11-01-2020

Park Meadows Church

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All right, well, let's get started. I'm going to have you turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter 8, verse 28 through 30.

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And we've been here quite a while. We've already actually finished chapter 8 except for these verses. And we bounced back to these to finish with these.

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And the main reason I held this for the last part of our study on Romans 8, of course, we're still going verse by verse through Romans.

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So we'll hit chapter 9 soon. But chapter 8, this particular part spans all, even before time began, all the way into time and outside the other end of time.

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And just those two verses is quite amazing. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate.

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That happened before time began. So there is no sequence or order to that, not one happening before the other.

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They just both are. God has always known who his children are. That's what the word means in the

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Bible language. It doesn't mean that he's knowledgeable of it. It means he knows you with a relationship.

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Completely different word. It's not the same as omniscience. He knows about everything, yes.

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But foreknowledge has to do with a personal relationship with human beings that he knows personally as his own children.

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That's what the word means throughout scripture. So he knew you before the foundation of the world as his own child.

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He also predestinated that you would be called into his family according to his plan.

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And then we come into time in verse 30. You see the calling and you see the justification.

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Those two things happen in time. The calling happens on the day of your birthday, your spiritual birthday.

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Now there are two types of callings in the Bible. One's called the universal call. And that's just the gospel going out to the world.

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So everyone is called in that sense. But the other theologians call it the effectual call.

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And you can only tell the difference by the context where you find these words. It's the same word in the Greek.

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But in the context, it's very different. For example, here we know this is effectual call because the same group of people that he foreknew before time began and that he predestinated to be saved, that same group of people is called.

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So not everyone has this calling. So this is a different calling than the calling of the gospel going out.

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But the truth is God has sent the gospel out to the world. No man is without excuse. Romans chapter one tells us that.

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Everyone gets to know God exists because of the universe that he created for one thing.

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And there is this calling that goes out where the church witnesses and the truth is out there and people get to hear it.

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What they do with it is what they will be judged according to. So all human beings do what they want to do.

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And those who struggle with this, and I see the struggle a lot out there, I'll have friends, family, church members will send me a text and say, man,

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I need some help. I've got a family member that's just not understanding this. And they are saying these other things.

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It's all about free will. It's all about man doing this and man doing that. Well, we can understand why people think that way.

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But when you take a thorough study of all of the scripture, it won't fit the whole of scripture to think that salvation is based on man determining his own destiny.

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It simply is not based on that. It's based right here. It's very clear who

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God foreknew before the foundation of the world. How do I know that's when that happened? Ephesians chapter one talks about it.

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The Bible is written like this. It's interwoven. These truths are interwoven throughout different chapters and books all throughout the different books of the

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Bible and all throughout the time that the Bible was laid down. So we know what foreknowledge means and we know what it means to predestinate.

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So if God predetermined who would be saved, then those who think that humans determine their own destiny by what they do or think or the acts that they do or how they live have a major problem with that.

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And so they don't get it. But the truth is all humans do what they want to do. Now, as we go into looking at this, the same group of people that were foreknown and predestinated are called in time on their spiritual birthday, the day they're going to wake up, the

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Holy Spirit is who wakes them up. While we were yet in our sins, hath he quickened us? Hath he brought us to life?

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We didn't do that to ourselves. We didn't just decide one day, I think I'll love Jesus because the

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Bible says we didn't love him. The Bible says there are none that seek God, not one. They've all gone out of the way, all humans.

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It's a fallen race, ladies and gentlemen. The whole race deserves hell. And what God did in his mercy is he decided to save some of that race by grace, which means undeserved salvation.

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Salvation based not on what they did, but on what God's great heart wants to do. And that is he wants to give some human beings as a love offering or gift to his son,

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Jesus, to be his brothers and sisters. And so that's why God did it. And that is what God did. And the

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Bible never says anywhere in the scripture that God set out to save the entire human race. If he had set out to do that, the entire human race would be saved.

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And we know Jesus says they won't be because God is sovereign. If God wills that all be saved, then all will be saved.

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I mean, that doesn't take a lot of logic to figure that out. So apparently that's not the whole story that man just chooses.

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And according to what man chooses, God responds. That's what the world wants you to think.

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But the Bible teaches that that's not how it works. The Bible teaches that God predetermined these things before he made anything.

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Romans 8 .29 says that clearly. And Romans 8 .30 said that in time, here we find a race that's totally fallen with not one person seeking

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God or desiring God in the natural state that we come into this world into, not one.

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So how could the gospel be based on humans deciding to start to live right or to choose

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God when the Bible says they won't do it? So that system just doesn't work because you're dealing with a fallen race.

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The Bible says Jesus was the light of the world and he came into the world and the darkness did not want him.

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The darkness loved the darkness and moved away from the light.

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It doesn't say that people came to the light. It says they moved away from the light. Adam and Eve, what did they do when they fell?

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They hid themselves. That's what humans do. Unless God in his mercy sends his

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Holy Spirit and wakes you up. And that's what he does to everyone that the father tells him to do that to.

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And the father tells him to do it to every single person that he foreknew and predestinated to be his own child.

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And so that person's living along in their life. You and I living along in our life, hanging out with the goats, thinking we were just like them.

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And the goats liked us that way, but really we were lost sheep. And when the Holy Spirit came and woke us up that day, we had a change and I want to.

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God didn't make us do anything we didn't want to do, but the Holy Spirit changed our want to. And how did he do it? Just simply by showing us, by opening our eyes and saying, look, there's

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Jesus for real. You can see who he is now. And once we saw that, we desired him because that's what we were created for was to have the

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Lord in our hearts with us walking together hand in hand with him. And so once our eyes were open, yes, he became irresistible.

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And we received Jesus as our Lord and savior. And at that very moment, when the

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Holy Spirit opened our eyes and allowed us to see this, he also did something else to us.

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The Bible says he justified us. And that's what we've been studying lately is justified. Justified is in the passive voice, which means it's something that someone greater than you does to you.

