Colossians 1:13 - Delivered From the Power of Darkness, Pt. 1

Park Meadows Church

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Or if I sit out there and I look at the creation, I can see that there must be a God. I mean, who put the

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Big Dipper up there, right? I mean, there's order in everything. So there must be a creator, there must be an engineer, there must be, you know, someone who designed it all.

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But I can sit out there like this and say, okay, know about God, nothing happens.

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There's nothing in my carnal brain that can know anything about God.

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Nothing. And then fortunately for me one day when I was 24 years old,

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I was still just finished, had two weeks to go in the graduate program at Baylor MBA program.

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And then I had to take comps and take class in the mornings and drive 40 miles to our ranch and where I was running the oil company for my dad already.

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And in that car on the way to work that afternoon in Mahea, the

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Holy Spirit called to me. He woke me up. I shouldn't have been asleep driving anyway, but he woke me up, he opened my eyes, he opened my ears, he quickened my dead heart and spirit, and he showed me

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Jesus for the first time and he was irresistible. I was a hungry little lamb and he was a shepherd with food.

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And I was a businessman, so I didn't know the right way to pray, but guess what? It doesn't matter because no preacher can show you how to pray to get saved.

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That's just some kind of Baptist concoction. But I just said,

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Lord, I've always known about you. My mama taught me about you, but today I want you to be my boss for the first time instead of me being my own boss.

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And guess what? He saved me, but guess what? I was already saved before I prayed that because I was saved at the moment that he quickened me in that car going to Mahia that day.

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And everything changed in my life. And some years later, I got called to preach. I just felt a call that God wanted me to be a preacher, which was really weird because I was an only child running an oil company, family business, a fourth generation family business.

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And my dad had already retired and thrown the keys over and a deed to it and given it to me in Charlotte.

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And who's gonna run it if I go to seminary, right? But I ended up studying theology under Dr.

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Freeman, Rocky Freeman, and whose stuff is on our website, by the way, it's amazing stuff.

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And I inherited his entire library and he used his library to teach me theology. And that was my seminary.

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And I'm really happy it worked that way because now when preachers come up and say, where'd you go to seminary?

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Brother David. And if I were to say Southwestern, I'd say, oh, you're one of those.

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Or if I were to say Bob Jones University, which I don't think exists anymore, but if I said that, they'd say, oh, you're a hardliner.

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But so whatever you say, they peg you. And if I just say, I'm kind of just self -taught like Spurgeon was.

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Spurgeon, the prince of preachers never went to college or seminary, did you know that? I just say,

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I don't know, I'm self -taught and I had Dr. Freeman helping me and that's it. And they don't have a clue where I'm coming from. So I have an advantage,

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I like it. But the main thing is to study, right? Study to show yourself approved unto

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God. And as we walk this walk, we see so many false teachings, but Jesus warned us about that, did he not?

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In the end times, he said, there'll be many false teachers. He said, don't be surprised if they look like angels of light because Satan himself looks like that.

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And so when you see these ministers, they all look good. That's why I didn't wear my jacket and tie today because I wanted to use that as an illustration.

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I have a jacket and a tie on and look really good. Never a sweater, but anyway.

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And like, if you don't study the Bible yourself, you don't know what they're telling you is true. In fact, even if you're studying quite a bit, you got to really watch whoever's preaching and make sure that what they say actually fits the whole of the

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Bible. So you need to know the whole of the Bible to know if it fits. Otherwise, you don't even know if it's true. It can sound really good.

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So I have enjoyed pastoring this church since 19, well,

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I didn't pastor it in 1980 when it was founded. Charlotte and I were founding members of it. We were laymen.

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I wasn't called to preach yet. And then when I got called to preach, I served as associate pastor under the founder of the preacher of the church and then two other pastors, and then

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I became the pastor. And now that's over 40 years ago, I guess, right, Charlotte? I'm not good with time.

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So 40 years ago, at least. And this church has been a church that just is in the word.

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And I've joked so many times, we don't argue about the color of the carpet and have fights. And then people that come in and want to fight,

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I've noticed that if I really preach this, if I just get into this, they will leave. They just don't stick around.

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And so we got plenty of space from the folks that have left through the years.

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It's not like they left last week. I remember when Brother Otis came so many years ago, he was with us 13 years and then went to heaven.

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And now how many years has it been since he went to heaven? 10, maybe. But from the time he came, when he first came, within three weeks, three families had just left because they didn't like his strong Bible teaching.

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And they accused him of teaching something he didn't even say. And I had the tape and I said, well, back then it was CDs, right? I mean, cassette tapes.

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And I said, I got the tape right here. I'd go visit him to try to keep him from leaving. Here's the tape. He didn't say that. I don't want to hear it.

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Well, but you're saying that he said this. They claimed that he said, your prayers are meaningless. You know, you don't need to, your prayers are meaningless, which is ridiculous.

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I said, I got the tape. Let's listen to it. Nope, don't want to hear it. He thinks our prayers are meaningless. And so I come back and tell

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Brother Otis, I'm glad you're here, Brother Otis, but you ran three families off. And he said, they weren't supposed to be here anyway,

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Brother David. Great attitude and probably absolutely the truth.

