The Gospel in 15 Words

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Well, I would invite you to take out your worksheet and your Bible, if you have it.
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Open your Bible to 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 21.
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Now the last couple of years, on Wednesday night, we have made it our practice here at Sovereign to use this Wednesday night as an opportunity as somewhat of a mini-seminary.
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We address subjects which often don't get addressed in churches, things like church history and theology and subjects which often go without much knowledge at all.
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And so I've been very excited about the things that we've been able to do on our Wednesday nights and I look forward to this particular lesson in particular, I was redundant, sorry.
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I look forward to this lesson in particular because I know just how important it is to memorize scripture and to make it a part of our life because when you are engaging with a person in regard to the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether they be a believer or an unbeliever, it's often not possible that you can immediately go and find a Bible and pull it out and open it up unless you just happen to maybe carry your Bible with you wherever you go and now that we have cell phones, that might be a little bit more possible to pull out a Bible.
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But certainly, even if you pulled out a Bible, that's a very thick book.
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So, you know, you might carry your Bible around with you but if you don't know the relevant passages to go to to deal with certain issues that you might run into with an individual, then having a Bible, I mean, unless you're going to start reading them Genesis 1-1 and go all the way to Revelation 22, yeah, that might be a little bit of a read and obviously I'm being a little facetious.
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We have to know the texts and we have to know where they are.
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So, what I've decided for this lesson and I was thankful for last week, Aaron started the series with my being out, being sick, and he started the series by teaching you what is commonly called the Romans Road, five verses in Romans, which are gospel-centered verses.
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And I'm kind of thankful that he did that because some of those were ones that I was going to do but I have decided now that since he went over those, that I'm going to move forward with some verses that you might not be used to and ones that are good to memorize because that's part of this, is not only do I want you to learn and memorize these verses but I want to introduce you to verses that you may not already know by heart.
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You know, we're not going to spend a whole week on John 3-16, I think we probably have that one.
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But even though a lot of people don't understand John 3-16, let me just put that out there, we could do a whole week on what the misunderstandings of John 3-16 are.
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But for memorization's sake, we're going to be looking at ten verses which are not as common.
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They'll still be common ones, they'll still be ones you say, well, I remember that growing up or I maybe memorized that when I was a young person or maybe as an adult.
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But they're going to be sometimes we look at verses you might say, well, I hadn't thought about memorizing this at all, that's hopefully going to happen a few times and then you'll through the process of learning about the passage, understand why it is so vital that you memorize it.
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So tonight we're going to begin with what I have entitled the Gospel in Fifteen Words.
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The Gospel in Fifteen Words.
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Now you'll notice if you read it, we have it in three English translations and then in the Greek, you'll notice that none of the English translations are fifteen words.
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So where am I getting the fifteen words? From the Greek.
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It's actually the Greek language, the Greek New Testament is much shorter than the English New Testament.
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It doesn't take as many words in Greek to say the same thing that we would have to say with more words in English.
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So when I say it's the Gospel in Fifteen Words, I could have maybe added the word Greek.
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It's the Gospel in Fifteen Greek Words.
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And we're going to learn tonight how those words work together.
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We're going to learn what this means.
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And I'm going to leave it to you as to which translation you decide to memorize.
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Why did I give you the Greek? Not so that you'd memorize it in Greek, even though that would be awesome if you did.
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I gave you the Greek for this reason.
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I don't care what translation you choose as long as it is faithful to the original language.
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Make sense? So I've given you the original language.
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If you decide that you prefer the NIV, I'm sorry.
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There are some times where the NIV is not really that bad.
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If you decide you want to memorize it in that particular translation, as long as it is faithful to the original language, then that's fine.
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Can I say it in the Greek? I will when we get there.
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I'm going to read it out loud for you.
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Yeah.
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But I will tell you this.
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From a personal, just personal like, I prefer King James memorization.
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Because the King James tends to read more poetically than the more modern translations.
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And because of the poetic nature of the King James, I tend to memorize things better.
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But that doesn't mean you have to.
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And that doesn't mean that's the best way.
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I'm telling you for me.
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And then there are certain passages, like the one from tonight, that I sometimes will say differently because I have studied the original language and I know what the original language says.
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So sometimes I'll translate as I'm talking.
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But that's not something I'm expecting you to do.
