08-30-2020

Foreknowledge as God’s Loving Knowledge of His People

So let's review a little bit. Remember, we learned about foreknowledge. It doesn't mean what we've always maybe thought it meant. If you use Webster's Dictionary, you get it incorrectly. It doesn't just mean to know something.

It's not the same as God's omniscience, which means he knows everything now. He knows everything now, everything about the past, future, and present, now with him, right? That's omniscience. Foreknowledge is not the same thing.

And what you find out is in the Bible terms, and there's a couple of great verses that show the idea, the Bible word for to know someone means to know them with affection and love and have an intimate relationship with them.

So when God says that he knew you before the foundation of the world, he knew you like that. He knew you as his own child before the foundation of the world, with love and affection. And we know that from studying everywhere the word's found in the Bible.

It's always used that way. And another interesting thing is it's never used in connection with events or actions. Now think about that, because that's new to some of us. Foreknowledge does not mean God looked out there and saw people doing things or believing things.

It doesn't mean that. It never means that. What it always means is it always is a reference to a person that God knew. Do you see the difference? It's not that God knows what you're doing. It's he knows you.

You see the difference? It's huge difference. Because in the Webster's dictionary, foreknowledge just means to know something in the future or ahead of time. It doesn't mean that in biblical usage. It means to love and have a relationship with a person.

It's not knowing stuff about the person. Obviously, God being omniscient would cover that, right? He knows everything about us, even our thoughts, even the deepest things in our hearts, right? But that's omniscient.

So that's an interesting study, I think. Also, Arthur Pink made that beautiful statement at the bottom. But we went through a lot of scriptures a couple of Sundays back and showed that he was absolutely correct.

We looked at every scripture that has the word in it. And they all have to do with persons. And then we talked about the calling. The Holy Spirit has to call a person before they can be saved. And if you remember, there are two kinds taught in scripture you can only tell by the context because the Greek word's the same.

But you have the universal calling, which is basically the gospel going out to the world and that's for everyone, every individual, every person. And then you have the effectual call. And the effectual call is different.

And you can only tell by the context, but the effectual call is when the Holy Spirit comes to a person that God has known before the foundation of the world and predestinated that that person would be his child.

And in time, the Holy Spirit comes and calls that person. And awakens them and quickens them. While we were yet in our sins, hath he quickened us? That's the calling. And it's also regeneration at the same time.

Two different things, but related obviously. And they happen at the same time, at the moment you're justified. Now, so what we learned was the scripture says those who were foreknown were predestinated.

And that all happened before time began. And so it's not in any particular order, it's just now with God. Both are just true with God. You were foreknown and predestinated. Boom, it's done. Then you come into your life and two things happen in time.

You're called by the Holy Spirit on your spiritual birthday and you are justified at the moment you're called because you're regenerated. One of the things that happens in your regeneration is you are justified.

We studied that. It means just as if you'd never sinned, right? We're still sort of on that topic. And then the same group that's justified is glorified, goes to heaven, lives forever with the Lord and so forth.

Same group all the way through from before time. So every single person who is effectually called by the Holy Spirit is also justified and glorified without exception. Because Jesus said, I know my sheep and of them I shall lose nothing, but shall raise it up at the end.

It's his responsibility, not ours. His responsibility to make this happen and he's 100 accurate. In his blood, every person for whom his blood was shed shall be saved. Every person for whom his blood was shed will have the calling and at the calling, what we'll find if we get far enough into today's lesson is you're gonna find out one of the big things God does at the calling is he changes your want to and makes you have a will to receive Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.

All of a sudden you want to for the first time, you never did before, you would have done it. You didn't want it. You didn't want it. Now you do. It's because the Holy Spirit called you and regenerated you.

And so every person who will be in heaven on this side of the cross will have personally received Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior because they wanted to. So your will has an important role.

But the problem is your will never wanted him. And we'll talk about that more as we go. But we've covered this thing. So it's the same group of people from before eternity or whatever you want to call it, eternity past, whatever you want to call it, into time and out the other side into eternal future.

And here are two verses that we're studying. Romans 8, 29 through 30, for whom God did foreknow, he also did predestinate, who he preached, same group that he predestinated, he also called, the same group that he called, he also justified, the same group that he justified, he also glorified.

