Book of 2 Corinthians - Ch. 3, Vs. 1-18 (04/01/2001)

Park Meadows Church

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We have worked our way to 2 Corinthians, the third chapter. 2

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Corinthians, the third chapter. Do we begin again to commend ourselves, or need we?

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As some others, epistles of commendation to you are letters of commendation from you.

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You are our epistles, written in our hearts, known and read of all men.

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I do bear the most ardent love for you. I have no need to be put in remembrance of you by any epistles or any other means.

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Paul is telling them that they are indelibly written on his heart. We are the epistles to the world.

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We have been broadcast. We have been known abroad.

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I am speaking of us right here. You are known by your actions, by your spirit.

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For wherever I go, I mention you, speaking of your various gifts and graces, and praise your knowledge in the gospel.

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For as much as you are manifested, declared to be the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living

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God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart. We need to remember this each and every day.

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It is not just as you come to Sunday school or church. You are an epistle to everyone.

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We have a visitor with us, Joe Lang.

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It's very obvious that this man is a Christian. He not only sought us out, but you can tell by his demeanor that he is born again.

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So that's the way it is with us. Wherever we go, whatever we do, wherever we are, we are the epistle written to the world.

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4. And such trust have we through Christ to Godward, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God.

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We must always remember that we answer to God. No matter where we are, what we act like, anything, we answer to God.

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5. Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament, not of the letters, but of the spirit.

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For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, both spiritual and eternal.

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If we adhere to the literal sense, even of the moral law, we regard only the precept of sanctification, sanction as they stand in themselves, not as they lead us to Christ.

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The moral law cannot lead you to Christ. Nothing can lead you to Christ but Christ himself.

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In John 6 .44, he says, No one comes to God except my

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Father draw him, and he drew you before the world was created.

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But in the ministration of death, written and engraved in stones, was glorious.

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But if the administration of death, written and engraved in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance, which glory was to be done away, that glory diminished.

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It began to diminish the moment he stepped out of his presence. Imprinted and engraved so that by this place we may plainly perceive that the apostle speaks.

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Not of the ceremonial laws, but of the

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Ten Commandments, this word glorious indicates a brightness and majesty which was in Moses physically, but it was in Christ spiritually.

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I'm getting a lot of baby crying.

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Now, I ask you to look up glory to glory. Greg, did you look it up?

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What conclusion did you come to? It's what?

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Alright. Well, in the King James there's only one place to look at it, and it pretty much says that he came first,

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I'm not going to say which we do, but which he does. Alright, that's a good explanation.

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Did anyone else get one? From glory to glory. Is Greg the only one that looked it up?

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Is that Greg? Well, I thought it was the same place, but I was thinking more of the original deceit of glory to glory, and the law of God, and God's glory was further on to the

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Son, and glory to the Son is to an extent just lust, and that glory will be over as such.

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Maybe I just had the first handful. Maybe that glory is going to be revealed more and more openly and clearly until we have the great glory.

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Alright. Well, you've come to learn.

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Clarence, did you spend any time at it? Well, I thought it was a very interesting presentation.

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God gives glory to the slave, and from our life, progressively towards the clergy, all of us, glory that he has for us, and then he dies, and we take that glory.

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There are a lot of questions of the importance of life.

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Anyone else? I'll say it, that when

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I sit in the room, I think of glory to glory, and when we become like him, we will have glory to glory, and we all participate in it, in the spirit of glory.

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Alright. Jesse, did you look at... You weren't here, were you?

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Alright. It struck me as very powerful when I saw the word change.

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You know, we are to grow from glory to glory, but we can't when we are under condemnation of the last thing we did.

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Think about it. It's not something abstract. It's real.

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It's right now. Are you under condemnation, meaning that you have not confessed?

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You can't grow from glory to glory. It's a good subject to talk about, but when you get to applying it to your own life, is it real?

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Alright. Verse 8. How shall not the ministration of the

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Spirit be rather glorious? If the Old Testament was glorious, how much more the

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New Testament? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness succeed to glory.

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For even that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect by reason of the glory that excelleth.

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For if that which is done away was glorious, how much more which remaineth is glorious.

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Now, the law was fulfilled, right? It was done away with.