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It's not something you just decided to do. And so the very Greek proves that salvation is by grace, not by works or by decisions that humans make.

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Your decision, ladies and gentlemen, no matter what your pastors and denominations taught you, it was not your decision for Christ that saved you.

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God did not save you on the basis of your decision for Christ. The Holy Spirit quickened you before you ever made that decision because you didn't want to make that decision.

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And once he quickened you, you were already quickened. That means alive. So the great cause of your salvation had already happened.

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And everything else is an effect of it, including your decision. Now, people don't like to hear that because you want to think, well,

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God saved me because I was so different than everyone else. I decided to believe in him. But that would be salvation by works.

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And the Bible is very clear that salvation, that works play no role in the salvation. Works are an effect of the salvation, but they don't cause it.

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And an effect can never be the cause of the cause. So what happened was the

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Holy Spirit called us in time. Every single person that God knew as his own, when it's their time to be saved, the

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Holy Spirit goes to that person by the command of the Father and wakes them up and shows Jesus to them and says, what will you do with him?

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And the human heart was built for Jesus. And so once that heart is open and those eyes are clear and we are alive and that spiritual part of us that can commune with God is made alive by the

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Holy Spirit, that's the regeneration, the cause of the salvation, the regeneration has taken place.

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Now, certainly we do all the different things that the Bible says Christians do. We receive him as our personal

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Lord and savior. We repent, we change our mind about who God is. We want to get baptized in the water. We want to go to church and live for him and give tithes and offerings and hang out with Christians and stay away from the goats we used to hang out with.

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We don't even have to do that. They'll just stay away from us. They don't like us at that point. And all of those are effects of the salvation.

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That's what we've been studying here. It's really amazing. Even the Greek shows that's how it works. So we've been talking about justification.

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Now, we've already pointed out it takes about, you have to understand about seven different things to even understand what it means to be justified.

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And what does justified mean again? It means to be rendered righteous by someone else.

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It's the Father causing us to be righteous. That's what it means. So that in itself, the very definition of the words and the way they're used in the scripture prove that it's not something we do for God.

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It's something he did to us. He saved us. He justified us. He made us just as if we had never sinned.

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From the Father's viewpoint, we've never sinned. Now, how does that work? Well, you have to understand seven things.

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The first one is you have to understand the depravity of manner. You will never understand how justification works.

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If you don't understand that the Bible teaches that the human race is so fallen that no one desires

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God and never will, that the light has come in the world and the darkness hated the light,

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John 3. If you don't understand those things, you'll never understand salvation because you'll think man does it.

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You'll think man has some innate goodness and decides just to come to God. And that's not how it works. Every great religion in the world teaches that except biblical

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Christianity. And now biblical Christianity is not biblical. It's just like the other religions of the world.

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It's based on works in most churches today. If your pastor gets up and he says, look, Jesus died to provide a gift for you.

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Now you just have to decide what you'll do with it. Then he's preaching the same stuff that the Mohammedans preach and the same stuff that the

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Buddhists preach in a different way. But they're saying, well, yeah, Jesus is important but you have to make the decision to save yourself.

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That's no different than the great religions of the world. They all teach you have to save yourself except the

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Bible doesn't teach it. The Bible puts it in the passive and says, God saves you. The Holy Spirit, while you're dead in your sins wakes you up and gives you life and quickens you and makes you alive.

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And then does about 33 other things to you. One of which is we're studying today. He justifies you.

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It doesn't say you get justified or that you do something to be justified. It says he justifies you.

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Something he does to you. And what does it mean? It means he renders you righteous. He counts you as if you're righteous.

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So we've been studying that but you'll never understand it if you don't understand point number one. If you don't understand that man is totally depraved not just somewhat depraved.

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He is totally unable to save himself or to seek God. If you don't get that you'll always give man the glory for salvation and God will not love that.

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Jesus gets all the glory for salvation. The Holy Spirit gets all the glory for salvation. The father gets all the glory for salvation.

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Man gets no glory for salvation but he receives a beautiful gift and gets all the benefit. That's the true gospel but you don't hear it a lot today.

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It's never been loved. 2000 years ago, Jesus preached a sermon on it and they walked away from him and he looked at his disciples and said, will you leave me also?

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No one's ever loved this doctrine, but it's true. We should love it. We should love the fact that God in his mercy decided to save some from a completely fallen, damned race.

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Don't you think? We should be happy that he decided to save some especially if we wake up one day and figure out we're one of those.

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Now, how do you figure that out? Because you love God, that's impossible to do. You can say you love

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God but you cannot love Jesus Christ and all of his people unless the Holy Spirit saves you. So if you ever had a desire to call upon the name of the

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Lord then you're saved because no natural man has that. It's the Holy Spirit that puts that desire in the heart of a sheep, a lost sheep and he turns that lost sheep into a saved sheep.

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And the day of the calling is your notification. That's the day that God notified you.

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You've always been my child, you just didn't know it. Come to me and walk with me and your whole life will change.

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Second thing is we have to understand the meaning of grace. Grace means free, free. It's a double free.

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Free, free, mercy. Free, free, undeserved favor from God. If we don't understand that we will always think man plays a role in this justification but if we understand that it cannot be deserved then we understand man can't play a role in it.

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All they can do is receive it. And then the third thing that we've been studying a little bit last couple of times is propitiation.

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What does propitiation mean? If we don't understand what this means we will always think man can save himself but propitiation is a doctrine in the

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Bible that teaches that is utterly impossible because what propitiation deals with is it's something that when

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Jesus died on the cross it's something he did for the father, not for us.

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Now we received the benefit of it but he didn't do that part of it for us. He did this for the father. He propitiated

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God, not us. Now there is a sense in which propitiation is extended to us and applies to us in a personal way but that's what happens at the calling when the

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Holy Spirit, he does many different things to us in the moment he saves us. One is that he applies the blood of Jesus to us therefore applying the propitiation to us individually.

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But what does it mean? Well, we studied last time that the best English word for that is the word satisfied.