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All right, well, let's take a look at this. Who hath delivered Jesus, who has delivered us from the power of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom of his dear son.

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Now, look at this first part of it, because two things happened here.

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We got delivered from something and we got translated into something. And so let's look at this first part.

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Who has delivered us from the power of darkness. And you talk about the

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Godhead. I mean, Jesus says, I am, well, the scripture says about him in the book of Colossians that he's all of the fullness of the

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Godhead bodily. In other words, he's all of the fullness of God in a body. And so that was

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Jesus Christ. And here we have where it says that he translated us into his dear son.

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Now you're starting to look at the father and or the Holy Spirit. And you see, that's how we get born again, by the way, is two things have to be present.

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You've gotta have the water and you gotta have the spirit. Jesus said that, and it's recorded in other places in scripture too, where that's how you grow as well.

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The water is the water of the word, that is the gospel. So you have to have heard that Jesus died and was buried and rose again to save his people, to die in their place, to pay the sin debt and to ransom his people from the world of flesh and the devil, right?

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You have to have heard that's the gospel. And he rose again, he's alive and he loves you and he's calling you to himself.

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That's the gospel. You've gotta hear that, that's the water. And then the spirit is required in order for salvation because no man, the

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Bible says, there's none that seek God, not one. It says that in the Old Testament, the book of Isaiah, but it says it in the book of Romans.

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There's none that seek God, not one. So if that's true, man is depraved. He is so depraved in his fallen nature that he doesn't want

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God. You can just, you wanna test it? Why didn't you get saved two seconds before you got saved? Because you didn't want to. What about two days before you got saved?

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Because you didn't want to. And so when the Holy, so that's why it says the water and the spirit, because unless the

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Holy Spirit had come into my car, I mean, the first thing that I prayed after he quickened me was my mom's always told me about you.

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So that's the water, right? The water of the word. I'd heard the gospel. I knew about Jesus. I just didn't want him.

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I wanted David. I like David being God. That was pretty cool. I was a humanist, right?

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In the truest sense of the word. I made every decision about where I would go, what I would do, and I liked the fact that I could make those decisions.

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And then when the Holy Spirit quickened me and showed me Jesus, God of the only true

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God, the one who looked around and said, you know, I am he, and I've looked around and there is no other, that God.

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When he woke me up, my ability to be in control, to be

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Lord of my life, just diminished down to nothing. And it looked horrifying to me at that moment.

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And I asked him to do that. I didn't know the phrase be Lord of my life because I didn't know anything much about the

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Bible yet. But I knew what boss meant because I was a businessman. So I said,

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I want you to be my boss instead of me being my boss. And so I was delivered from the power of darkness right there in that car.

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And I was translated into the kingdom of his dear son. And it was the

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Holy Spirit who did this for me on behalf of the father. And that's what's talking about in verse 13.

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But this little phrase who had delivered us from the power of darkness, I put the little word really with a question mark there.

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What are we talking about here? Delivered us from the power of darkness. What is this power of darkness? People around even, especially in America, secular people don't seem to even think there is such a thing as Satan.

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And they certainly wouldn't wanna talk about it. But God Almighty says that there is a power of darkness and you've been delivered from it.

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At the moment that I was delivered from it in that car, I was not aware I was a slave to Satan.

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I thought I was free will agent. I thought I made every decision.

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Little did I know that I was influenced to make every decision by the powers of darkness.

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And because you don't know that when you're lost, right? You're blinded, you don't know that. You don't even believe it's there. Well, I sort of believed it was there since I grew up in a

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Christian home, but I just didn't think about it. So this very thing that we're delivered from, a lot of people don't even sense that it's there while it's working on them.

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So this word for delivered is in the aorist passive indicative in Greek.

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And what that means is obviously it's the same in English. When you see something that's passive, that means that whatever this verb is, this thing that happened to me, in this case,

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I was delivered, it means I did not deliver myself. You see, now that would help the modern gospel a lot in most of these churches around the country, especially in America, who seem to believe that, if you pray some prayer formula that the particular church you're in gives you, and you do whatever the things are they say you have to do to get saved, that you'll get saved because you did those things.

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Oh, I grew up believing that, didn't you? Even, I don't care if you were Baptist or Methodist or whatever you were, you grew up believing that because that's what pretty much in America is taught now.

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And yet the Greek is like math. And the Greek says, didn't work that way.

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It's passive. It's not active voice. If it was active, it meant you did it. It's passive.

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It means someone bigger and higher than you did it to you. So when I'm driving that car headed to Mahea to go to the office to work that day with my head full of junk that the graduate school had taught me that morning,

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I was not looking to be delivered. I was happy. People used to ask me, well, what was going wrong in your life that made you want to get saved right then?

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Well, because see, that's the American gospel. It's like, it's all humanistic. Like stuff bad had to happen.

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Other people had to say just the right words and tell you exactly what to pray. And then you got saved, right? It's just not how it works.