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It was fulfilled in Christ. If that led to glory, the old law, then how much more the new law, which is in Christ.

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He brought it to be a personal thing. Done away is the law.

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Notice it is done away. Then how much more glorious is that which remains, the new covenant?

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He is making a contrast between the giving of the Mosaic law and the day of grace in which we live.

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We're so far removed from the law that we read about it and we don't think much about it.

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But we need to. He has written it in our hearts. They had to go and read it.

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They didn't have the privilege of it being written in their heart. We have.

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Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech, and not as Moses, which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished.

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When Moses came down from the mountain the second time, there was a joy in his heart, and his face shone.

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Now there was a way for the children of Israel to come into the presence of God through a sacrificial system.

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They had to go to the temple. First the tabernacle, then the temple.

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They had to take an offering, a beast by which their sins would be symbolically taken away.

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But that just covered the sin. It covered it from year to year, day to day.

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The high atonement, which was once a year, they just simply rolled it forward.

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They could not eliminate it. But they rolled it forward until finally it rolled upon Jesus Christ, and he took it away.

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But their minds were blinded. For until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the

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Old Testament, which veil is done away in Christ. The veil that Moses wore on his face is now a veil in the minds of God's ancient people.

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The Jew, for the most part, unless they've been converted, the

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Jew still is blinded. They cannot see. They'll argue with you about it.

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It would be much like Greg, knowing that, now let's see, what would be a good example?

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Knowing that he has an automobile that he can drive down here.

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You commute how far? 50 miles. Now, there's no mistaking that.

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That's complete. That's real. It would be like comparing that to going to church at home.

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There's no way that you could go to church at home. You come here and you meet with the people.

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That's just as foreign to your mind as it could be. Same way with the law.

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The law was real. The blinded Jew, it's still real.

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They cannot see. Not through their own efforts, but through God.

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He blinded their heart. But even unto this day when

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Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart. Even today, it's like that.

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When they read the law, they actually think they're able to keep it. Nevertheless, when it shall turn to the

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Lord, the veil shall be taken away. It refers to the heart.

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When it shall turn to the Lord. Now, what is it that turns a person to the

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Lord? David?

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The small ones. The free ones.

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The saved ones. That's right. The salvation ones. That's right. No, they think that you can accept it or not accept it.

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They think that I make up my mind for this or I don't.

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What is it that makes up your mind, Greg? Sure. He does it in such a way that it seems like you did.

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But you didn't. Because you remember a time when you were different. Then you remember a time when you were saved.

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Something had to change. Now, the

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Lord is that spirit. And where the spirit of the Lord is, there is what?

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Liberty. Liberty from what, Bill? From the power of liberty.

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All right. What else? Fred? All right.

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All right. From the power of sin. From the power of sin. All right.

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From the law of liberty. That's what he's talking about.

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The liberty from the law. They had to keep the law. You don't anymore.

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We have a far better. The veil shall be taken away.

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Now, the Lord is that spirit. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

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Only the spirit of God can lift that veil. It seems so strange that I didn't believe, then

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I did believe, that the spirit of God, the

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Word, lifts that veil. It's almost unbelievable.

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He alone can do that. He is the one and the only one that can lift the veil.

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He doesn't put you under the law. He delivers you from the law and brings you to Christ.

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He was chosen. What's Ephesians 1 and 4 say?

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All right. You better turn over to it. You can. Yes, you can. Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, we should be holy or not blamed before the foundation of the world.

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Bill, when did He choose you? Before the foundation of the world. It's the choice that was never made.

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He didn't choose upsides like we choose upsides. He chose you from man's viewpoint before the world began.

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But you've always been with Him. God does not make decisions or choices.

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He wills, and everything's already been done, so how could He change anything? But we all, with open face, behold

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Him as in a glass of glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the

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Spirit of God. But we all, you speak into Christians, with open face.

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What's that mean? Open face. What? Not hiding anything.

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Not hiding anything. It would be impossible to hide anything.

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With open face, as looking in a glass, the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.

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We're changed. Now, is that something all of a sudden? We're changed, but we become more like Him.

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We understand more and more. But you're changed all of a sudden.