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We found that in Isaiah 53. I won't go through the whole thing but just to review a little bit last time verse six says, all we like sheep have gone astray.

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What does that teach? That teaches point number one up there. Can you see it? Total depravity. All we like sheep have gone astray.

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We're not chasing God. Now that's just one of many thousands of verses in the Bible that teach total depravity, right?

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But we're not chasing God. We're going away from God. We're hiding from God in our natural state. So we've all gone astray.

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Point number one is now covered in this beautiful passage. We have turned everyone to his own way.

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We think we're God. That's one of the things the Holy Spirit does when he regenerates us is he lets us know, guess what?

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God's there and you ain't him. God's there and you're not him. That's called repentance.

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You just changed your mind about yourself. You thought you were God to that very moment. You ran your life, didn't you? Some of you listening may still be running it.

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Well, you need to repent. But guess what? You can't repent unless the Holy Spirit puts a desire in your heart to repent.

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And if you sense that desire, he's already done it. Welcome to the family. Guess what?

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You didn't need our altar call to get that, did you? You didn't need the church. You didn't need a human. God did that.

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So there here in Isaiah 53, Old Testament, long before Christ was born, the

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Bible says you need to understand man is depraved. And number two, because of that, every man goes his own way, not

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God's way. So he's not seeking God. And then it says, and the Lord has laid on Jesus the iniquity of us.

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That is the substitutionary death. There's so much taught in the Old Testament, New Testament doctrine taught all through the

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Old Testament because it's not New Testament doctrine. The New Testament lays it out clearly. The Old Testament says it's always been here.

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And so much of it. So God the Father laid on Jesus the sin of us but you gotta ask who us is.

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Well, you gotta read the whole passage to know that, but you'll find out in Isaiah 53, God is writing to his people, the sheep, not to the goats.

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He's not writing this to the whole world or any human, just every human being. He's writing it to those who were foreknown and predestined before the foundation of the world is who this passage is written to.

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So all of us, our sins have been laid on him. You say, no, that doesn't sound like it says that. Well, let's keep reading though.

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And we're not even covering the whole thing. And we did that last Sunday if you wanna check the archives, you can find it. Verse eight said, for Jesus was cut off out of the land of living.

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So he died in the place of us. We should have died for our sins, but he died for the sins of his people.

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No longer can you say, as you've heard your pastor say, he died for everyone. The Bible does not teach that.

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And when you're a pastor like me and you discover this in scripture, you gotta adjust how you give altar calls if you choose to still give them.

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Because you can't say, well, Jesus died for all you guys because I don't know who was out here. If you have a big church, you don't know everybody out there is a sheep.

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There might be some goats and he didn't die for them. Now I can't prove to you in five minutes today that, but if you go back and check the archives, we've already proven it through scripture, through hundreds of pages of scripture.

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So the people that he gave his blood for, he ransomed those people and they all will be saved.

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100 % of them. Jesus said out of them, I will lose nothing. So his blood was not shed as a ransom for all human beings.

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It was shed as a ransom for the predestined, the foreknown that God has loved for all ages and always known as his own family.

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That's who his blood was given for. Now, did he die for everybody? Well, you can say he did if you want to, because in a sense he did.

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His death will be what everyone is judged by. The first question at the great white throne judgment is what did you do with my son,

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Jesus? And the vast majority of the human race say nothing. And God will say, depart from me.

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I never knew you. And that's why you didn't do anything with him because I didn't know you. Because if I had known you, then

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I loved you first, you would have loved me back and you'd have been saved. So depart from me. See, that's what the Bible teaches.

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Through and through is what it teaches. So Jesus was cut off out of the land of the living.

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Why? For, look at this, the sins, the transgression of all human beings.

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Does it say that? What does it say, church? My what?

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People. Whose people? My people. That's who he was killed for.

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My people. That's who he was stricken for. The Bible is clear on it. John Calvin did not invent this.

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Isaiah lived quite a long time before John Calvin was born. So did Jesus. So did the apostle

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Paul. So did Augustine. So did every other person that studied their Bible, all of the whole

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Bible, rather than just the doctrines your denomination wants you to hear. You study the whole thing. You will find this throughout

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Old and New Testament because it's the truth. You can't hide the truth. You can only try to twist it.

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But when you twist it, the whole rest of the Bible will contradict your twistation. You like that word, Ron?

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We can use that one. It's a $9 word he said.

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For Jesus was cut off out of the land of living for the sins of his people, for sins of God's people. That's who he died for.

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Verse 11. And he, God the father, shall see the travail of the son's soul while he's hanging on the cross and he shall be satisfied.

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And that's what propitiation is. That's the propitiation. When the father saw your sins and my sins in Christ and he died with our sins,

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God was satisfied that your sin debt and my sin debt is paid in full. Paid in full.

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It's all of God, none of man. You didn't do anything. You weren't even here yet. This happened 2000 years ago. And the

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Bible says, the father transcended time up to our time and he took our whole lifetime and he put us in Christ and we died in him the day he died.

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We were buried in him the day he was buried and we rose again when he came out of the grave.

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And that's why we're saved and you weren't born yet. So what role did you play in that? Nothing. It's all

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God that did all of this work. Millions of points of work that we don't know what he did to save us, but he did it all.

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We didn't do any of it. We receive it as a benefit. How much does a child play in the role of his own birth? And yet Jesus said, you must be born again.

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Spiritual birth works just like that. And ladies, you can understand that better than we men probably.

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The baby does not play a role in it. He gets in, he's the problem. He or she is the problem. The parent gives the birth.

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The parent planned the whole thing before it ever happened. The child just receives the benefit of it. Doesn't that sound a lot like salvation?

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Spiritual birth. It works the same way. So the satisfied part in Isaiah 53, 11 is propitiation taught in the

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Old Testament. And by knowledge or by knowing Jesus, shall my righteous servant justify many.

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Now, let me ask you this. Is there ever a case where the word all really means many in the

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Bible? Well, there's a lot of cases when all means many. In fact, in the Greek, pas means all.