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And it's funny because it used to bother me when I was a young, like a new Christian, people would tell me, they'd tell you testimony, tell us all the bad stuff that happened that caused you to want

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God all of a sudden. And I couldn't think of any. My life was great. I mean, think about it.

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I grew up in a family with a great grandfather who was a junk dealer with a sixth grade education, lived his whole life working in an oil field, dirt poor, but he made money doing what he did because he had a skillset no one wanted to do.

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So he had no competition and he saved money every week. And when he was 60 something, the pure oil company said,

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Mr. Brown, would you like to buy this oil field? It was the largest oil field in the world when it came in, in Mahea.

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I don't know if you knew that, it's pretty cool history. And he said, yeah. So we went and borrowed the other 80 % from a bank in Dallas, bought the

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Mahea oil field and took our family from poverty to wealth. That's my great grandfather. My grandfather had a business degree and was really good with money and accounting and so forth.

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And he's the one that became a great stock trader and bond trader. And he took it to another level. And then my dad took it to another level.

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And then my dad taught me all the skillsets all three of those men had while I was still in high school.

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So I was, my mom was an only child. My grandmother, my mom's mother was the only favored child of Captain Brown that started this whole thing because he had one son that he disowned, he was so bad.

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And the other one was killed in a plane crash, a company airplane crash. So my grandmother was like an only child.

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So she inherited the whole thing. My mother was an only child. So she inherited the whole thing. And I was an only child and I inherited the whole thing.

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And by the time I'm driving home and Charlotte and I move home, my dad says, here's the deed, it's yours.

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Then I get called to preach, isn't that weird? But God worked it out where all that worked together.

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But the thing is, I didn't have anything bad going on in my life to cause me to wanna get saved.

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I was pretty, I was pretty set up actually in this life as you look at this world.

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And I met the prettiest girl in the world when I was 17, married my childhood sweetheart.

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We were already married. We married after I graduated with my first degree. So I was in the

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MBA program, we were married already. So I'm in that car, just happy as I can be, right?

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Had no absolute human reason to get saved. But guess what?

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It's in the passive. Indicative just means it's a fact. It's just a fact of, it's real, all right?

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Passive means I didn't do it. Someone bigger and stronger than me reached down into that car and saved me.

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And he separated me and delivered me from the powers of darkness. And he translated me into the kingdom of light.

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What is this power of darkness? Well, it's interesting. We've studied this word power a lot.

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Who can tell me what the, you've heard Brother Otis, you guys, or Brother, if Kenner was here, she would just in a second tell you what the word is.

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This normal word for power in the New Testament is what? Dunamis, right.

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It's kind of a physics word. If you study physics and you study what power actually is, that's what the Greek word means.

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Well, guess what? This word, where you were delivered from the power of darkness is not that Greek word.

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It's not dunamis, it's something else. This is something else operating here. And so rather, this word is exousia, exousia.

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And it comes from a little Greek word I'll tell you about in a minute, but actually what it means, it is kind of has to do with the word,

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English word ability, the ability to do something, the privilege to do something, the force or ability to do it and the freedom to do it.

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Now that gives you goosebumps if you stop and think about, this is talking about Satan. The devil has this power.

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It's not dunamis, it's different. It's exousia. And it means he has the freedom to do what he does because God Almighty has given him the freedom to do it and the ability to do it.

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Now that's power from God. People don't think of it this way, but it's what scripture says.

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Listen, I asked brother Otis one time, why God makes so many lost people and narrow is the way and few there be that go to heaven.

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Why is there way more lost people? Why do you do it that way? Brother David, the lost people don't understand.

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And if they did, they wouldn't like it, but they serve God too. They do exactly what

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God put them to do here on the earth. And he said, actually what God put them here to do is to put everything on the shelf that God's children need.

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I went, wow, I never heard anything that profound in my life that morning at breakfast when he told me that, right?

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Well, did you know Satan is the same way? Satan may not like it. He may not believe it.

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I think he's the greatest unbeliever there ever was. He just totally lacks any belief in anything, but he wouldn't like it or believe the fact that he does exactly what

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God put him here to do. And nothing more. Read the book of Job chapter one, if you don't believe me.

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Nothing more, but he does exactly what God wants him to do. And one of the things God did is he gave him this exousia, power and freedom and ability and privilege to do what he does.

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Now, a lot of what he does happens to us and certainly to the lost world.

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But even as a Christian, you still fight this. I remember the time when Jesus was led by the

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Holy Spirit, which is an interesting thing to talk about, led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.

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God led him there. The Holy Spirit led him there to be tempted by Satan. And the devil tried to use the

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Bible, which is what modern preachers do all day long, all day today across this country. They use this very book to teach stuff that's not even true.

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Stuff that's harmful, stuff that gets Christians, they're focused on totally the wrong things.

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And Satan did that with Jesus and Jesus defeated Satan with this same

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Bible. He said, no, that's not what that means. You misinterpreted that, Satan. You need to reread it.

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It says this, and this says this, and this says this, and I'm not gonna do what you're saying because you're a false liar and you've been a liar from the beginning and I'm not gonna do it.

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So he had complete victory over Satan. And the Bible at that point says, and Satan left him for a season.

