Chosen (Part 1)

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Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author, Dr. Mike Avendrop.

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Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

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Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the scriptures, verse by verse, with No Compromise.

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Did God choose you to go to heaven? Did you know He chose some people to go to heaven and He didn't choose other people?

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Does God have a special love for you? You know, God gives special love to some people, but not to all people.

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Are you one of God's elect? God elects some, but He doesn't elect all.

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Has God selected you to go to heaven with Him? Did you know the

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Bible teaches He's selected some and not all? Today we celebrate Resurrection Sunday.

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But for the church, 52 weeks of the year is Resurrection Sunday, right? For 2 ,000 years we've had

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Resurrection Sunday, one after another after another, I think about 100 ,000 total, because every

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Sunday we celebrate the resurrection. And on Resurrection Sunday, that's the particular one,

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Easter Sunday, I like to talk to Christians about their salvation, and I like to talk to people who aren't

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Christians about who God is. And so today, I'll do that exact thing.

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There was a great evangelist, his name was George Whitefield. And George Whitefield said, when I meet people who aren't

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Christians, I love to talk about election. I love to talk about God chooses some and passes over others.

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And George Whitefield was known by pretty much the world as the great evangelist, and he said,

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I like to talk about God picking and choosing people when I talk to unbelievers.

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And this is why he did that. Quote, George Whitefield, this is one reason among many others why

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I admire the doctrine of election, and am convinced that it should have a place in gospel preaching, and should be assisted on with faithfulness and care.

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Then he gives the reason, why would pastor preach on election on Easter morning? It has a natural tendency to rouse the soul out of carnal security.

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If I were to tell you that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, if you're a Christian, you'd be happy, and if you were an unbeliever, you'd be happy too.

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God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life. But if I were to tell you, God as a creator loves everyone, and he gives rain and food and family and friendship and taste buds, and he just gives so much to everyone.

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His creative love, yet he has a special love, a special love that only applies to his bride, to his chosen ones.

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You sitting here listening today should ask this question, am I chosen or am I not?

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This is what Whitefield meant. If I were to tell you God loves you all equally, unconditionally, and everybody is loved the same, you'd say, okay, fine.

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But if I were to tell you, as the Bible teaches, he's chosen some and not others, it would behoove you to sit there and think, am

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I in? Did God choose me? Did God even select me? There's been a choice.

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Now am I chosen? Have I been elected? So I ask you the question, did

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God choose you? Did God choose you to go to heaven? Did he select you?

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He hasn't selected everybody. Did he select you? Well, this morning we're going to look at a passage and you're going to be able to know for sure, did

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God elect me? Did God select me? By the way, you should see some of your faces right now.

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This is the best. Boy, I can't wait until second service now, too, because their faces are more exaggerated as they're awake longer.

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Am I chosen? If God loves me, I must be in. He loves me. But if God loves people differently, some just on earth with rain and pleasure and families, but other people with rain and pleasure and families plus eternal life, am

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I in? Which one? What kind of love does God have for me? As Lewis Johnson said, if we preach a universal love of God, then we're not forced to think,

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I might not be there. So Whitfield says election has a natural tendency to rouse the soil out of carnal security and therefore many carnal men crowd against it.

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Whereas universal redemption is a notion sadly adapted to keep the soul in its lethargic, sleepy condition and therefore so many natural men admire and applaud it.

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This morning, why don't you turn your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 2. We are going to look at the sovereign, distinguishing, electing grace of God.

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We will answer the question, how can I know God has chosen me to go to heaven?

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Ephesians chapter 2, Professor James Dane said, sermons on election are so rare that even a regular church goer may never hear one.

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No other doctrine has been so central in theology and so ignored in the pulpit. Sermons on election are rare.

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Sermons on election during Easter are even rarer than the steaks I like, nice and bloody and juicy.

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The only hope for anyone's salvation is that God would choose you because then the ones that God has chosen, the son dies for and then

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God raises his son from the dead to confirm that. A God who raised himself from the dead dies for those the father has chosen.

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Thomas Arnold said, the distinction between Christianity and all other religions consists largely in this, that in these others, men are found seeking after God while Christianity is

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God seeking after men. And it shouldn't surprise anyone who reads the

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Bible that God has particular love for some and not others. God chooses

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Israel and no other nation. By the way, Israel wasn't deserved election, but God chose her anyway.

