steps a day in the hospital with my high -flow 60 liters of oxygen, and it was 60 degrees yesterday here in central

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Massachusetts. It's supposed to snow 14 inches tomorrow. In real time, it's February 24th right now.

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This won't play for another week. February 31st, March something, and March 2nd,

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I think, and maybe 1st, but anyway, rode 22 miles yesterday on the bicycle.

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I won't tell you how long it took me, but it was over an hour. I'll tell you that at least. I wasn't going 20 miles an hour, closer to two hours probably, but two things happened.

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It was super windy, 25, 35 mile an hour winds, headwinds, which really made it slower, and I didn't want to push it too much with my oxygen levels.

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I think it probably was like a 14 mile an hour ride if there was no wind, so anyway, thanks for everything.

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I'm glad to be in your earbuds talking, and got some good feedback from the

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Johnny Gibson interview from last week, thankful for that. Maybe I'll do more interviews as time goes on.

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I think I'll have Pat Abendroth back, Luke Abendroth back, Scott Clark Abendroth back.

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I am planning to go to the Shepherds Conference. I wasn't going to go, but my kids are going.

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My kids are going. My kids are there in California, most of them, and so my wife and I will go, swing by and say hi to our kids.

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I think my son -in -law will be at the Shepherds Conference, and I'm mainly going to go to see friends and those alumni that we're friends with, and I'm not speaking at the

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Shepherds Conference. I never have, never will, but that's okay. Lots of good fellowship that goes on there, so we're going to do it.

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I guess I could go to the Ligonier Conference like I did last year in lieu of, but then what's the big imbroglio with the

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Ligonier Conference held at First Baptist Church in Orlando, etc., etc.? Can't keep up. Here's the show today.

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The world we live in is a transactional world, and if I do this, then you do that.

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You know, business transactions, agreements and exchanges, and we interact, and you do your part, and I do mine.

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But you can tell already even by that language that that's not going to be a good spiritual arrangement.

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God, I'll do my part, now you do your part. That's not the way it goes.

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And in evangelicalism, to our demise and to our shame all too often,

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I do this, then God loves me. I do this, then God's happy with me. God will love me if I do such and such.

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God will love us if we obey. And that maybe is for your quiet time, or going to church, or serving, or prayer.

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It's transactional. We want to be holy and upright and good people and nice people so that God doesn't change

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His view of us, that He continues to love us.

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Is that the way to run? Is that the way to obey? Is that the way to live the

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Christian life by faith? Is that the way we want to do it? Only out of love for ourselves and fear of being condemned?

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Belgic Confession, Article 24. How do we work through this?

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What do we do with a transactional life? Sometimes I say to myself, as you've heard on the show many times,

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I discuss a father, earthly, sinful, frail, weak.

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How does he treat people called his children, who are his children? And then somehow we make a human father more kind and compassionate than the

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Heavenly Father? For those of us who are dads, moms too, or those of us who've had dads and moms, we've all at least had one, maybe they died or ran off or whatever, but if I do this, my kid says, then my dad will love me?

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That's a bad relationship. That's a bad deal. But somehow we think God is like that.

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Jerry Bridges said, to the degree that we live with an abiding sense of His love for us in Christ, to that degree we will love

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God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's the way things should flow.

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God loves us, and then we respond. If that's what you mean by a transaction, okay, fine,

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I just don't want it to be the transaction going the other way, where I do this, then God is pleased with me. God loves me more.

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God's more happy with me. Jerry Bridges says in the same book, The Discipline of Grace, he,

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God, does not examine our performance to see if we are worthy. Rather, he looks to see if we are trusting in the merit of His Son as our only hope for securing

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His blessing. To repeat, we are saved by grace, and we are to live by grace every day of our

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Christian lives. If it is true that our relationship with God is based on His grace instead of our performance, why then are we so prone to fall into good day, bad day type of thinking?

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It is because we have relegated the gospel to the unbeliever, Jerry Bridges. And he had given an illustration about a good day, bad day, and, you know, a good day was you get up and you pray, and you read your

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Bible, and you deny self as you serve your wife or, you know, all these different things. Bad day, you wake up late, and you're running, and you haven't opened your

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Bible, and you're not praying, you're not thinking about spiritual things. Which day is God more apt to bless type of thing?

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He, God, is looking to see if we're trusting in the merit of His Son, right? That's why we are living by grace every single day.

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Jesus, remember, in John 17, prayed, Oh, righteous

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Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me.

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I made known to them your name, and will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I, I mean, there goes our transactional thinking.

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But that legal spirit, that legality, that, that, I don't know, it's almost kind of weird karmish kind of thing.

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What we do and how it affects, and what we do does not affect relationship with the

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Lord Jesus, with the triune God. That's been secured for us and sealed to us by the

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Holy Spirit. What do you think of Ralph Erskine's gospel mortification quote?

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The believer kills sin because God loves him, but the legalist kills sin that God may love him.