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That's freaky. That was the last time Satan tempted Jesus. Who do you think was there in the garden of Gethsemane when he knew he was about to go to the cross and he was sweating blood from his forehead and he said,

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God, Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me. Who do you think was tempting him to not wanna go to the cross?

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But isn't it wonderful that Jesus added at the end of that prayer, nevertheless, thy will be done, not mine. Or you and I would fry in hell forever.

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I don't know why I was looking straight at Pam when I said that, but we would, wouldn't we?

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I guess I was trying to pick the holiest person and say, even you, even you, Pam. Yeah, yeah, we would.

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So if that's true, then Satan keeps coming back to you. Yes, you can defeat him with this word and with prayer anytime you want.

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Want me to show you how simple it is? Dear Lord, you told me in this book that I could have the mind of Christ.

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So right now, whatever this stuff is, it just got put in my mind, take it out and give me the mind of Jesus and help me think like he would think if he were here in this situation right now.

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And furthermore, Jesus, would you, not me, I get a kick out of charismatic

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Pentecostals where they're gonna rebuke Satan. No, they're not an apostle, they can't do that. They're not Jesus, they can't do that.

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But you can ask Jesus to do it. You can say, Jesus, would you bind and rebuke this demon or whatever it is and send it away from me and keep it away from my family?

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And I like to add this, and put a herd on them next time they come back. And the instant have peace at that moment, right?

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But guess what? Only for a season. And then they come back. And that will be your life till the day the rapture happens or you die and meet

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Jesus face -to -face, then that'll be over. But till he does, the Bible says you will fight that fight every day, many moments of every day.

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This sounds tiring and it is tiring, but you can do it. Because just like God gave

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Satan this lower form of power, this exousia power and freedom to do what he does, he gave you dunamis power, which is a higher form of power, which is the power of God.

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And you're gonna see that word later, but it's the power of God to overcome that every single time it comes back at you.

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So don't ever think you get saved, it makes life easier. It just makes you more aware of the bad stuff happening, which in some ways makes it work harder, but you have a power you didn't use to have against the power of darkness.

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And besides that, you're going to heaven when you die because you can't mess up what God did to you because it was passive.

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He saved you, you didn't do something to get saved, so you can't undo it and lose your salvation.

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Isn't that a nice message? I mean, all of it's in the Greek, it's like math. The fact that it is aorist, which by the way, aorist means without regard to time, it's an eternal word.

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Think about that. So who had delivered us from the power of darkness in my car driving to work that day, something without regard to time, something outside of time and space and not limited by it in any way at all, named

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God, sent his spirit into my car, into time and space and saved my soul and delivered me from the power of darkness.

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And the Greek proves it because it is aorist, which means it's outside of time without regard to time.

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It's passive, which means I didn't do it, which means I can't undo it. And it's indicative, which really means

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I can't undo it because it means it's a fact now. I am a saved person who has been freed from the power of darkness and delivered into the kingdom of God's dear son.

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And if you just know more of the story, you go, okay, well, that's nice. Why'd God do that? Because David was such a nice person or Pam was such a nice person.

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No, the key is right there. He delivered you into the kingdom of his dear son. He did it for Jesus, not for you or me.

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It's Jesus that loved us. He knew us from the foundation of the world, read Ephesians chapter one. He knew us from before he made anything, read

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Romans chapter eight. He knew us and loved us before he made the worlds, read the whole

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Bible talks about it. And so he says, even before anything was created, the

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Bible tells that Jesus loved everything that God's plan had in it.

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And then when Jesus spoke forth the universe, Jesus looked at all the planets he had created and he looked at the earth and he said, that's the one

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I like. And he looked at the humans that were gonna be on there and said, I like those.

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Bible says all that, now I paraphrased it, but the Bible says all of that. And so when time came and Adam and Eve sinned against God and fell, the entire human race became a lost race, which would have been lost forever, except that God said that Jesus was crucified before the foundation of the world, which means the

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Godhead had already determined that those people that God knew before he made anything would 100 % every single one of them be saved.

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And of them, Jesus would lose nothing. And he sent him as a shepherd to gather his sheep and to bring us home.

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And he can't fail. No man comes to me unless the father draws him.

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That's the calling of the Holy Spirit that happened to me in that car. No man comes to me unless the father draws him from outside of time and space, reaches into time and space, into your car.

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And you can be going fast because that's me. And saved me from the powers of darkness.

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In a moment of time, did over 33 things to me, gave me over 33 gifts and sent me home to tell her something happened to me on the way to work today.

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And here I am preaching, which makes no sense in my life. This is totally beyond the scope of humanity.

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It's beyond the scope of humanism. It's beyond the ability. If you want to look at this word, exousia, humans don't have the exousia to save themselves.

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They sure don't have the dunamis, but they don't have the freedom to save themselves.

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They don't have the right to save themselves because they have already stricken and smitten Jesus and nailed him to the cross with their own sins.

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By defying God, there's none that seeketh God. We've all gone our own way. We've all gone astray.

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And that's the state we're in when he saves us. So yes, it's passive. He did it to us because we had no ability.

