God Centered Podcast - Episode 3 - Sola Gratia

God Centered Theology

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Hello there, this is Pastor Andy Cain, and welcome back to Foundational Theology, and I am currently covering the five souls of the

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Reformation, and we've already covered Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide, so today we are covering

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Sola Gratia, or Sola Gratia. Now, I prefer, it's probably more correct to say Gratia, but I prefer

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Gratia, because it sounds a lot more like the English word that we translate it into, which is grace. And after all, it is by grace, by His grace, that we are saved, by His grace through faith, which is the whole theme for my ministry, that our journey is paid by His grace, and also the fact that everything that we have and everything that we are is by the grace of God.

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And so we see, and we'll look at two passages of scripture here to really bring this out today for you, that our unity as Christians, the one thing that binds us all together, the true foundational cornerstone, or cornerstones if you will, of our theology and our faith, one of them is that it is by grace alone.

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Notice with me in Ephesians 2, 8, it says, for by grace you have been saved through faith.

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It is by the grace of God that anyone is saved. God could have saved everybody, He could have saved nobody,

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He could have saved somebody. The Word of God, and certainly life experience will teach us that it is somebody.

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Universalism is not taught in scripture, it's certainly not witnessed of those we know, and nobody is certainly not true, because I'm saved,

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I know I'm saved. The Holy Spirit testifies in my spirit that I'm a child of God, so the answer is somebody.

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So of those that are saved, it is by God's grace, His unmerited favor, meaning it's undeserved, it's unmerited, nothing could be done to earn it, there's nothing about us in and of ourselves or what we do that puts

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God in any position where He has to save us, it's completely by His grace. And it says, this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.

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See repentance and faith are gifts of God, they are not anything that we possess on our own, they're not anything that we can produce, we are spiritually dead in trespasses and sins.

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A dead person cannot respond to commands. You can shake them, you can pound on their chest, you can pick them up and stand them up, you can put them in a car weekend at Bernie's style,

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I think that's the movie where they have the guy in the car, I think he's actually a dead guy and he's carrying them around.

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You can do that all you want, they're not going to respond because they're dead. So a spiritually dead person, a totally depraved person cannot respond, they cannot show that which a spiritually alive person can do.

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Spiritually dead person isn't going to do that because by grace you've been saved, it's that gift. Not as a result of work so that no one may boast, there's not going to be boasting among the children of God, there's no boasting among the people of God.

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Every single Christian, every single person that's been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, every single person that's been made alive in Christ, we all have equal right and privilege to go and commune at the

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Lord's table together. We do. There are no distinctions in the body in that fashion.

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Now there are certainly distinctions in the sense of roles and spiritual giftedness and we'll play different roles and have different gifts that we use for the kingdom and so on and so forth.

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But in terms of our justification, in terms of the foundational theology behind our soteriology, how we are saved, why we are saved, so on and so forth, there are no distinctions.

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Only man -made ones. We're all equal in the eyes of Christ in terms of how we are justified.

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Each and every single person that stands before God one day, saved by the blood of Christ, saved by the atoning sacrifice of Christ, we will all be equally justified in the sight of God by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ.

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It is man, social justice warriors, social justice gospel, intersectionality, levels of victimhood, levels of oppression, gender, race, poverty, all these things, economics, all of it.

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Man is the one that puts distinctions on stuff and says, you here, you there, you down here, yada yada, forever and ever.

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God doesn't do that. You won't find that in the word of God. It's not there. It says you all are saved by grace through faith.

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And notice it says there's no boasting. No one's going to stand before God and say, you know, when

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I said my prayer, I really meant it. Or I used the right words.

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Or you know, that aisle I walked, that was a really good church, guy, about four people down.

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Yeah. You see him over there? He just, he didn't really mean it. He just kind of meant it.

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I really meant it. There's no boasting or Lord, look at the great kingdom

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I built for you. Thousands of people at church or my Sunday school class had the most people.

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Surely I'll get in. No. We're all justified in the sight of God by grace through faith.

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It is grace alone. Grace plus nothing. Even our very faith is a gift of God's grace.

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And so also I want to kind of expand this and really understand grace alone by looking at Romans chapter four.

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Now we're going to pick up the thrust of what I want to talk about in verse 16, but for context purposes, in chapter four of Romans, Paul's talking about how

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Abraham was justified by faith. His righteousness was based on his faith.

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It's not based on circumcision. If circumcision was the basis or law keeping was the basis of our salvation, then there would be some type of distinction.

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Well, I'm a law keeper. That's the reason I'm justified. See, God has to let me in because I kept the law.