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Why? Deuteronomy 7, because he loved her and he set a special love on Israel. God has chosen only some to be

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Levitical priests. Not all of Israelites could be priests, but only the Levites. God has chosen

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Jacob. He has not chosen Esau. God chose Moses, but he did not choose

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Pharaoh. God chooses the 12 disciples and not the others. So it shouldn't shock us when we read the

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Bible, God chooses. And by the way, if I could speak just personally for a moment, that's when the pastor goes for the kill usually, when he says that.

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We all love to choose. You like to choose. You want to choose what school you went to, you want to go to.

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You want to choose, unless you're from the Eastern culture, your bride. You want to choose friends where you work.

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You like to choose. Why do you like to choose? Because you reflect who God is.

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God makes you in his likeness and image, and God is a choosing sovereign God, and so therefore you say to yourself, like God, even though I'm not

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God, but I have his image and likeness, and therefore I like to choose. You like to choose what sport teams you like to root for.

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Maybe that's just conditioned here in New England, I don't know. If you're a Christian and you remember this morning that God chose you,

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I think, like Spurgeon said, it's going to make your hearts dance with joy, that God would choose me.

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Knowing what I've done and what I would do, he still chose me. And if you're an unbeliever here today,

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I want you to ask the question, did God choose me? And then I want to give you the answer. So for an outline, if you would like outlines this morning, four questions and answers about election from the book of Ephesians.

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Four questions and then answers about the doctrine of election found in Ephesians to rouse your soul to joy if you're a

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Christian. And if you're not a Christian, to ask the question, am I elect and how do

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I know? Question number one, why is election needed?

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Why is election needed? The answer is because unbelievers left to themselves would never choose

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God. God has to choose first because unbelievers never choose.

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They would never ever choose God. Only the resurrecting power of a sovereignly gracious God could save those who would never choose him.

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Let's look at Ephesians chapter two for a moment. We're going to look at chapter two mainly this morning and then we'll slip into chapter one a little bit later.

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Election is needed because unbelievers left to themselves never choose God. Ephesians two verse one, and you were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

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Mankind, when he thinks about sin, he says, you know what? I'm going to overestimate my goodness and I underestimate

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God's holiness. I'm really not that sinful. God's really not that holy. So the gap that bridges man and God becomes a smaller yet.

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Paul here says we're just dead in trespasses and sins, not physically dead, but spiritually dead.

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Unbelievers are dead to see how great Jesus is, how glorious he is, how saving he is.

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One writer said you can take a dog to Niagara Falls and it just looks at the falls, but it doesn't see how beautiful it is because it doesn't think that way.

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It doesn't reason that way. And so to every human who's ever been born short of Christ, Jesus is utterly unable to meet

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God's divine law and standards. You can poke an unbeliever, you can prod, you can yell, you can bribe, you can plead, you can threaten.

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But if you look at those two words back in verse one, dead in trespasses and sins, the comprehensive account of human evil, sins of commission and omission, both plural.

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Do you see that? Trespasses and sins, dead. I have to tell you an interesting story.

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I went to Walmart this week. That's not the interesting part of the story. Although my wife is like,

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I never want to go back to that particular Walmart. And so I was in line,

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I think it was Wednesday, I was in line, excuse me. And the lady in front of me was checking out and the checkout clerk said to this lady, have a happy holiday.

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I thought, well, that's kind of interesting to me, holiday. And so I walked up and she said, how are you?

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And I did my typical thing. I do it every single time. I said, I'm doing much better than I deserve.

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Thank you. And most of the time they just let it go. You know, they're just, they're just bringing up what

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I've been buying. You know, there's, you know, some kind of arrows and ammo and, you know, mace or whatever.

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Vitamin C. But she just looked right at me and she said, what do you mean better than you deserve?

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What do you deserve? And I had a rip curl hat on and kind of workout outfit. And I said, I deserve sin and death.

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I mean, I deserve death and judgment. She looked at me like, okay, it was like I was speaking a foreign language,

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I mean, it is so strange. And she said, who said you deserve judgment and death?

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I said, the creator said it. My conscience says it. I said, the real question is not that I'm a sinner, but are you a sinner?

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Now I'm trying to buy extra things now to slow this process down. I'm just kidding. I'll have some of that gum, some

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Tic Tacs. She said, I'm not a sinner. I said, really?