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We had no power. We had no knowledge. We had no ability. It's like he said, we are in the world without hope and without God at the moment he saves us.

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And then in a moment, all that changes and you are set free from the power of darkness.

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So this power, we know the word now, Satan has these abilities and this freedom to do these things that he's going to do.

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Now that word comes from a smaller Greek word, existi, it sounds like exist in English, wouldn't you agree?

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And it literally means what is right and lawful. So that's where it gets this root meaning of Satan has the ability that God gave him to do the stuff that he does.

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And when you start to look at what he does, it is to put a darkness and a blindness on all of the lost race.

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And 100 % of the race is lost. And that's why this modern gospel that you just make, like you come down and you talk to the preacher and he says, well,

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Jesus died and there's a gift he's given you. And you just got to decide to reach out and get it. And when you do, you'll get saved.

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If that were true, none of us would be saved because we didn't want the gift. We wouldn't reach out to get it.

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We wouldn't even know about it, but we wouldn't want it. And no one would be saved that way. But that is the modern gospel.

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And Satan has the power, freedom and ability to keep you blinded where you won't even know what that means or do it.

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So how's that gospel gonna work for you? The true gospel says, you're driving in your car or whatever you do in your life.

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And you're going down the highway just happy as a goose, everything working great. And all of a sudden the

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Holy Spirit comes in that car and blows your life up and saves you. Totally turns like 100, 180 degree turn in your life in a moment of time.

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And then you spend the rest of your life learning how to live that life and trying to not be a hypocrite.

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It's crazy, isn't it? It doesn't work anything like modern churches teach you how it works. And I'm not saying we're the only one that's got it.

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I mean, go read Spurgeon. Now you go back 120 years, nearly every preacher understood these things.

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I don't care what the denomination was on the sign. They understood these things. You look at now, they don't. Just in my lifetime, it's changed from 1980 when this church started and I was saved, some years before that 70, 72, three, four, five, 76 is when

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I got saved, no, eight, 78. We forgot it was after the graduate degree when

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I got saved. But man, things have changed even among what church preachers are preaching and even who the preachers are nowadays.

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So what about this word darkness? We got saved from the power of darkness.

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Well, scatos, sounds kind of bad, but you know what it means, shadiness or obscurity.

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So Satan, who's the prince of the power of the air, but the prince of the power of darkness puts a shadow or an obscurity over how salvation works so that all human beings are totally blind to it in their natural state when they're born into this world.

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That's why it's so important for parents to teach the gospel in their home all the time. I don't mean just sit down and have a formal thing, but just everywhere you go, talk about what

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God's done. And when you see a rainbow or when you see a cloud or you see an ocean or you see a lake, tell your little child, didn't

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Jesus make a pretty cloud today? So like to them, it's just dad or mom, just this part of everything we're doing,

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God is there. And if you just keep doing that, then when you start teaching them scripture, then they say, okay, this is like, yeah, this is normal.

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This is what I grew up knowing. And even then you can't save them, but you know what you can sure do?

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You can give them the water of the word again and again and again and again. And people that have a problem with this doctrine that God has to do the saving, especially moms, because they say, well,

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I got kids. I don't know what now, I don't know if they're all gonna get saved. I always just tell them this, well, would you rather it be where you have to live such an exemplary life and live perfect?

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And they look at you and that's how they get saved? Or you would rather an all knowing, loving, all powerful

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God do the saving? Okay, I agree. I mean, that's just how it is. But I always say this too.

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And I've run this past a lot of the folks in our church and just see if they think it sounds logical.

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But I say, if it is true that God chooses who gets saved, Jesus chooses who his bride is gonna be, so to speak.

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If that's true, don't you think it's logical that God would put a lot of those little sheepies in a

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Christian home where they hear the water of the word every day growing up? Wouldn't that be logical? Now, not all of them come out that way, but bunches of them do.

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So don't worry about that stuff. Listen, if God gave you kids and you got a Christian home and God has already saved you from the power of darkness and translated you into the kingdom of son, you don't think that's gonna rub off on your kids?

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Of course it does. There's examples, I can't explain them, but there's examples in the book of Acts where people were told to go home and tell your family and the whole family will get saved.

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You remember those? They're in there, aren't they? So don't worry about that. But here's the thing.

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He is the power of shadiness and obscurity. Probably make a pretty good politician.

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Probably make an excellent president of the United States. And it comes from the little

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Greek word skia, which means shade or shadow. So let me talk about that.

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We got a little bit of time. Turn with me to 2 Timothy chapter two. 2

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Timothy chapter two. And verse 23.

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My wife shared this passage with me, but now Charlotte, a couple of years ago at this point.

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And I never stopped thinking about it from that morning when she shared it with me. Almost every week

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I'll think about this. And I think I saw what she was wanting me to get from it, but I got a lot of other stuff from it too.

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And so let me see if you get something from it. And I'm gonna read it to you in the context of this exousia power that Satan has, this freedom and ability to do what

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God put him here to do. And think about it. I mean, this may well reveal something to you you have never seen before.

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And I'm gonna throw out this. It's not what the sermon's about, but is there such a thing as free will? Do human beings have free will?