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That's what we're after. Everything that we think of in a worldly sense, according to the world, or our flesh, something in our own minds, without external revelation, we are living in a world with the hangover of the covenant of works, and we need to do this and live.

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But we're living, so therefore we do this, if that makes any sense.

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Since God has loved us, we want to kill sin. God loves us.

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He's given us Jesus for pardon and for power, and that power is the

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Spirit of God. He's dwelling in us personally. The Spirit of God isn't a power,

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I'm not saying that, but the Holy Spirit is powerful, capital P power, you could say, as some old commentators do.

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But we're able to say no to sin, mortification, and yes to righteousness, vivification, alive, dead and alive.

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What do we say we're dead to? We want to say we're dead to sin, practically, because positionally we are Romans 6.

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We're united with Christ, union with Christ, in Christ, in Christ Jesus, in Jesus our

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Lord, language like that. And we want to say yes to righteousness, alive to doing the right things.

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That's a consequence of God's sanctifying power and wisdom.

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What we don't want in our life is transactional. My wife will love me if I do this.

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My wife will serve me if I serve her. I mean, I guess I could just say from the very get -go, is this agape love?

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What kind of love is this? Now, there's all kinds of different definitions of love in the

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Bible, storge, eros, phileo, but agape, self -serving love, seeking what's best in the other.

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And therefore, if I'm doing something in order to get, well, that's agape?

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I don't think so. What is sanctification? Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 35.

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Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die to sin and live to righteousness.

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In other words, God is the sanctifier. He supernaturally sanctifies. We are being sanctified. We don't sanctify ourselves.

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We are enabled. We are renewed. It's the power through His Spirit in your inner being.

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That's what we're strengthened by, Ephesians 3 .16. It's a supernatural work.

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It's a gracious work. And then we respond by the Spirit's power. We don't just lay back and let

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God. We say no to sin and yes to righteousness. Those are the consequences of sanctification.

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We see what God has done. There's a reflex response. It's not transactional.

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God will love us if we do that. That's why Ephesians 1, 2, and 3 has already been written, read.

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That's why it precedes all these imperatives found in chapter 4.

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There is one imperative in 2 .11. Remember, you're a Gentile. You were

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Gentiles. But when it comes to holy living, what's going on? And let's just make sure we think about this rightly like there are chapters 1, 2, and 3 in the

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Bible of Ephesians. Not just, oh, we just have to do these things. Paul says in Ephesians 4, verse 1,

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I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called.

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There's the link. We understand who God is and what he's done. We understand doctrine about God, about Christ, about the

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Spirit, about the church and what he's doing. And therefore, we want to walk in a manner worthy.

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All that really means is to balance out the scales. If you have a scale on a fulcrum and you put a bunch of weight on the left side, the right side goes up.

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There's no weight there. It doesn't balance. It's like a seesaw, right? Remember riding seesaws when you were a kid?

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It's a good way to hurt people when you jump off them and the other person goes careening down to the ground. Maybe that's why my back hurts.

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So we add weight to our side of the seesaw scale to try to balance it out some.

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And that's the idea. He's not saying it perfectly balances or anything like that, but he wants things to be balanced out.

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And we realize as we've been studying the book of Ephesians here on Sunday morning at Bethlehem Bible Church, bbchurch .org,

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or you can go to the YouTube site for our services on Bethlehem Bible Church, West Boston Mass, et cetera.

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But I think if you go to bbchurch .org, you can find the link for the live stream. You take some texts that say, don't lie, don't steal, forgive, maintain unity.

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And if you just isolate them and just make them ethical only, moral only,

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I think there's gonna be a problem. One of the problems, as Graham Goldsworthy would say, you'll then make people think that the essence of Christianity is law.

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Of course, we believe in the third use of the law to guide us. I mean,

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I'm looking forward to being in Ephesians 4 the next couple of weeks. And for those that think

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No Compromise Radio is anti -law because we talk about grace so much, I'm not anti -law.

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But the definition of an antinomian denying the third use of the law, I don't deny the third use of the law.

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I think some dispensationalists might deny the third use of the law. They would be technically antinomian even though they would say, and rightfully so in terms of wanting to live holy lives, they're under the law of Christ.

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Okay, I get that. Maybe they're not functional antinomians, but historically, if they would believe that, they would be deemed antinomian.

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But I'm not lawless. I'm just trying to say keep works in their proper place.

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I'm not against works, as Luther would say. I'm just against them in justification like the dispensationalist.

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I'm also against them for any kind of standing in the future.

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You say faith without works is dead, but am I gonna be standing before God based on my works? Of course, faith without works is dead.

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That's not what I'm talking about. And therefore, when we look at Ephesians and we see these six chapters and the first three essentially doctrine, and then the last four with a bunch of commands, the essence of Christianity is not law.

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Law is important. It shows us who God is, as I say in the show, over and over and over and over. It's good, it's holy, it's right.