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It doesn't mean all individuals like it does in English. In Greek, sometimes it means all individuals.

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Sometimes it means some individuals out of all the groups that are available. So it's different in Greek.

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So yeah, in the Bible language, from the Greek coming into the English where you see the word all, sometimes really just means many.

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But let me ask you this logically. Can the word many ever mean all? It cannot.

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It's just a logical statement. If you ever studied logic, you know that's true. So many cannot mean all.

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So Jesus did not die for all individuals. He died for many individuals out of all people groups, out of every race.

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And when Paul said he died for everybody, that's what he's talking about. He's teaching the Jews, look, guys, you don't think

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God will save a Gentile, but Jesus died for all men. That's the context that's always found in.

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And people wanna say, well, he died for everybody. It says in the Bible. No, not in context. It doesn't say that he died for every individual.

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It says he died for many individuals. You'll see the word many, look at verse 11. Everybody see it in your

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Bible? I didn't write that. God wrote that. John Calvin didn't write it. Augustine, 1 ,400 years earlier, didn't write it.

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Paul didn't write that. Isaiah wrote that 2 ,600 years ago.

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He said he died for many, not for every individual. So who'd he die for? Those who he foreknew, he also predestinated.

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Those who he predestinated, he also called. He woke you up and regenerated you. And those who he called, 100 % of them, he made you as if you never sinned in God's eyes.

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And also part of that salvation was propitiation, which is something Jesus did to God, which you did not know part of it, but without it, you could have never been saved.

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So how can you ever come up with a gospel that says you save yourself by stuff you do? You couldn't have propitiated anybody.

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So that is an earthy, demoniacal doctrine that works play any part in the salvation of a person if you're talking about the cause of the salvation.

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Yeah, it works as a result of it or an effect, but an effect can never be the cause of the cause. So he died for the many, for he shall bear their sins.

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Whose sins? The all or the many. What does it say? What does the grammar say?

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It says the many. Jesus died for the sins of many.

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Who are the many? It's all of God's people out of the entire fallen race. You take a whole annihilated, fallen, hate

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God race, and there are many, it's not very many in any one generation, but if you take all the generations from Adam until now, that's many people that God saved out of that fallen race.

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And that's who he died for. That's who he gave his blood for. And 100 % of the people he gave his blood for will be in heaven.

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So the false doctrine that's taught today is relatively new. You go back 150 years ago, 90 % of Baptists, maybe 95 % of all

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Baptists believe that Jesus died only for the elect. Now only 5 % of us still believe that.

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Isn't that funny? But I don't call myself a Baptist anymore for that reason. All right, so I'm a

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Christian. I'm a, you know, I'm an Augustinian. How about that? How about a Pauline Christian?

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Or how about a Christian, a Christian? Or Isaiah, we could put that out on the side.

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Why don't we try that this week? Where's brother Paul? Tell brother Paul when he comes back. We're gonna put Park Meadows Church, Isaiah group, the

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Isaiah 53 group. So how did he bear the iniquities of many?

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Because he bear the sin of how many? There it is again. Do you think God is being redundant here?

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He's telling me, look, I am not saying all, I'm saying many. He bear the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

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All can sometimes mean many, but many can never mean all. Good thing to memorize and remember.

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Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, John Calvin were all correct as they taught limited atonement, which means doctrinally that Jesus only died for the sins of God's people, not for every human being.

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All of these people taught that, not just Calvin. They call it Calvinism today. That's a misnomer. I'm not ashamed to be called a

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Calvinist, but that's not what I am. But I love John Calvin. I've actually read his words of you. Go read his words and tell me that he's not a godly man.

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Read some of his prayers. Most people that knock John Calvin have never read John Calvin.

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They've heard their pastor say he was bad. Well, you know, they'll say the same thing about Luther.

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You know why they can say that about all these men? It's because we're all sinners and you can find something we said wrong.

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If you look at everything we wrote, can't you? But you know where God draws the line on that?

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It's like the people that teach that human works play any role in their salvation are on the wrong side.

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And all the rest of us sinners that understand we were sinners and couldn't have saved ourselves and as total free grace, we're on this side.

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And yeah, we don't agree on every little picky thing, but we agree on who saved us and what saved us is the blood of Jesus plus nothing.

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And that's what we agree on. You see the difference? Oh, all that was review, isn't that funny?

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That never happens around here, does it? Let's add a fourth one now to the seven things we have to understand to understand justification.

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And that is we need to understand what imputation means. All right, so let's take a look at that.

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Romans chapter three, verse 23 through 28, but let's start with verse 23. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

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Now we're gonna review a little bit still because people just don't get this.

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And if we can get this, then we have an understanding of salvation that few human beings still have in the end times.

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Trust me, most of your family and friends, if you showed them this stuff, they go, huh? Like in Texas, like a calf looking at a new gate, huh?

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There's a gate I might can go through and they sit there and stare at it a minute. Eventually one of them goes and they all go, right? So what does imputation mean?

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Well, let's review a little bit first. What do you think Romans 3, 23 is teaching when it says all have sinned and come short of the glory of God?

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What great doctrine is that teaching? All are sinners. What does that sound like? What did

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John Calvin call it? Total depravity. But the Bible just said, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, which means you're falling short of God.

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You're just not gonna see the light of God. You're in darkness, you're not gonna see the light. Total depravity.

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So there's point number one. You have to understand the fall and total depravity to ever understand what justification means.

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Now let's keep going. Verse 24, being justified freely by his grace. Freely by free undeserved favor.

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So it's free, free. You're justified by grace. It is free. It is a gift. You didn't do anything to get it.

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You can't pay for it. You can't earn it by working. You can't keep it by working. It's free. So you gotta understand grace, right?

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To understand justification. It's free. Justification does not mean that you are a righteous person.

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It means God counted you as righteous because he chose to count you as righteous because he chose to see you and his son dead on that cross and buried in that grave and risen with him.

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You're a new man and woman now, boy and girl now. You're justified now as if you have never sinned.