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Did Adam have free will in the garden? Like some theologians say, well, he did until he fell. And then he lost it. Well, that's a theory.

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You know, you read theology. One of the cool things about it is so much of it is false.

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It's just theories that men think up and put it in their theology book. It didn't come from the Bible and it may be right, or it may be wrong, but there is a theory that Satan had,

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I mean, sorry, Adam had free will until he fell and then he lost it. And so that no human after that had it.

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And then most of the population of the world think every human has free will. But the word free means sovereign.

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It means uninfluenced will, that you can make decisions with absolutely no outside influence.

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I only know one person that can do that, and that's God. So that whole idea is not right.

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But if you still kind of want to hang on to that, well, surely that's right. Now you have to understand what I don't mean by that.

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I don't mean that you don't make decisions or that they're not important. You do. You have a will. It's just influenced.

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You can choose to do this or to do that. And what you choose makes a huge difference. And everywhere the

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Bible talks about the sovereignty of God, almost in the same verse or right below, it'll talk about that responsibility that you and I have to make the right choice.

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So it's hugely important, but it's not free. You're not sovereign, right? Only God is.

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So throw that away. That's not true. But this will show you something about that. These people that want to argue that we have free will,

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I can show you very easily that Christians don't because it's like, what did I ask Jesus to do when

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I got saved? I said, I want you to be my boss, not me. So I just gave up any freedom I had right there and gave it to him, right?

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The lordship of my life, I gave it to him. Now, what I didn't know till years later when I studied this, that it was passive indicative, which means

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I didn't give it to him. He took it from me. He did it to me. He took that freedom away and put my hands into his hand, my life into his hands.

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I knew that was good when it happened. I just didn't know all about it yet. I knew it was good though. It's what I wanted.

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He put the desire in my heart to want that. It's not like he just made me be a slave. And all he did was he just opened up and let me see him.

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And when I saw him, that's what I wanted. So I chose it. I freely chose for him to be my lord instead of me being my lord.

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And then he then delivered me from every lesser lord. He was my only lord at that point, right?

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So that's what happens. But so now I don't have free will because every decision I make is influenced by the word of God, by the

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Holy Spirit, by Jesus and by God and by Charlotte. And some of you guys that watch everything

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I preach and make sure it's true and then tell me when it's not, you know, and rightfully so, we can apologize and fix it, right?

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So, I mean, I don't have free will. So, but what about lost people? Surely they have it.

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Well, let's look at this and see. 2 Timothy 2 .23, oh,

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I see it. Josh, Josh, would you bring me that water? Thank you very much.

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You didn't know you were gonna participate in the message today. I will now use him as an illustration. This represents the water of life.

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He is the Holy Spirit and he just handed to me, delivered me from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the son.

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Thank you, this is, actually I messed up. It's not the Holy Spirit, this is the Bible. Yes, it was influenced by me.

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So, I spoke for four hours yesterday.

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So, at home making video or something. And so, my voice is wrecked.

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All right, let's look at 2 Timothy 2 .23. But foolish and unlearned questions avoid.

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There's a nice one. Boy, you get those all the time, people.

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If they find out stuff you believe in the Bible and they don't wanna believe that, they're gonna ask you stupid questions.

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They don't even make any sense. And the Bible said, well, just avoid them when you can. Now, if there's innocent people standing around, then you have to answer them.

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You have to answer it and blow the dude away so the innocent people see, oh, your side is correct, that side's stupid.

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You need to do that. But when you can, you avoid them, knowing that they gender strife or divisions in the church.

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And then it goes on and says, and the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men.

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And maybe that might be one reason Charlotte showed this to me, he must not be someone who likes to argue and debate.

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And win arguments and risk losing them and all that.

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But he needs to be gentle to all kinds of men, apt to teach and patience.

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Now watch this. Verse 25, in meekness, so he's not supposed to strive, but what is he supposed to do?

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He's supposed to, in meekness, instruct those that oppose themselves.

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Wow, that says a lot. First of all, he doesn't need to win an argument. He just needs to share this book with them.

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He just needs to share truth from this book. And that will instruct them whether they believe it or not. That's your job.

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They do not have to believe it. It's not up to you anyway. You share it with them and you instruct them.

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So you teach them the truth, even if you don't think they believe in the Bible. I've done that a lot with Jewish people that I've witnessed too, because they don't believe the new

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Testament. And I've had people say, well, just use old Testament. I use both, right? It's the word of God.

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I use both. And I don't care if they believe it. I don't care if I win the argument. I'm gonna instruct them with the truth because it's beautiful.

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All right, and powerful. So in meekness, instruct those. Now look at this. Why do you think they oppose themselves?

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Now this is talking about logic a little bit. If you younger college age folks in the room, take a course in logic at college as an elective.

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It's in the school of philosophy. You say, I wanna take a logic course and ask them how to get it and take it.

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For one thing, it's fun. But for another thing, God said, come let us reason together. That's logic.

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So you need to have that ability. Boy, did Charles Spurgeon ever have it? One of those logical thinkers

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I've ever seen. But you need to understand logic or else you can be led astray by Satan and by false teachers real easily.