And that's past tense from God's viewpoint. So the father already sees you as glorified. Think about that. That'll make your day because you try sitting over there before you preach and think about the fact that you're not a perfect human.

Only my wife knows that, y 'all don't know it, but I'll confess, not a perfect human. And I have to get up here and preach the holy word of God. And I can do it with freedom and with joy because every sin I did in my whole life up till the moment I was sitting there and every sinful thought I would have here, I don't think I'll have one here, but if I did, all of those are covered and removed by Jesus because God put them all on him the day he was on the cross and he took them to hell and he put them lower than the lowest ocean and as far as the east from the west, away from me.

They're not on me. So from the father's eyes, I'm glorified so I can preach. Now, does that excuse me to live a bad life and get up here and preach? No, no, because the same Bible says that if you do that, the Lord Jesus will smite you, he will chasten you, he will bring you to your knees and you don't want that.

So if you're really saved and you're trying to live for the Lord and do whatever ministry, all each of you are doing, you won't do it in the midst of a on purpose sinful life. You will strive to be a good person.

And so we're always striving, but we're never perfect, are we? But we keep getting up using 1 John 1, 9 because he's faithful, which means he'll do it every time and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, even the ones you didn't think to ask for, and you can get up and go again.

And that's what we do. Even for preachers, that's what we do. And all of us have to remember, because Satan will come to you and say, you're not worthy to do anything for the Lord, right? And he may do that.

He may whisper that to you at any time. It may be right before you're about to do something for the Lord, he'll whisper that and discourage you. So we understand, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself because I'm talking about the glorified part, but I want you to notice it's ED, that's past tense for my English teachers in the room, right?

From the Father's view, you're already glorified. You can serve him. Isn't that great? So we serve through our positional righteousness because it never changes. You can't do or think anything that will change it.

All right? But we also need to have experiential righteousness, which means we need to try hard with all the equipment God's given us right now, and we need to do the best we can every day. All right, so we looked at the scope of predestination, foreknowledge, election.

It's unto salvation, and it's also unto service. You're predestined to be saved. You're predestined to serve God when you're saved. Number two, the breadth of it starts from eternity past, comes into time.

You're foreknown and predestinated in eternity past, comes into time, you're called and justified. It goes out the other end of time into eternity future, and you're glorified. But God sees us that way already.

Isn't that cool? All right? Moreover, whom he did predestinate them, he also called, and who he called, he justified. So we've been talking about justified now, especially last Sunday in greater detail.

Remember from last time, to be justified, the Greek word, the literal meaning is to regard someone as if they're just or righteous, to regard them just or righteous, to render them just or righteous. So it's in the passive tense, which means it's something only someone greater than us could do, which is God.

Only God could make us righteous. That's positional righteousness. He gives us the righteousness of Jesus Christ, which we know that that's kind of like an accounting term, isn't it? It's called imputation.

God imputes that to us. The very definition says it. So it doesn't take a whole lot of study to figure these things out. It's just, we have to do the study. We gotta look at the words, what they mean, exactly what they mean.

Otherwise, the world will tempt us with false doctrine every day of our lives. So the only way you do that is look at the truth enough. If you keep this old book right here, and you stay in it enough, you will recognize the counterfeit when you hear it, and it will burn your ears.

There's even some information in the sermon, depending on how far I get today, that tells us how to treat people that tell us false doctrine if they try to sneak into this church, what we should do. And the Lord tells us what to do and how to deal with it.

Getting a little ahead of myself there. So justified to render righteous. It's something God does to us. And then we looked at these couple of verses where we see the word righteous. Let's look at 2 Corinthians 5 .21.

For the Father has made Jesus to be sin for us, and Jesus knew no sin of his own, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. That is imputation. God takes our sin, puts it on Jesus, and he is crucified with it and buried with our sins, as if they're his.

God counts it as if the debt is paid, and it is paid. But it's as if we paid it, but we didn't. He paid it on our behalf. Then when he rose from the grave, we came out of there with him. And guess what?

We had on new robes when we came out of that grave. We had on white shining robes of righteousness positionally. We had Jesus's righteousness, and that's why the Father sees us as glorified right this minute.

All of that happened 2 ,000 years ago. So what role did you play in it? Nothing. So you're saved by the work of God plus nothing. You didn't do it. He did it to you and for you. But what's interesting is we look at these.