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Well, no, God doesn't owe you anything. God gives you salvation. God grants you salvation.

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He makes you alive in Christ based on his grace and his mercy. So notice in verse 13, when it picks up, it says the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be the heir of the world did not come through the law.

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It didn't come through law keeping. It didn't come through do's and don'ts. It didn't come from, well, you better wear this or you better do that.

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Yada, yada, yada. But through the righteousness of faith, you see, the righteousness doesn't come through different levels of righteousness, you see, in terms of our justification.

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Now, in our sanctification, we're to be progressively growing more righteous daily. In terms of our justification, because it's not through the law, you don't have, you know, 500 level law keepers who are extra special righteous.

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These little 101 guys over here, this isn't how it works. There's no distinctions in that sense.

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It comes through the righteousness of faith, meaning that every single person that stands before God righteous stands equally righteous before God.

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Why? Our righteousness all comes from the same unique source, and that is the one mediator between God and man, and that is

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Jesus Christ. You see, Jesus Christ is the eternal life. He is the eternal life. It's not that he was eternal life or that he will be eternal life.

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He is eternal life by his very being because he's God. You see, we have to come into eternal life.

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We have to be born again. Christ didn't need that. Christ was perfectly righteous and was complete eternal life simply because of who he was and his eternal nature.

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See, we've already covered this, I believe, with Sola Fide, and when we looked, I think we looked at Ephesians 5 and talked about how you were once darkness, you were once by nature children of wrath, but now you're light, so walk as children of light.

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We have to become righteousness. We have to become or come into possession of eternal life.

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We have to become or have our nature changed to be one of spiritually alive in Christ.

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Christ is that source of eternal life. Christ is that source of righteousness, and we receive the righteousness of Christ as our own through faith in him.

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And so he says, verse 14, for if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.

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The whole promise to Abraham had nothing to do with skin color, nationality, who your mom and daddy were, what tribe you come from.

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Even Paul references this in Philippians 3. He says, I'm a Hebrew of the Hebrew, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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Doesn't matter. It's all lost. It doesn't matter one hill of beans difference, but I want to gain

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Christ and the righteousness that is by faith through him. And this is the whole point. So many people get caught up because their eschatology, they take whatever they believe by end times, they put it on top of everything else.

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Just take the scripture for its normal plain reading in context and understand what it's saying. The promise did not go to the adherents of the law.

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It didn't go through being circumcised. Abraham believed God, then he was circumcised.

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Law came after that. You know, Abraham fulfilled the promise through faith.

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That's why it says it was not the adherents of the law that were going to be the heirs. Otherwise it'd be up to man who was going to be the heirs or not.

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And the Bible is abundantly clear that it is God who makes, and that's ultimately what people have issue with Calvinism.

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It's not depravity or atonement or perseverance of the saints. It's always the unconditional election.

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You push hard enough in someone's theology and really dig in, you're going to come up with the unconditional election issue at some point.

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That's the part they ultimately have the issue with. Because if you accept that, then you accept that man has no control over that.

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We all are born totally depraved, and if left to ourselves with no grace, we would all die loving and choosing our sin, hating

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God, being rebel sinners, and we'd spend the rest of eternity in hell hating God, loving our sin, sinning in punishment.

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And so it's by His grace, it's not the adherents of the law that are heirs. You can't stand before Him, as Ephesians said, and boast and say, well,

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I was an adherent. I did it. I kept the law. No, that makes faith null.

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What difference does it make if you have faith in God if you're not a law keeper at that point? You can have all the faith in the world, but you can't keep the law.

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It makes the promise void. The promise to Abraham, you go all the way back to the beginning of the chapter, it says,

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Ephesians 2, what shall we then say was gained by Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh?

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Nothing. Nothing was gained by Abraham according to his flesh. If Abraham was justified by works, he would have had something to boast about.

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Ephesians 2 makes it clear that we don't, right? But not before God. Notice the consistency of Paul's theology here.

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I love Paul and how consistent, of course, all scripture obviously is consistent and inerrant.

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That goes without saying. But specifically here, notice the consistency because he wrote Ephesians as well. It says,

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Abraham believed God and that belief, that faith, was counted to him as righteousness.

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See, we're not righteous in and of ourselves or by our nature. Righteousness has to be credited or counted to our account or we're treated as righteous even though we're not.

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So the way you're credited as righteous, the way you're treated as righteous before God, or the way you have righteousness counted to your account is through faith, just like our father

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Abraham. And I think Galatians deals with this as well. I think it's at Galatians 2 .7, it talks about Abraham's the father of all the believing ones.