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Justified means just as if I'd never sinned in God's view. It's something God did to you and for you.

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He was propitiated. He is satisfied that your sin that is gone and that your righteous standing before him is true because you don't walk in your righteousness.

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You walk in Jesus's righteousness. You don't depend on your belief. You depend on the faith of Christ.

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God sees all of that. And then it says whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through the faith in his blood.

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So now we gotta understand propitiation. And that's what we just finished talking about, wasn't it? God is satisfied with the death of Jesus as payment of our sin debt in full to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins.

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And that's where we come into the fourth one. That's imputation, okay? So that's where we are now. What is imputation?

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It's an accounting term. It means that God the father took all of the sins out of your account, went back 2000 years and credited that to Jesus's account.

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So all of your sins were taken out of your bank account and put in his account as if he had done them and then he died.

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And then when he rose again, God took Jesus's righteousness and he debited that out of Jesus's account and he credited that to your account.

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It's an accounting term. Now, when God looks at your books, he says, you're perfect. You have the righteousness of Jesus.

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You're a billionaire from the point of view of righteousness. You have a billion points of righteousness.

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You have an infinite point of righteousness or points. I can't even say that right. To declare

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Jesus's. Now look at the word his, I should have circled it. You see it up there in verse 25,

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Romans chapter three, verse 25, his. You see, this is not talking about some righteous act that we go out and do.

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This is not talking about a group of righteous acts or good works that we try to do in church or in the neighborhood or in our family.

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We don't listen. If you really look at your life last week and I look at mine, we fell way short, didn't we? Aren't you glad that that's not the righteousness he looks at to determine if we go to heaven or not?

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Because on any given day, we would fall short. And that's why you're Methodist, you're Pentecostals, you're Catholics, you're

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Church of Christ. On any given moment, if you ask them, if you die now, would you go to heaven?

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They say, I hope so. Or the Baptist will say that. Now, how many Baptist have you heard say that? Almost every Baptist I ask, well, if you die today, where would you go?

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Would you go to heaven? I hope so. Why do you hope so? Because you know you didn't live right yesterday, right?

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And you're hoping that something just mysterious and mystical happens so that when you die, God just doesn't see that.

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So you hope so. Well, if you're basing it on your life, guess what he's gonna actually see? Your life.

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That's why the Bible says those who base their salvation on that, on works, have fallen from grace.

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Doesn't mean they lost their salvation. People take it out of context to teach that. It means they never had it. They've fallen away from grace because they're depending on works.

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And God's gonna say, depart from me. I never knew you, you workers of iniquity. What kind of work does God see when he sees our petrified little works?

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Works of iniquity. Praise God. We're not saved on our righteousness.

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We're saved on, what does it say? His righteousness. You do see that, right? You know every little word's important, don't we?

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Don't you think many is different than the word all? That's important, isn't it? He didn't die for everybody.

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He died for the sins of many. Well, no one believes that today, hardly. Maybe 2 % of the church believes that today.

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98 % of Baptists believed it just 300 years ago. What changed? We're in the end times and you have many false preachers and the seminaries went bad, put out bad preachers.

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And the pulpit is the demise of everything. You look at the state that America's in right now, it's all because of the pulpits in America.

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100 % of it. That thing I finally, Paul's not in here, but I'm gonna tell him,

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I finally watched that video he sent me where the other preacher in town talked about that our school districts in Corsicana have now made it okay.

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It's part of the public schools to have a meeting. I don't know how often they have it where kids that don't know if they're a boy or a girl can meet together.

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People wanna be, in their words, queer. That's the words they used as they wrote the article, that queer kids can come together and share their experiences and support one another.

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And the school district in Corsicana, Texas, now it made that official from what this pastor said.

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And I haven't checked it out. Have you guys? Okay, well, we do know that that particular pastor had church members whose kids were in the school and reported that to him.

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So I'm gonna assume it's true, but the point is the world is gonna go that direction, isn't it?

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I mean, listen, if you wanna send your kid to a public school where every human in Corsicana pays their taxes and it pays for education, well, a lot of those humans are queer as they call themselves.

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Isn't it funny they call themselves that? They're like that and they pay their taxes too. So you gotta let them do that.

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So what's the answer? The answer is not to fix the public school system. You ain't gonna do it. The answer is to get out of it, depart from them, separate yourself from them, come out from among them, saith the

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Lord, and go to a Christian school like Park Meadows Academy. I watched your video, by the way, that you sent me.

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Yeah, I don't know how I got on that rabbit trail, but I will tell you this.

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If man depends on his own works, he won't make it. But it says he declares

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Jesus's righteousness for the remission of our sins. That is imputation.

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That is where God took Jesus's righteousness and put it on you and counted you as righteous because he sees

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Jesus when he looks at you. Imputation is, I think, I don't know, maybe just for today, it's my favorite doctrine.

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Psalm 32 .1. Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven.

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Do you think imputation is only a New Testament doctrine? Well, this is

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King David writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. I don't know, 2 ,000, what, 800, 900 years ago.

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What psalm dated? I don't know. If you have a scope of it, you can look. It'll tell you the date. Over 2 ,000, six, seven, eight, 900 years ago, maybe close to,

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I don't know. Look it up. Somebody's got a scope, Phil. Just, if you look up that verse, look at the top of the page, it'll tell you the date, tell you how long ago it was written.

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But David wrote this many, over 2 ,600 years ago. I know it's older than that.

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Blessed is he whose transgression, whose sin, transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

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Now, the covering is an Old Testament concept. That's atonement. We don't have that anymore.

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Our sins are not covered. They are eliminated. Isn't that wonderful? So that's something that the cross changed.

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We're on this side of the cross, so we're not atoned. Our sins are gone, hallelujah. But look at this.

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Imputations was still there in the Old Testament. It says, blessed is the man unto whom the

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Lord imputed not iniquity. Wow. And in whose spirit there is no guile.

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So here you have certain people on the earth that did have sin in their life, but the father didn't impute their sin to them.