It's all about the work he did, right? So if you look at these two, I gotta get this fixed real shy on that thing somehow. It'll take me months to not do this because I've taught all over the country pointing at the screen.

So, all right. So the word righteousness in 1 Peter 2 .24 and in 2 Corinthians 5 .21, and now you see the word justified in Romans 5 .9. We did a little word study on that last time, and what's cool about it is that the root Greek word is the same for both words.

So when you see that God justified you, it means he made you righteous. Or if you say that the Christian has righteousness, it means it's because he's been justified. And if you remember, justified means just as if I'd never sinned.

See it over on the far right. So there's some good review. All right, now we're done with the review. So let's move forward with vigor as President Kennedy would say. So we've looked at a word study on justification.

Let's now look at a doctrinal study. John Calvin said this, justification is the main hinge on which salvation turns. Now, remember a couple of Sundays ago, I mentioned how salvation is a big word that has a past tense, a present tense, and a future tense.

And we don't call ourselves Baptists now. I guess we're biblionarians at this point, but I grew up Baptist. And we used to say, I'm saved. And what we should have been saying is I'm justified because that's what we mean when a Baptist says I am saved or I've been saved.

It's the point in time when we were regenerated. You could just say, I'm called, but it'd sound weird, wouldn't it? When did you get called? Wouldn't that be weird? But that's how we should talk. But we say it wrong because I'm saved.

Well, you can't be like, you're not totally saved. That sound weird? You're not totally saved. You know how I know that? Because your body's not saved yet, but it will be at the rapture, you see? So salvation is a bigger word, but you can say, well, I'm called.

And when did you get called? Well, I got called when I was 24 in my car driving to work one day. I could also say I got justified that day. There's a lot of things I could say that happened that day that all have to do with this big topic of salvation.

So it's a huge topic. But John Calvin said everything to do with that topic of salvation hinges on justification. Isn't that something? All right, so let's go to the scripture. Romans 3 .23, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ.

Now, we're gonna talk about justification for a while, because it's the second thing that happens in time. Remember before time began, you were foreknown. You were foreloved, all right? You were chosen.

You were predestinated to be God's child out of a fallen race. That happened before time even began, and God did it, and no man can change it. Then in time, you're called by the Holy Spirit out of darkness into his marvelous light.

That does not sound like something I can do or you can do. It sounds like something God did to me, don't you think? And that's called the calling, and regeneration happens at the same moment. And then at the same moment that happens, about 33 things are done to you by the Holy Spirit or given to you, and one of them is justification.

You are made righteous. You're given the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Your sins have been removed at that same moment, by the way, and placed in the body of Christ 2 ,000 years prior. God doesn't have to deal with time, remember.

So at the moment in time when you are called and justified, your sins are removed from you forever and have already been paid for by Christ, and they're gone. Even the ones you're going to do are already gone from that viewpoint.

Jesus will deal with them in time and spank his children when he needs to, but the Father doesn't see them. Isn't that wonderful to know? Because you stand as justified and glorified already. That's called positional truth, because you can't change it.

God did it to you. Now, this starts to talk about some of this. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, have we not? Therefore, there must be salvation. There must be regeneration. There must be a calling because a sinful race, the Bible says, of them none seek God.

So how are you going to get saved? If the Arminian slash modern gospel viewpoint were true, where it's just the gift is just offered, now you decide what to do with it, no man would be saved if that's all there were.

No man would be saved. I'm not the only person that believes this. We'll look at it today. You can go back to Augustine. What was he, like 350, just a few hundred years after Christ. You can move forward to Luther.

You can move forward to Calvin. You can go back again all the way past Augustine to a couple of early church fathers in around 88 AD, and then all the way past to Paul, the apostle Paul, and then from him to Jesus, who taught it to him.

So we have fallen short of the glory of God, and a fallen being cannot climb a stairway to heaven. That's what the Arminians want you to think. That's what the churches we grew up in taught us. Here's the gift.

Just reach out and grab it. You don't have any hands to grab it with. Your hands are filthy. Your mind is not right. You don't want it. Not in the flesh, you don't. And if the Holy Spirit didn't call you and bring you from darkness into light, you would never receive Christ ever in a million years.