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Because you won't recognize that they're giving you a false premise and basing their whole argument on something that's false.

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And it sounds good. And then you buy into it. So logic is great. But why is it these people oppose themselves?

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Because they're lost. And Satan who has this power to overshadow them and put a shade over them and darkness around them where they can't see truth.

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Their arguments are fallacious. They will start you into an argument. And if you get them talking, the trick is they wanna get you talking.

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But the way you turn it around is you answer their questions with questions. That'll work good in college, by the way.

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You answer their question with a question. That's what Jesus did. Well, yes, I'll answer that if you'll answer this,

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Jesus would say, often. So you answer it with a question. You get them talking. And if you get them talking long enough, they will say something over here that contradicts something they said back here because their argument is opposing itself.

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All right, so that's key. And then, so what you're supposed to do is instruct them with the word of God.

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Tell them the truth. And then you get them talking and you'll see that their own argument will oppose itself.

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And they'll see that. And they'll start listening to you a little bit better. But look what it says after that.

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Why do we meekly just tell them the truth? Because it says at that point, they've got the water, right?

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But it requires one other thing to be saved. What is it? The spirit. Spirit. So if per adventure, that's a great old

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English word. It means by chance, humanly speaking. That's kind of what it means, by chance.

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If God per adventure will. Now, when you talk about God's will, it means if God wants to do that with this person because he does everything according to his will.

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He may not wanna do that with this person. But if he does, if God per adventure will give that person repentance, if God just might happen to decide that he wants to, give them a changing of the mind to the acknowledging of the truth.

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And that after that, now think about it. So this is two things. The first one is God, the Holy Spirit has to come in there and change their thinking and their want to.

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And God might do it or he might not, depending on if God wants to do it with that person. And I'll promise you this.

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If God did not know that person before the foundation of the world is his own, he ain't gonna do it. It's his choice, it's

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God's choice. And so then if God chooses to give them repentance to acknowledge the truth, that's the water of the word, the gospel.

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And the second step is this, this is interesting. And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil.

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Now that's interesting because when you read that, it's not in the passive, it's in the active. That's something they choose to do.

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Now you see how I told you every time you see sovereignty of God, you see the will of man and his responsibility with it.

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Both are true. Most churches pick one side and they become that. They're either a Calvinistic church or they're an

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Arminian church and don't believe God does that stuff. They believe God flung it out there and he just sits here and watch to see how it happens.

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That's a sick way to think of it. But I mean, so maybe they'll recover themselves out of the snare of the devil because now

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I'll tell you this, when the Holy Spirit does awaken you, he changes your want to. He makes you want to recover yourself, right?

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But you do have the responsibility to make those choices afterward, right? You've got to do some things to quit drinking like I did or smoking if that was your problem or whatever these things are

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God wants to deliver you from. Even though the Holy Spirit saves you and puts in your heart a desire to be a new person, you still have to try, don't you?

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You've got to try your best with the equipment you have on that given day and do your best. That's all God wants you to do. But you're already saved by that time.

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That doesn't save you, it's an effect of the salvation. It's not the cause of it. So that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil.

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Now look at this last part. This defies the logic of almost 99 % of humans on the face of the earth.

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These people that God may or may not awaken and cause them to repent and acknowledge the gospel truth.

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And then after that, that they recover themselves out of the snare of the devil. These people, it says, are taken.

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Now this is why they're still in the lost state, right? They're sitting there arguing with you that the Bible's not even true.

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God didn't write it or whatever they're arguing. Those people are taken captive by Satan at his will.

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So tell me who's in control there. The lost person or the power of darkness?

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What do you think? It doesn't say if the person lets him, the demon will come in, it doesn't say that.

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It says the person is captive by Satan according to Satan's will.

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And God has given him the freedom and the right and the power to do that to the lost human race.

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And he did it to you before you got saved and to me. I was driving home in a shadow of obscurity to go to work that day.

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And all of a sudden the lights came on and the obscurity vanished and I could see clearly.

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And that was something God did to me. And so here we see that lost people don't have free will because they're taken captive by Satan at his will.

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And so that's an argument I don't hear anymore. People wanna argue that, I just like you. If I think they're just trying to win an argument,

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I just walk away from it. If I got young people standing around and they're thinking, oh, maybe he's got it right. Maybe David's got it right.

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Then I will blow him away in the love of Jesus. The best I can. And I've done this for, how long have

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I been saved now? I got saved back in a completely different dispensation. That was a long time ago.

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So I have sat on the porch of little old Church Christ ladies and Jehovah's Witnesses and everything in the world and argued with them and cut my teeth on that.

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So yeah, if there's a crowd of young people, influenced young people, and this guy over here is telling me something that's totally wrong in front of them,

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I will do my best to kindly and meekness instruct that person. That's your job too.

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And part of my job is to equip you to do that. So we're almost out of time, but let me share with you what this means.

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It says, if they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil.

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They can only do that if God's already freed them, right? Now they can make that decision. But this idea of recovering themselves on an ipho, it's a weird word, on an ipho in the

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Greek, it literally means to be sober again, to regain your senses.