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And then she said quietly under her breath, I know I am. I just don't want to admit it. I said, well,

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I'm a pastor. She goes, you're a pastor. I like the lines getting longer.

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The gang members are coming behind me, trying to buy oil to change the oil in the parking lot.

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I'm just thinking, all right. I said, when you know you're a sinner, then you know you need a savior.

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Hence, Friday, Good Friday, and then Easter Resurrection Sunday. She goes, that'll be 4212.

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Here's my point. My point is you talk to people today, and they elevate how good they are.

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And they say by comparison, well, I'm at least not like Jeffrey Dahmer.

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I'm at least not like Hitler. The people at my school are worse than I am. But this here in Ephesians chapter 2 just cuts us all off at the knees.

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It slays us all. We are dead, and dead people don't choose God. Why did God have to choose us?

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It's because if he waited for us to choose him, we are spiritually dead. Not unconscious, not sick.

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We are dead. We would never choose. Dear Abby, I am 44 and would like to meet a man my age with no bad habits,

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Rose. Dear Rose, so would I. Everett said no man can enter heaven until he is first convinced he deserves hell.

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And is enslaved to sin, bound to Satan's will, following the world, Ephesians 2, wrapped up in sin, man is not going to say,

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God, I admire you, I love you, your son is to be worshiped because man is dead. He won't choose.

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So God had to choose. Westminster Confession said man by his fall into a state of sin has lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation.

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And as Jonathan Edwards said, how bad is man? Well, let's just think about a servant to his master.

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If that servant only spits in his master's face once a year, what will his master think?

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No matter how good he is the rest of the time. People try to deceive themselves and they say, you know,

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God grades on a curve and I'm just better off when here the text says, and if you're a believer, this is who you used to be.

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If you're an unbeliever, this is who you are, dead in trespasses and sins. The Bible says in Romans 3, there's no one who understands.

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There's no one who seeks for God. So we need the seeking God to save us. Before other people, we're good.

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Before God, we're wicked. Listen to what Henry Mahan said. There's enough evil in the heart of the best sinner to make another devil.

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No wonder Edwards said we're half man and half animal at heart because of Adam's fall and because of our own sin.

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Therefore, if you today are not a Christian and you're not born again and you would like to go to heaven, the bad news is you can do nothing about it.

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You have no power to get to heaven on your own. You have no spiritual capacity to get to heaven.

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The power of your salvation is outside of you. If you are to be forgiven and have your sins cleansed, you cannot do it.

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Only God can. Who can make the clean out of the unclean? Job 14, no one.

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John 6, 44, no one can come to the me unless the father who sent me draws him.

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Question number one is, without...question and answer is, why do we have election?

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Well, without election, no one would be saved. Question two, why does

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God elect anyone? Why would God elect anyone? If we're really that bad, then why would

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God choose anyone? I wouldn't choose people like that. I choose people who help me win. When I played basketball all the time, you pick four other guys to play the game and if you lost, you sat for two hours.

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I pick the best. Why would God pick any sinner when his eyes are pure, too pure to behold evil?

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If we're really this bad in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 to 3, why would God help us? That seems preposterous.

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Judge us maybe, damn us, yes, but save us.

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And if you look at Ephesians chapter 2, verse 4, two of the best words in all the

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Bible, favorite words in any human language, but God.

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If God left us alone, we would die physically and eternally, but God intercepts,

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God interrupts. The soul who sins will die, but God. How wonderful, this is really great news.

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This is good news. These two monosyllabic words here open up everything.

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We think we're going to get judgment and God gives something else. Can you imagine?

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You're dead in trespasses and sins, you follow the world, Satan is your father, by nature you're children of wrath, and God, then how do you think you'd fill that in?

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And God therefore judged righteously and according to his holy law, but here it's different.

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The sense of the gospel almost in these two words, but God. Let me give you five reasons why

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God chose us, they're all right here. One, he's merciful, do you see it in verse 4?

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Why would God do it? We only figure this out because he tells us. This is the goodness of God, his mercy.

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Verse 4, but God being rich in mercy. Not just merciful, but rich in merciful.

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If you're a bankrupt sinner, he's got lots of riches for you. Not just a little mercy, but he's having mercy that's inexhaustible, an inexhaustible treasure.