You didn't do it before that. Two seconds before it, you didn't want to. A day before you didn't, a week, a year, a whole lifetime, you didn't. And now all of a sudden, you did. And anyone that's had that happen knows it was God that did it.

Except a brand new baby Christian may think he did it because some preacher falsely told him so, right? Some of us had that happen. Oh, you took the gift, you're saved. Shake my hand, right? We've had that.

But as you study, you understand, wait, it was something that happened before I ever got out of the pew down to that. I never even made it to the altar. I was already saved. God said it was one-on-one between me and him, and always has been, even before time began.

It's always been just between me and him. The preacher got in the way, if anything. But guess what? God's made it where even they can't mess it up. Even the people, even the ministers can't mess it up.

They can't unsave you by telling you the wrong thing once you get down there, because you're already saved. Because it was the calling is where you got regenerated. The stuff he tells you to do may be fine, but those are effects, not the cause.

And we've been through all that. But look at this. You have sinned and come short of the glory of God. You cannot climb a stairway to heaven and save yourself. It is impossible. Bill, your Sunday school lesson was excellent, as always today.

One of the things you discussed was the rich young ruler. And they said, well, you know, Jesus said it's so hard for a rich man to be saved. He liked a camel going through the eye of the needle. And the people standing around listening were not wealthy, not from their own viewpoint.

But you know what they said? Very interesting. They said, well, how can any man be saved? And Jesus said, well, with man, it's impossible, right? Not just for the rich man, but for any man, it's impossible.

But then he said, thankfully, he didn't put a period there. He said, but with God, all things are possible, right? It's of God. Man, I like preaching this stuff in particular. All right, now look at verse 24.

See, I'll stay up till two. I got like 55 slides. I won't get past verse 24 probably today, All right, so being justified freely. We're talking about justified. You know, part of the definition of the word is it's free.

So that's redundant. Because the word justified means freely made righteous. So when you put freely in front of it, it's like God is saying being freely justified freely. And guess what grace means? Free, it's a gift.

So now God says being freely made right with God, freely by his free grace. Do you think he's trying to get something into our heads that is not by works? Perhaps in one verse, we're not done with the verse yet.

Like four or five words, he said it three times, and it's free. That's the definition of justification by grace. So we're justified freely by his grace through, the word through is dia in the Greek, and it's like a pipe.

Picture a pipeline with, I like picture oil going through it, all right? So you got a pipeline with oil going through it or water or whatever. And the way that we're justified by his grace is through the pipeline of redemption that's in Christ.

And what does redemption mean? To be set free by a price that is paid. That's the pipeline through which your salvation flows. It's all Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit to make all of it happen.

None of the work is done by us. Whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood. Now, propitiation is part of Jesus' work on the cross that he did for someone besides you. In fact, he did it for someone besides any human or no angel.

He did it for God, the Father. When Jesus died, one of the things that accomplished, that the work that he did accomplished on the cross is it satisfied the Father that the sin debt had been paid. Charlotte, it's your birthday.

If you wanna make it warmer, you can do it anytime you want. All right, because I see people freezing around here. But now you think about this, propitiation. Okay, we've already been freely justified, freely by his free grace, right?

Now, the way that happens as far as the method, the methodology, God not only predestined who would be saved and whose children would be, that's no doubt about that. People ask me, do you believe that?

I say, nah, I don't believe John 3, 16 either. I just pick and choose which parts of the Bible I wanna believe. Then I wink at them and they go, what? And I say, well, it's in the Bible. Of course I believe it.

So, I mean, you're freely justified by his free grace, but not only does God predestine who will be saved, he predestines the method by which they will be saved. And it's through the channel, through the pipeline of redemption, which means Jesus had to give his life, give his blood to buy us from a slave market of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and set us free with the price that he paid.

That's called a ransom, ladies and gentlemen. And by the way, a lot of times when you see the word redeem, if you look up the Greek, you'll see it translated ransomed. So if you think Jesus died for everybody, here's a rabbit trail, but it's okay.

I'm at home, right? We're all at home, right? Okay. So like you think Jesus died for everybody, like your preachers have told you your whole life, then it defies the very definition of ransom, which is the same Greek word here.

It defies the definition of ransom because when a man pays a ransom, it's just for his kids. If that kidnapper has other people's kids, they don't get set free. Only the one for whom the price is paid, right?