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If you think about a human being the way God created humans to be in the garden before sin happened, to put you back in that state is what that means.

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Because once sin takes over, which you're born in it anyway, at this point in human history, all of a sudden you are intoxicated by the world system, by Satan's lies and by your own flesh, fleshly desires.

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And you're just totally intoxicated. You're out of your senses. You're just kind of walking around the earth. Just whatever happens next is cool with me.

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And you're totally blind to God. You don't care for him. You're not seeking him. You don't want him. You're flat on your way to hell, so to speak.

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And if the Holy Spirit didn't come into your car or wherever you were at the time and awaken you and show you

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Jesus for who he is, you're just gonna continue down that road. So when they get to the place where the

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Holy Spirit has brought them to repentance, the changing of the mind, and they realize they're not God, but God is

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God, and the acknowledging of the gospel truth that Jesus died in my place and paid the sin debt and ransomed me away from Satan.

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And then they start to get to this place where they're gonna recover themselves out of the snare of the devil.

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The Bible says all it's like is they just quit drinking. And that's an allegory.

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They just, all of a sudden, they're in a right mind. Their mind is right like God meant for it to be for the first time in their life.

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They're in a right mind. They can see the world as it really is. They can see that the things that are unseen, like Myron says so often, are more real than the things that are seen.

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And now they can be joyful when they're on the dungeon wall, which Ben's been teaching a great

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Sunday school class. If y 'all can make it at 10, come to it. I exhort you to come to it.

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But if you're on the dungeon wall, like the Apostle Paul, when he wrote a lot of the books of the New Testament, he's singing hymns.

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He's not over there crying and pouting and sad. He's joyful. And so this is how the

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Lord has equipped us. All right, so once we are removed from this power of darkness, and it's interesting also when it says that they've covered themselves out of the snare of the devil, the word snare is interesting.

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And it is pagisi, and it means a trap, which kind of fits the

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English word snare, doesn't it? But it figuratively means a trick or a strategy.

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So it's like being delivered from the strategies of the smartest person who ever lived other than God, and that's

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Lucifer. He has strategies to destroy your life. Listen to me, young people in particular, to destroy your life by making things look good to you that aren't good, good for you that aren't good for you, to destroy your marriage.

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Now let's move up a little bit to the young couples, okay? Want to destroy that marriage first of all, and then destroy the kids because he destroyed the marriage if possible.

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Sometimes a marriage goes away and the kids are fine, depends on if it's what God's will is in that life. But Satan's desire and his strategy is to destroy that marriage, and then the more marriages we can destroy, we'll destroy the church.

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We're gonna even bring immorality into the church if possible and make that a spotlight in what used to be the newspapers, right?

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And then we're gonna destroy a nation, and then we take freedom away and everybody is communist and under control of dictators in the whole world, back to the kings and queens of Europe in the dark ages.

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That's what Satan's will is, his strategy. And yet the Bible says that God can open your mind, free you to think clearly, take the obscurity away where you see clearly so that you can recover yourself from the strategy.

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That's what this word snare means, it's the strategies of Satan who once took you captive at his will, but now you've been set free.

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Now that sort of leads us to the last part of the verse which we'll cover next

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Sunday on what does it mean to be translated into the kingdom of light. But now we're at the stage where he has set us free from Satan, he's removed the obscurity, the darkness that we were walking in.

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He has allowed us to be free of strategies of Satan and to understand them better so that we can avoid them because we understand his strategies from this book.

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It teaches you what they are and you learn what those are. It's kind of like seeing his playbook. That's kind of cool, isn't it?

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And so we're freed up. It's kind of interesting, one other thing, because I don't wanna go back to this part too much.

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Yeah, it looks like maybe I'm gonna have to because I didn't quite finish this part. But here where it says that these lost people are taken captive by him at his will, that's in the perfect passive participle.

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That means the lost person is not doing what he's doing because of his will, that would be active.

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It's passive, which means someone stronger than him is doing it to him and what is his name? Satan. You see, that's spooky, isn't it?

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It's what the scripture says and it's like math, you can't change it. If you know it, people can't argue you on that.

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They're not gonna talk you out of it because you've seen the math, that's what it means. All right, so yeah, so next time when we come back,

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I'm gonna talk to you a little bit more about some of the strategies of the enemy and then we'll get into the part about being brought into the kingdom of God, which is the good part.

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Let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you that you've given us this book and you protected it through the fires of those who would burn it out of existence.

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You've protected it from the pen of those who would create modern versions that have full of error and so forth and you've preserved the true word of God so that we have it today and thank you for the power of the words.

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You said they are spirit and they're life. Thank you that they are that to us and Lord, thank you that you reveal the strategies of Satan to us as we study the scriptures and that you give us the dunamis, the power to live a

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Christian life even in this world that is totally against our life and thank you for that power.

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Thank you for giving us each other because when one of us is weak, the others can be strong and pick us up and vice versa and thank you for the fellowship time we're about to have and we ask you to bless the meal we're about to have in Jesus' name, amen.