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This is right where we have the word from the Hebrew language, loving kindness. His steadfast love, he abounds in it.

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He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to his what? Mercy, Titus 3.

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Blessed be God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again.

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We would never choose God because of our sin. God would have to choose us.

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What would motivate God to choose rebels and people who would crucify the son if they could?

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Well, one, he's merciful too. The second reason is he's loving. Look at it in verse four.

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Because of his great love, first rich in mercy, now great love with which he loved us.

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If God looked into my soul before I was a Christian, what was there to love? There's nothing in me to love, only to hate, yet God is loving and he loves us.

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The son of God loved me, Galatians 2, and gave himself for me. 1 John 4, 19, we love because he first loved us.

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That's staggering to think that God would see through his holy glaze, gaze rather, he'd see a love for me.

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He'd have a love for me. God demonstrates his own love towards us that in while we were yet sinners,

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Christ died for us. Well, not only that, thirdly, God's gracious. Look at verse five.

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Why would God ever choose anyone? Because he's merciful, because he's loving, because he's gracious.

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Even when we were dead in our transgressions, he's repeating what verse one says, he made us alive.

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He made us born again. We were dead, so he has to make us alive spiritually. He made us alive together with Christ and then we see parenthetically, by grace you have been saved.

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God's generous, unselfish grace given to us.

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Goodwin said grace is attributed to princes. They are said to be gracious to their subjects, whereas subjects cannot be gracious to princes.

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Now, God, who is an infinite sovereign, who might have just chosen whether ever he would love us or not, for to him is love, this is grace.

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Well, that's not all. If that wasn't enough, verse seven, God is kind.

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Here's a fourth reason God chooses people, because he's kind. In order that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

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God is merciful, God's gracious, God's loving, God's kind, but that's not all.

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Final motivation is found, final reason is found in verse seven as well, to display his own glory, because it shows off how great he is when he saves people.

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How can you uphold God's holy law yet still forgive people? God has this worked out to show his surpassing riches, see that in verse seven, of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

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Man would never choose God, therefore God has to choose, but why would God choose? He doesn't choose because of what's in us, he chooses because of what's in him.

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He's merciful, he's gracious, he's loving, he's kind, he shows himself. Question number three, question number three this morning, when did

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God elect? When did God elect? Now most people think that God is a

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God who's outside of time and at the beginning of time he looks down the corridors of time, you've probably heard that phrase, the corridors of time.

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And God looks in time even though he's outside of this time and he sees and he says, well Mike will believe in 1989 and he'll kind of be down on his luck and he'll believe and so since he believed in me,

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I choose him. Now we're going to find out here just very quickly that in eternity past if God were to look down the corridors of time and see in 1989 what

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Mike would do, Mike wouldn't do anything because Mike is dead in trespasses and sins.

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If God looks down the corridors of the time and sees you, he's going to see someone who's enslaved to sin, who's fallen, who can't get up spiritually and he's going to see someone who is left to themselves in some kind of quagmire, in some kind of quicksand,

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I can't extricate myself. I think I've told the story before that the day shortly after I was married,

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I wasn't a Christian and the day that I was just very foolish and I was thinking about my sin,

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I thought to myself, here's the woman that I love and I'm just a foolish sinner the way I don't treat her like I ought to and then

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I thought this, I thought, I don't have a problem. My problem's not anger, my problem's not

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I'm not patient, my problem's not I'm unloving, I don't have a problem. The day that I realized

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I am the problem, that was what set me free, that God used that because if I got a problem,

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I'll work on it, I'll go to anger management, I'll go to this and I'll do that, I'll try better, I've got a budget problem,

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I just have to make the ends meet but when I'm the problem, how do I get myself out of me? I am the problem.

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So if God were to choose, he's not going to choose after I believe, that's not predestination, giving me my destiny pre -time.

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If God chooses based on what I do, that's post -destination, that's God chooses in a reaction to us but we've already seen, we're not going to do anything, we're sinful, we're dead, we're unable, we're depraved, we're corrupt and so because of Adam's fall and God crediting our

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Adam's sin to us and then by nature we are now sinful, God's going to wait for a long long time.

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So God chooses when, when did God choose? Before time began. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's Word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 8 .30 and 11am and Sunday evenings at 6pm.

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We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org

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or by phone at 508 -835 -3400. The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.