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He imputed it to someone else and let them die in their place. And that was Jesus, from their viewpoint, looking forward in time, from ours looking back in time.

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And there's your doctrine. Blessed is the man whom the Lord imputes not sin.

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We've all sinned, but if God imputes your sin to someone else, then you don't have to pay for it. That's a blessing, isn't it?

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That's an understatement, isn't it? Romans 4, 6, even as David, now here in Romans, Paul quotes from Psalm 32.

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Even as David also described the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputed righteousness without works.

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Now you look up that word without in the Greek, it's a great gulf. Like when the rich man died,

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Jesus told the story about the rich man had died and Lazarus was there. And he said, you know, go and tell my brothers so they don't end up here.

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And he's trying to talk to Abraham who was across this great gulf. You had the lost people in Shoal and there was a great gulf.

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And on the other side was paradise where Abraham and all the Jews were before Jesus took his blood to the throne and made it where they could go to heaven.

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They were in paradise. And there was a great gulf that divided the heavenly part from the hellish part.

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And no man could pass one way or the other, the Bible says. Remember that great gulf? Same word is used here where it says without works.

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So God imputes righteousness to his people. And then there is a great gulf and the works you do are way over there.

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They're not a part of the cause. They're a part of the result or the effect of salvation, not the cause.

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There's a great gulf place between works and grace, between works and mercy and justification.

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So we're justified without works. And also these things are imputed to us without works.

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So God imputes righteousness to his children without works which means without regard to your works which means that imputation is an accounting term whereby

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God took your sins and the bad works you've done and even the things you thought were good works that to God look like filthy rags.

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And he took those away from you and he imputed those to Christ and he died with them in his body and he was buried with them in his body.

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And when he rose again because of that death and because of that blood that was given as a ransom for our souls and our lives he then takes the righteousness of Jesus and imputes that to us without works.

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Now that means without us doing works. It doesn't mean without Jesus and God and the father doing tons of works but without human works is what this means in the context of it.

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So Jesus's very righteousness is imputed to the saved person without regard to any works that they do or don't do because imputation is a work

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God does to us. It's in the passive again. So imputation is amazing.

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We are justified. We stand in a righteous position before God. That's what it means to say you're justified.

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We have a standing of being righteous in front of God because God imputed the very righteousness of Jesus to us as if it were us that were he and he that were us.

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So our sin debt is paid by him and we have a full basket full of righteousness which is his not ours.

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And God sees that every time he looks at us. That's why we're justified. So, like I said, you have to understand about seven things to understand justification.

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And one of them is imputation. If you don't understand imputation, you'll think you came down to the aisle and the prayer formula that that preacher told you to pray saved you.

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That would be works because you did it with your mouth and your brain. Both are works. And it says without works in my

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Bible where God imputed righteousness without works. So that system's not right.

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Now you say, well, does that mean I'm not saved? Because that's what I did. No, I'll say this. That system cannot unsave you either because in that pew before you came down that aisle and were told the wrong way to get saved because you can't get saved.

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I mean, you can't save yourself, right? Little formula didn't save you. Long before you got down there, back in that pew back there, the

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Holy Spirit called you and he quickened you while you were still in your sinful pew and he brought you to life and you desire

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Jesus and whosoever desires to call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. So you were saved before you got down there.

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All I'm saying is the formula didn't save you. I'm not saying you're not saved because you did the formula. I'm just saying, look, that didn't keep you from being saved, but it didn't save you.

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The Holy ghost saved you. And he did it by the works of Jesus, the finished work of Christ on the cross and the blood that he gave.

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No works of us played any role in it. Even as David described the blessedness of the man unto whom

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God imputes righteousness without works, saying blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered.

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Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Now, the apostle

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Paul pulls the word covered from Psalm, which he's quoting. It doesn't mean they're only covered.

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Paul's just quoting scripture there. That little aspect of it changed because they're no longer covered.

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They were covered in the Old Testament. Now on this side of the cross, they're removed. Isn't that wonderful?

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In fact, that's part of New Testament imputation is that our sins were imputed to Jesus in full.

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So they don't have to be covered anymore. They were eliminated when he died. They were paid for, isn't that beautiful?

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So if you look at a word study on the word impute, logitzomahi is how you say it if you choose to try to say it in Texan.

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Excuse me. And what impute means is to take an inventory. I told you, it's an accounting term.

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So God the Father looks at all of us and he takes inventory every day. And he looks at us and he says, what do

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I see in their account? And he sees other people in other churches and denominations and every kind of church and denomination that think they're saved because they became a church member or because they got baptized in the church's water or all the other effects that the church told them were the cause, which were not the cause.

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And so they did those things, but they don't love Jesus. They never have given their life to him because they just don't love him.

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They're just still walking around as a natural person who has been spiritualized by going to church.

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And God looks down at those people and he takes inventory. And what he sees is every sinful thought they had that day and that week.

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And they're still not bound for a holy place called heaven to be around a holy God called

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Jehovah, are they? But then he looks down at churches and he sees other people sitting there.

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And I'm talking about the Father now. And he looks at those people and he says, my goodness, I see a few people in that huge church out there.

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That are a hundred percent righteous. In fact, they're as righteous as my son, Jesus. So when it's their time, graduation day, they already had it.

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Apparently God says, apparently they already had a spiritual birthday because all I see is Jesus. I see his righteousness on that person.

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And now they're going to have a graduation day. They're going to come see me in heaven because I just took inventory. So all the people that the

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Father has already sent the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation, at the calling, at the regeneration moment.

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And he took all of your sins out of your account and put them in Jesus and buried them. When he looks at your inventory, there is no sin there.

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Is that a beautiful thought? Blessed is the man or woman who's had that done to them by God. And every of the elect called people of God have had that done by God.

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A hundred percent. Jesus said, no man will come to me unless the Father draws him, sends the

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Holy Spirit to him and opens his eyes. And he said, of them, I will lose nothing, but will raise them up at the end of time.