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But it comes from the Father's hand through Christ, the mediator. And therefore, we wanna make sure that when we obey, we do because God loves us.

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And when we obey, we're not worrying that God is going to condemn us if we don't obey rightly, perfectly.

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If you wanna say, all right, how does Ephesians break itself out with chapters one, two, and three, and then four, five, and six, you could say it this way with a song or the hymn.

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Love so amazing, so divine. That's Ephesians one to three.

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And then four to six is demands my soul, my life, my all. There it is, right?

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God's holy, we're to be holy in all our behavior because he's called us.

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That's what this doctrine is. This is not a how -to section necessarily. This is, oh, how do you do this?

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Well, you really need to go back to chapters one, two, and three and appreciate that the

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Christian life, as Ian Hamilton said, flows from who

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God is and what he's done. He said now, oh no, this is said in Clare Ferguson.

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Now, after these first three chapters, exhortations flow like a swift river.

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This may explain why Paul pauses and then steps back like a long jump athlete as he takes his approach run to what he has to say in the following three chapters.

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Okay, I can see that. That's a good illustration. So here in Ephesians, with that in mind, and you can do this with other books of the

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Bible too, New Testament epistles, how do we frame this? How do we teach this?

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If I was going to teach you how to do a Bible lesson or a Bible study or prepare a sermon or you're gonna teach your children

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Sunday school class that you might teach, how do we frame this?

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I mean, when you look at Ephesians four, there are many things that are discussed.

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Humility, long suffering, gentleness, eager to keep the church unified.

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What do I do with those? I ignore them. We're under grace, not law.

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Of course not. It's incumbent upon us to obey these things in the

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New Testament. Of course. I'm not saying we don't have to obey things in the Old Testament, that's what I'm saying.

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But these New Testament epistles, we're to obey them. But we have to remember why we're obeying them and who's giving us the command.

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The way I would frame this, and it kind of just, I had an aha moment yesterday when I was working through everything, and my mind thinks this way.

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Guilt, grace, gratitude, you know, we wanna do things out of gratitude. Duplex gratia, Christ for us,

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Christ in us. That is Christ for pardon, justification, Christ for power, indwelling Holy Spirit as we live holy lives in response to God's trying,

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God's sanctifying work. We see what God has done. There's a reflex. God does something.

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How do we respond? And I'll give you an illustration. It's the first one. Probably have to do it on the show on this.

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Because this was a long intro. Okay, God calls you by grace and love.

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How do you respond? Let's put them in a form of questions. If you look at Ephesians chapter three, no, excuse me, chapter four, you're gonna see a lot about call, calling, call, at least three times there.

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God has called you by grace and love. How do you respond? Well, if it's a call from God that means he does all the work, walk in a manner worthy of the calling by which you've been called.

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If you're going to live that life of calling in light of your calling, what does that mean?

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Well, of course, general call means God indiscriminately invites sinners, commands them to believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And some say yes, some say no. But what we call the effectual call, the internal call is the person hears the general call and then the spirit of God uses those words through the preacher, calling people to believe.

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Then he, the spirit of God, makes this external call effective.

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And the sinner who hears it is born again.

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They're converted. And of course, everything goes along with the response when it's justification and sanctification and redemption, et cetera, et cetera.

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This powerful working that God and God alone does in the life of a sinner.

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So if God saved you by himself, how do you respond? Well, the answer, when you think about this give and take in terms of, that's a wrong word,

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I don't want to say that, give and take. When you see this revelation and response, God revealed himself by what he's done and who he is and how do we respond?

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Okay, Christian, let's just make it super simple. The only reason you're a Christian is because God made you one in spite of yourself.

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The same goes for me too. I'm not trying to preach down to you. We're all in the same boat together. We're sinners, ungodly enemies, helpless,

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Romans 5, but God. Right, he demonstrates his love toward us and while we're sinners, Christ died for us.

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That's why we're Christians. We didn't do, strive, trial, toil, slave away.

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We couldn't do anything. So if you have received such a salvation, what should your attitude be?

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And that's what Paul talks about in Ephesians 4 too, an attitude. What's your attitude if you've been so rescued?

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And the answer is here. This is the revelation response paradigm with all humility, gentleness, patience, showing forbearance to one another in love.

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Since God has so done that, salvation is by grace alone through faith alone. That's not of yourself. It's the work of God, right?

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It's the gift of God. Well, how do you respond? Pridefully, self -righteously, pompously, arrogantly?

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No, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance. And so we see it even right here in Ephesians 4.

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This is the way God works. This is what sanctification does to us.

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God is sanctifying us, and this is how we respond. It's like, oh, duh, guilt, grace, and gratitude. Oh, duh, fruits of thankfulness and fruits of obedience and fruits of faithfulness.

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If God has called me, and he has, I should be humble, gentle, and patient, especially with Christ's body.

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More tomorrow. God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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

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

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