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Yes? You said that we're not under the law.

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All right. Even that we don't need the law to be saved, but we would keep the law.

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That's right. That's right.

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That's right. That's right. I would hate to think that a Christian decided that now that I'm saved,

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I don't have to keep the law. Bill? One more thing. Smaller glory.

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Fulfilling God's will. Outcome with that was the ability of the person to behave that way.

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So you have to have revelation of God's real possibility and revelation that you could not directly follow

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God's will if the second greater freedom was that you didn't have the ability to follow

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God's will. And I'm talking about a willingness to walk

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God's path with us to do that. You're making sense.

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From what I understand, we can't really be outside of God's will.

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No. But in any case, what Christ did was

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He took on that burden for us. And so that's the greater glory, that God's will is fulfilled.

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And that's the greater glory. Why do you not go to the feed store and buy a package of weeds?

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Why? Why do you? What do you mean naturally?

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All right. The same logic is that we can't keep the law.

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Why? Natural not to.

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It's not natural to live the

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Christ -like life in this world. That's an unnatural thing. We've made it natural and the weeds to be unnatural, but that didn't stamp out the weeds.

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They still grow. If you don't believe it, come look at my wife's flower bed. They're in there.

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Every spring they come up and she fights them all summer long. I'll be so glad when we come into the new world and there won't be any weeds.

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And you won't have to work at it. Yes. It also empowers us to live to the death of our parents, to keep the law, to live before the

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Lord, to dwell in the Holy Spirit, to never talk to the poor, to the poor at all.

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And so we did not have that. Once the Holy Spirit has dwelled in us, we can then make a choice on a daily basis or once a day, save that amount of time for another day, we can still have the

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Holy Spirit connected to us and we're in a place where we can do this. At that time in our lives, we keep the law automatically.

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And I've worked on this unit. That's right.

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And so part of the greater glory is how it's dwelling in the

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Holy Spirit and our ability and choices to be in union with the fellowship and the

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Holy Spirit. At those points, we don't have to literally enumerate the points of the law because we all remember that in our lives, it's the

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Spirit of people and the Holy Spirit of people. And the law of Christ, love, faith, and the

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Holy Spirit and all of us together walking right now is the law of the

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Holy Spirit. Thank you.

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Yes, not the flesh. You get out of that law of the

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Holy Spirit. It's not the flesh. It's the

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Spirit where we honor God. We make the flesh do honor unto

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God. We are all open -faced, not reflection as some translations have it.

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We are open -faced. As a mirror of the glory of the Lord, the idea is not reflecting in order to be transformed.

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Do you reflect God's glory in order to be transformed?

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Well, as soon as I make this point, you do not reflect in order to be transformed, but rather that of beholding until transformed.

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Our transforming is going on. We have been made like Christ, but we're not what we're going to be.

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The word transfigured is then amplified, and this is wrong.

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Now, what was you going to say? Well, we see more of Christ in us.

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That's right. You get faith as much as you'll ever have at the moment of salvation, but it seems like faith grows.

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What is it that's growing? What is happening? You realize you have more.

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You realize more of the faith. You don't grow your faith.

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You grow the accessibility to it. Anything else?

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Jan, we're proud to have you with us. Not Jan, Joe. He's a young man from Florida just passing through.

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This church was recommended. I understand that. By who?

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By Christian Power. By Father Power. Brother Owens, Joseph told me a few minutes ago that the

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Lord had blessed him, and someone who was living passed him, and he received it.

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He was going on to know that some day our efforts had some effect on the future of the

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U .S. And Joseph, by my knowledge, was going to bring more to the table.

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Well, do you have anything you'd like to say to us? I'll say what

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I said before. I don't pass on people my talent. I'm a human person.

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You see how this illustrates our lesson?

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We are an epistle written in our hearts. Anything else?

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Well, we're early, but let's stand and we'll be dismissed. Urge dismissal, please.

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Father, I thank you for this day you give us, Lord. I thank you for a few of my tiny days that you showed us to create a lesson and deliver it in our lives as we listen to God's word.

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You will be seen in our lives as we stand together in glory and honor,

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Father. Thank you. Glory be to you, Father. Glory, glory, glory. In the name of the