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So the very word itself, Greek is like math. I mean, if the concepts don't win you over, then the words should.

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And if that doesn't win you over, the grammar should. It's like math. It can only mean one thing usually.

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So God imputes or takes inventory. It's an accounting term. There is something that is not imputed to us.

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Then there is something that is imputed to us. And the thing that is not imputed to us when he takes inventory is all of our sins.

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They're gone. And when he looks at our inventory, he sees a hundred percent perfect righteousness.

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He does see that because that's what was imputed to us. First Peter 2 24 says it this way.

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So beautiful. Jesus, who his own self bear our sins in his own body while he was on the tree, the cross.

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So this is a father transcends time. He comes forward in history. In our case, he takes our whole lifespan of sins and the things we thought were good that weren't good in the holy

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God's eyes because they just weren't up to his standard. We just didn't do it quite right. He takes all of that back in time, some 2000 years and imputes that to Jesus, puts that in Jesus' account while he's still alive on that cross before he died.

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And he puts it in his body. And now Jesus looks up and says, my God, my God, where are you?

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Because the father turned his head from his son because he had your sins in his body and my sins in his body.

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They'd been imputed to him. And when God took inventory of his own son, he saw nothing but Satan.

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And that's why in the old Testament in Exodus, when they put that pole up with the snake on it and the people looked at it and they were healed, people have asked me all my whole life as a minister, why was that a snake?

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It represents Jesus. Why does a snake represent Jesus? Because it represents Jesus on the cross who had all of the satanic filth of our lives on his body at that moment.

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All of it had been imputed to him. Every sin you will do tomorrow in God's eyes was already in him and you just caused it and put more on him.

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Think of that when we're tempted. Maybe we won't sin as much. You say, well, is the stuff we do real?

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Yeah, the decisions we make are just as real as the sovereignty of God part is. You can choose not to sin tomorrow.

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You can choose to put a less weight on Jesus while he is hanging on that cross if you choose to tomorrow.

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Think about that. That's good for teaching our kids too, isn't it? It's better for us though as adults.

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Jesus who bear our sins. Well, just think about it. If you don't do as many sins tomorrow, he doesn't have to hold up as much weight, does he?

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Well, can I control that? Bible says there's no temptation that comes that God doesn't leave us a way out.

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Doesn't it say that? So yeah, listen, I'm a Calvinist, but I believe that our decisions are of ultimate importance and God holds us responsible for every decision we make.

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And not only are we responsible, it adds more weight to Jesus every sin we do tomorrow.

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You can't fix the ones we've already done. They've already been imputed to him. The ones you will do have already been imputed to him too, but in time you can decide not to do them, which means you'll get there and find out, well, he had a little bit lighter weight, right?

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So think about that. If you wanna try to match the responsibility of the man with the sovereign will of God, it all working together at the same time and they're both important.

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I know which one's most important is God, not man, but man's important because God made us important.

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So Jesus bear our sins in his own body on the tree. Why? So that we who are dead to sins should live unto righteousness by whose stripes we are healed.

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So you can see in Isaiah where it talks about it by his stripes. It's not talking about physical healing. It's talking about the soul is saved.

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The soul is healed is the primary meaning. It does affect physical though, because isn't it true that every one of us will get a new body that will never be sick someday because of his stripes.

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So it healed us physically too. It's just that that part's out in the future. Now I'm not saying God doesn't heal in answer to prayers.

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He does, but that's not what Isaiah 53 is talking about. Does that make sense?

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I mean, people get that wrong. They take it out of context. What is it talking about? We are spiritually, the sin part of us is removed because of his stripes.

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We are healed by what Jesus did for us on the cross. And when you put 1 Peter 2, 24 together with 2

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Corinthians 5, 21, and that's all you had on a desert Island, you would have enough information right there for the

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Holy Spirit to save you. You would have enough of the water, which is the word of God and the spirit come and save you.

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Because look what it says, 2 Corinthians 5, 21, for God has made Jesus to be sin in our place.

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That's imputation, right? Who knew no sin, he did not sin, but he had all of the sin of God's people on him, not of humanity.

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If that were true, all humans would be saved, but he had all the sins of God's people on him. And he has made

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Jesus to be sin for us. You have to ask the question, who is the us in the context of this passage?

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It's not every man, woman, boy and girl in the world in all of history. It's the elect, us.

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He made him to be sin for us who knew no sin of his own. Why? So that we might be made the righteousness of God in him, once we're born again and we're in Christ.

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So that's the other side of imputation. The sins are imputed to Christ, his righteousness imputed to us.

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It's so perfectly written out in 1 Peter 2, 24, together with 2 Corinthians 5, 21 and all through Isaiah 53.

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It's so amazing. So Romans 4, 6 through 8, that part we just studied, look at the context.

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It's talking about imputation, but look at the context that that's found in. Imputation leads to an understanding of positional righteousness for the

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Jew and the Gentile. All right. So look at the context, what we just studied, and we're not gonna go, we're pretty much done today.

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I just wanna show you the context because it'll go into what we're gonna do next Sunday, Lord willing. If you go up to the first verse, because we started with chapter four of Romans verse six.

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If you go up and look at the first verse, it says, what shall we say that Abraham, our father as pertaining to the flesh has found?

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So now it goes back to the Old Testament says, what do we find out when we study Abraham? And number one, we find out

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Abraham was not a Jew when he got called, he was a Gentile. Jews didn't like that fact, but Paul pointed it out to him all the time.

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And certainly in the book of Romans. The Jews are telling Paul, look, we love you, Paul, but we don't agree with you on one point.

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We don't think God will save a Gentile. And Paul said, no, Jesus died for all men. He means all kinds of men.

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Some from every group of humans, every race. That's what all means in that context.

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But you look at Abraham, what do you find? Well, if Abraham were justified, which is the topic we're talking about for the last several weeks, if Abraham were made righteous by God, if that happened because of Abraham's works, then he has wherewithal to brag.