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And it picks up on this here. It says, for the law brings wrath, this is verse 15, but where there is no law, there is no transgression.

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But then notice here it says in verse 16, that is why it depends on faith.

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In order that the promise may rest on grace. The promise made to Abraham, and I'm sorry, but they say that's only, there's some that in their eschatologies say that it's only to the

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Jewish people. They completely missed the boat. Paul himself didn't even see it that way. Yes, God pulled out of people nationality -wise for himself to show his grace and show his power and bring glory to himself and all those things, and that's sermons for another day.

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But the people of God, all of them, regardless of race, gender, color, all those things has always been by grace through faith.

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That is how you have righteousness credited to you and you become an heir of the promise. So if you have faith in God and faith in Christ, you're an heir of all the promises to Abraham.

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It's what it says. The promise rests on grace. The promise made to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations means that he's the father of many nations of people that all have faith in Christ.

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You see, it says in order that the promise may rest on grace, rest on the grace of God, grace alone, not who you are, not what nationality you come through, but on the grace of God.

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And it's guaranteed because of who the guarantor is. It's guaranteed promise because God proved that he guaranteed our justification.

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Romans 4 .25 at the end of this chapter. Let's see, Romans 4 .24.

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Bartholomew also becount us who believe in him who raised the dead, Jesus our

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Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. When God raised Jesus from the dead, he proved that he accepted his sacrifice and proved to the world that it is guaranteed that the promise is sure that all those of faith will be one day raised just like Jesus Christ.

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It says not only to the inherent of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham who is the father of us all.

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What he's saying here is this promise that is by faith guaranteed to all his offspring.

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Now if his offering were only Jews by nature, by nationality, by birth, then you couldn't apply this at all to anyone else.

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But Paul makes it clear, guaranteed to all his offspring. And then he makes the clarity here not only to the inherent of the law or referring to not only the

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Jew, but also the Greek. Paul rephrases and restates that many times in his writings about how, especially in Galatians, he talks about there's no dividing line.

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Colossians, he does this. You know, there's no Jew, no Greek. I believe it's Galatians 3 .28 where he says, you know, there's no

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Jew, no Greek. There's just one in Christ. That's what he's talking about here. Whether you're Jewish, Gentile, it matters not.

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The promise is to you, you're one of Abraham's offspring if you are united with Abraham by faith in the grace of God.

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Notice he says in verse 17, as it is written, quoting the Old Testament.

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In fact, he's quoting, let me find it here, the reference, Genesis 17 .5,

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going back to Genesis 17. He says, as it is written, I have made you the father of many nations.

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Now this is true in the sense that he's the father of many nations in terms of physical descendants.

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And, you know, there's sands of the sea, but the ultimate promise, the ultimate fulfillment of the promise is that he'd be a father of many nations, that his people would be as the sands of the sea because God has an elect people and they number in that great number.

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Father of many nations in the presence of the God in whom he believed who gives life to the dead, it is

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God by grace alone who gives life to the dead. God raises us to life spiritually and he will raise us physically to a new body for all eternity one day.

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And Jesus is the first fruits of that by God's grace. He's the first one to receive his resurrected body.

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But just as Jesus rose from the dead, we know we will as well. Notice in, um, uh, gives life to the dead and calls into existence of things that do not exist, referring to the ultimate sovereignty of God, that he is the creator.

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He's the creator. He speaks life into existence. He's the source of all life in hope.

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He believed against hope that he should become the father of many nations as he had been told. So shall your offspring be

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Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness and it rests on the grace of God and is guaranteed to all his offspring.

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My friend, if you have repented of your sin and place your faith and trust in Jesus Christ and have been born again in the

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Holy Spirit of God, raised to spiritual life, made alive in Christ, you are an offspring of Abraham.

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You are the spiritual offspring of Abraham because you in like manner believed God and that was counted to you as righteousness.

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But it was all read. It all rests every bit of it. My salvation, your salvation,

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Abraham's salvation, every single person that has ever been saved. It all rests on the grace and mercy of the almighty sovereign, the almighty creator, the almighty

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God and his son, Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, the only atoning sacrifice for sin.

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And we will cover this in more greater detail when we look at Solus Christus. But for now, understand that all of our salvation, every bit of it, our life before when we're saved and everything we do as a

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Christian after we're saved, it all rests on the grace of God. Well, God bless you and thank you for joining me on this episode of Foundational Theology and I really hope that you are learning from this and I really hope that you are growing in your walk with your creator as a result.