So everyone for whom Jesus paid the price is set free because he said, I will lose nothing, but we'll raise it up the end day. So Jesus died for the same ones that we've been studying. You go back before time began and God foreknew who would be saved.

God knew them with love and relationship as his own. And he sent his son to die for his own. The scripture teaches it through and through. That's why it says he died to save many. It doesn't say all, it says many.

Now there's a couple of places where it sounds like it says all, like five in the whole Bible. There's hundreds that don't, but there's five that sound like it means that, but if you study them in context, they don't mean that because they can't contradict the 200, but that's for another Sunday, not today, to study that.

We'll do it because I've had some of you friends out there ask me, could you do a study on the five difficult passages? And I will. I mean, you guys have already heard it, but I'll do it for these guys if you don't mind sometime.

It might take four Sundays to do it, but we'll do it. Anyway, so now here we are. The pipeline through which all of this happens is for redemption, and that is only in Jesus Christ, the only name named under heaven, whereby men may be saved.

And verse 25 says, whom God has set forth to be propitiation through faith in his blood. Now, once you have faith in his blood, notice it doesn't say through, but doing all this other church stuff and doing all of the Roman Catholic, and I don't pick on them.

I have wonderful friends that are Roman Catholic, but we do like to have friendly debates. But my viewpoint is that the authority of the scripture is higher than the authority of the tradition of the church.

But I noticed that doesn't mention the Pope. It doesn't mention the church. It doesn't mention the Baptist church either, or the Billionaire Church, like ours, whatever that is, Pauline, Augustinian. We're trying to figure out what to put on the side.

Everything we put will run people off. So we're not going to put anything. We're just going to let Park Meadows Church. All right. But anyway, so here God has set Jesus forth and his blood, and people have faith in that blood are the ones who are under their propitiation of God.

It doesn't mention anybody that goes to Methodist Church, Catholic Church, Church of Christ, water, none of that's mentioned because all of those are effects, not the cause. And that's where the churches are so messed up.

And that's why there's so much division is they're thinking that the effects are the cause of salvation. And the only cause of salvation is the regeneration of the Holy Spirit at your calling, period.

He saves you. He regenerates you. I shouldn't use the word save, it's too big, but he regenerates you, justifies you, and 33 other things in a moment of time. But one of the things is you come under this wonderful thing that Jesus literally did for the father, and it's called propitiation.

It means that he satisfied God's wrath, God's justice, and everything about God's law that's against sin, Jesus satisfied that on the behalf of the believer, the one who believes in his blood, on the behalf of that believer, God the father is satisfied that your sin debt is paid.

Satisfied is the best English word to mean what propitiation means, but it's the father that's satisfied, not us. But it helps us, doesn't it? Do you think we could stand before a righteous king if he hadn't been satisfied that we're his?

Do we belong to him and he loves us? Whom God set forth to be a propitiation through faith in Jesus's blood to declare Jesus's righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God.

So now it speaks a little bit of the Old Testament saints. They're saved by the same method as we are. But the point is, what is the method? It's all listed here, and it's all the work of Jesus Christ, the father and the holy spirit.

But don't think it's interesting, it says it declares his righteousness. And I noticed that, you see, this starts to border on going back to our definition of justification. Justification means that God gives you his righteousness.

You see it right there in the middle of verse 25 to declare his righteousness. And remission means the forgiveness or the covering or the doing away of sin. It's because he gave you the righteousness of Christ and at the same time your sins were removed.

It's all right there in that verse. Pretty beautiful. To declare, I say at this time, his righteousness, that he might be just and the justifier. So Jesus is not only the justifier. Now remember our word study that we did last Sunday, the Greek word for justify and the Greek word for made righteous is the same word.

So now it says, verse 26, that Jesus is just to be the justifier. So he is the one who made you righteous and gave you God's righteousness. And now the Bible says he was just to do it. It was right with the father, why?

Because the father's propitiated. He's satisfied that it's right. That's the only reason it's right. God has already been propitiated and now his blood is placed on you by the Holy Spirit at the calling.

That's one of the 33 things he does. He sprinkles the blood of Christ on your soul at the calling. You are now made righteous by the blood of Jesus. And Jesus Christ is both the altar and the blood of the altar.