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Abraham could glory in his own great stuff. And that's what every denomination wants to do. And that's why they give you a little prayer formulas and make you think you got saved because you came to their church, because they want some of the glory.

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And Paul says, well, if Abraham was saved by the stuff he did, then he could glory in his salvation.

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He could say, I did it. All humanism will say, man did it. The Bible says

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God did it all. So if Abraham is justified by works, then he can brag about it, but he can't brag in the presence of a holy

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God, can he? So that won't last long, a person that believes that. Eventually when they die, they'll be cast out.

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For what says the scripture, Abraham believed God. When it says scripture in the New Testament, it's talking about the

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Old Testament because you didn't have the New Testament wasn't penned yet. Not all of it. For what sayeth the scripture,

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Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. That isn't a counting term, that's imputation.

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So because of the belief that God put in Abraham's heart, you see, people think

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God looked down and saw Abraham. He was a good Gentile. So he called him out and made him a Jew. No, he was just like the rest of them.

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His father was one of the biggest idolaters around. From what I understand, Abraham grew up worshiping false gods and God called him out.

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He called him out of darkness into light. This is something God did to Abraham, not something Abraham did to please

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God. And God just woke Abraham up one day. That's the same thing he did to you when he called you. He woke you up one day.

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That's all he did to Abraham. And he woke him up, Abraham said, same as Paul, Lord, what would you have me do? Well, I want you to leave your father, leave your family and go to a place you don't know anything about.

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Just trust me. And Abraham did it. Where did that faith come from? Did he just work that up in his mind as a mental pep rally?

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I believe God, I wanna believe God. I'm gonna leave my family and just go be strange and just go off by myself and God will send me to heaven because I'm weird.

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Human belief. No, it was a gift that the Holy Spirit put in Abraham. It's called the faith of Christ.

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He gave him the faith of Christ as a gift. And now he believed God and he always believed

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God his whole life. He did have human doubt, but he wasn't saved by human belief. The belief of Christ was one of the things that was imputed to Abraham, given to him as a gift.

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And so Abraham was able to believe because God made him able. And once he was able to believe,

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God counted that to him as if he were a righteous man. Same way with us, that's imputation.

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Now there's the context this beautiful passage was in. Now to him that works is reward, not reckoned of grace, but of debt.

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So if you wanna say you're saved by works, then you didn't get saved by grace. That's what Paul's saying. You defied the definition of the word.

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You didn't get saved by grace if you add works to it. But to him that works not, you don't do any good works to try to get saved, but you believe on him that justifies the ungodly, that man's faith is counted for righteousness.

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So there is a type of faith men have that they don't go to heaven. And there's a type of faith men have when they do go to heaven.

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You find that in Hebrew chapter 10, right at the end of the chapter. Talks about that, it's pretty cool. So then on the other side of the little passage we studied this morning, verse nine says, does this blessedness, does it come then upon the circumcision only?

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Like do only Jews take part of this? See how Paul's trying to convince the Jews God might actually save a

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Gentile? Or does it also happen upon the uncircumcised, the

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Gentile also? For we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness. Well, how was it reckoned to Abraham?

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Look at this, Paul's using logic. He says, was it reckoned to him when he was circumcised or when he was still a

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Gentile? And every Jew knows Abraham was a Gentile when God reckoned this to him.

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When God gave him the faith of Christ and the righteousness of Christ, he was still a Gentile, not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision,

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I rest my case, Paul says. Jesus died for all men, not just Jews, you see?

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And he received the sign of circumcision. So circumcision was not a work that he had to do.

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He already had the righteousness. It was an effect of the salvation. Abraham had already been regenerated before he became a

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Jew. And the becoming of the Jew, the circumcision was a sign, like water baptism over here is a sign.

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It's not what causes it, it's an effect of it. It's a sign of circumcision.

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It was a seal of the righteousness of the faith or a sign of the righteousness, which he had yet being uncircumcised while he was still a

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Gentile. Why? So that he could be the father of all them that believe, Jew and Gentile.

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Though he be not circumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also.

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Jews don't like that message. And you know what? Christians don't like it. Because Christians wanna think it's my denomination, it's my water that has to save you if you get baptized in it.

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It's my formula that you gotta pray to get saved. And if you do it any other way, God won't have anything to do with you.

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And God comes in and says, no, it has nothing to do with any of that. It's all about what my son did to you and whether my

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Holy Spirit comes to you and wakes you up or not. And if he doesn't, you're lost. And you say, well, that worries me.

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Well, good. Because if it worries you, you're a lost sheep because goats don't get worried about it. So stay worried if you're worried.

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Stay worried and keep your ears and eyes open. And someday you'll have your road to Damascus where all of a sudden, just out of the blue,

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God says, there's my son. What do you think about him? You go, I gotta have him. And you say, it'll change your whole life.

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But it's because God changed it, not because you changed it. And then you'll wanna make some changes though. Would you agree with that? You'll try and the

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Holy Spirit will work with you. And even further change will happen. To declare,

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I say at this time, his righteousness, that he might be the just and the justifier of Jesus.

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So we're gonna be moving into point number five down there at the bottom. I don't know why number one didn't pop in.

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I need to check that out. But number one was depravity of man. Number five is gonna be positional righteousness.

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So now after today, we understand imputation. Next Sunday, we're gonna talk about, well, what does positional righteousness mean?

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And if we understand that, we're another step towards understanding justification. All right, well, let's stand and have prayer together.

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Lord, we thank you so much for your word and for your Holy Spirit to make it clear to us.

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And Lord, thank you for the water and the spirit that allowed you to save us, but it allows you to cause us to grow and to keep growing.

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And so thank you for that. Thank you for this local church right here in Corsicana, Texas, this little group of believers in this little country church.

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And thank you for the big ministry nationwide that you've built on the foundation of this little church.

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Thank you for all of our brothers and sisters around the country who love the word of God, and that's why they are here with us today.

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And bless each of them and their families as well. And Lord, go with us into our time of fellowship now and bless the meal we're about to have together in Jesus' name, amen.