When the Old Testament saints sprinkled the blood on the altar, it made the altar holy. Then when you put the animal on it, it made the animal holy because the altar was holy because the blood already made it holy.

All of that picture Jesus. So he's not only the altar that is holy, he's the blood that makes the altar holy and it's all pictured. And so it's all about what Jesus has done for us. I declare to declare, I say at this time, his righteousness, that Jesus is just to be the justifier of who?

Someone that goes out and does the rosary or keeps the communion or gets baptized in church of Christ water. And I'm making fun of those, but I make fun of the Baptist too. Come down and pray a little prayer.

Did you just come to my heart and say amen? It's all wrong. And I'm not standing here saying I'm the only one that's right and all that's wrong and I'm the one that sees it. Listen, go back and read Calvin.

Go back and read Luther. Go back and read Augustine, 1400 years before Calvin. Go back and read Chrysostom, 88 AD. Go back and read Paul. Go back and see what Jesus said. That's what I'm talking about.

But I know it sounds foreign in this world because we're in the end times and Jesus said there'd be many false preachers. And I'm gonna tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. If you have listened to them long enough when I tell you the truth and I'm not even telling you anything, I'm just reading to you.

I'm reading scripture to you. And you see that and that will confuse you because of all the false stuff you've heard about how it works when it doesn't work the way they say it works. So don't worry about that.

Just erase all that and get with scripture and let it say what it says. And you won't be confused, I promise. There's nothing confused. This is crystal clear, plain scripture here. To declare, I say at this time, God's righteousness, that Jesus is just to be the justifier of every person that believes in Jesus.

Now, how did you believe in Jesus? Well, we'll talk about that a little bit because you didn't want to and you couldn't, but then you did. But you did do it, didn't you? You chose to believe in him, did you not?

You exercised your will and you believed in him with all your heart. And now all of this stands as yours. The very righteousness of God, the free, free, free grace of God, the justification that comes with the grace of God, the act of propitiation that God looks down at you and satisfied that your sins are totally gone.

All of that just because you believe, but you didn't believe by yourself. We'll get to that later. Now, if all you had was that scripture, you might think so, and that's how it's kind of taught, but we know better.

We know that this thing starts with verse 23. You see, nothing starts with John 3, 16. It starts with Genesis chapter one and two, the fall of man. Even this beautiful passage, and I popped in verse 23 just so you understand, in the context of this beautiful passage, if I had just started with verse 24, you'd think, well, I just believe in Jesus and say, pray the little prayer, Jesus come out and save me, and I'm fine.

Not unless you got called. The Holy Spirit had to make you want to do that with all your heart, not just to be religious. Do you see the difference? And you can't fake that. The Holy Spirit has to do it to you, and you will know it when he does it, because you really, really, really will want Jesus when he does it.

But it started with all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The depravity of man, it always starts with the depravity of man. You can't just believe. You have to be called out of your depravity.

You have to be called out of your sinful state. He brought you out of darkness into his what? Marvelous light. And in less than a second of time, you found yourself wanting Jesus for the first time in your life, and you did receive him by faith as your personal Lord and Savior.

And you had to do that, but you did do it, and every elect person will do it, because the Holy Spirit will call you to do it, and he is very persuasive. The Holy Spirit is amazingly persuasive. He's totally persuasive.

And he doesn't even cause you to do anything against your will, like the protagonist will say, or you'll be like puppets. God just makes you love him. No, he doesn't cause you to do anything you don't wanna do.

He just, Holy Spirit hangs around you enough where all of a sudden you wanna do it. He can't help it if he's magnetic. I mean, he's not like, he's not twisting your arm. So he just calling you, hey, you wanna come with me?

See, there's a shepherd, you're a sheep. You've been hungry your whole life. You've been falling off cliffs your whole life. He won't let you do that. What do you think about him? Look at him now, look right in his eyes.

This is the Holy Spirit. Look right in his eyes. What do you feel like doing? Well, I feel like going with you guys. Well, then you just made the choice, didn't you? But the choice was an effect of the calling.

You see it? You didn't grow up seeing it, but the regeneration, the calling takes place and the regeneration takes place. And then your eyes are open during that process. And then you believe and you are justified.

All of this takes place. It's very beautiful the way God has done it. And you know, verse 27 proves that Augustine and Luther and Calvin and David Mitchell are right. It proves it because look what it says.