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I'm just saying that I know what the gist of the heart of this verse is.
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So if I say it to someone, they'll, well, which translation is that? I'm not, well, it's mine.
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I'm just telling you what it says.
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And that's, I remember last, at the Herald Society conference, Dr.
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White was preaching.
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And he was preaching from the Greek New Testament.
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But he was translating as he went.
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And none of us could follow him.
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Because he wasn't reading from any New Testament that any of us had.
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Some had ESV, some had NASV, some had KJV.
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But he was up there translating on the fly, which is his to do.
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I certainly can't do that like he does.
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But he was translating on the fly.
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And as he was, it wasn't reading like any of ours.
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So my point in all this is simply to say, as we're going through this, each week I'm going to give you three English translations.
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And the reason why, let me just kind of give you a quick overview.
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I didn't mean to spend this much time on this, but it is important.
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There are different ways that the Bible can be translated.
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And I've taught on this some in the past, but I know some of you are fairly new to us.
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And we have sort of a sliding scale, if you will.
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You have what is called the EL translations.
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You have the DE translations.
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And then you have the P translations.
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EL means essentially literal.
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Essentially literal.
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DE means dynamic equivalent.
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The P means paraphrase.
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So an example would be the ESV, the NASV, and the KJV are all essentially literal.
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You might say, why is it essentially literal? Because there's no literal translation, because the Greek and the English don't read the same.
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You have to make some translational changes.
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And that's why you'll see that the ESV makes some changes where the NASV makes some different changes.
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And that's why there is no absolutely literal.
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People say, well, the NASV is the closest.
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And I wouldn't argue.
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The NASV is one of the closest literal translations you're going to get.
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But it reads clunky at times in English because of their attempted literality.
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The ESV tried to solve that by making it read a little smoother, but at certain points doesn't translate as well as the NASV.
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So all that's part of what you get when you're trying to get an essentially literal translation that can still be read.
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Make sense? A dynamic equivalent is a Bible which is not intended to be a word-for-word translation, but instead is a thought-for-thought translation.
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The NIV and the NLT, New Living Translation, are both dynamic equivalent.
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They do not attempt to be literal.
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They attempt to translate thought.
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For instance, and I'll have to get my friend from Germany to help.
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In Germany, there is a phrase, morning hours have gold in their mouths.
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Right? What's that phrase in German? Do you say it in German? Okay, I can't say that.
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But that phrase translated into English is, morning hours have gold in their mouths.
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Does anybody know what that means? It means the early bird catches the worm.
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That's the dynamic equivalent of that phrase.
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That's what they're saying.
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Get up in the morning.
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That's the best hours of the day to work.
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Blah blah blah.
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Morning hours have gold in their mouths.
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It's the same as us saying the early bird catches the worm.
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Now you can see how that would benefit, but you can also see how that could be dangerous.
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Because if you're translated in a dynamic equivalent, that's why I always say the NIV and the NLT are good for reading, but not always good for studying.
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In fact, I don't like to study from them.
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Because you never know when what you're reading is dynamic equivalent or actually what it said.
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Another good one.
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In King James Bible, Paul says, shall we continue in sin so that grace could abound? God forbid.
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Right? Is that what it says? It's not what it says in the Greek.
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The word theos is not there.
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It does not say God forbid.
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It says, may it never be or may it not exist.
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It's the strongest emphatic no in Greek.
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No is the answer.
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Should we continue in sin? No! But the King James translator used a dynamic equivalent at that point and put in the phrase God forbid, because that was the equivalent of the strongest no at that time.
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Make sense? So to say no.
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Okay.
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I'd spend a lot more time on this than I thought I would.
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Paraphrase is the message Bible.
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What was that old living Bible? Remember the living Bible? Living Bible actually is not a bad paraphrase.
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It's got a lot of good places, especially in some of the portions about Reformed Theology of Romans 9.
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In some places you can tell whoever it was likely had a reformed bent because he kind of translated it as that.
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So there's some good parts in it, at least from our perspective.
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But I don't like paraphrases for anything other than, well, even reading them to your children can get you into a mess.
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So you have to be careful.
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And the message Bible, I think, has something like toothbrush in it or something.
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It's like Jesus said, don't forget your toothbrush or something.
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When Jesus talked about taking a staff or whatever, they really get very loose.
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And then you have really crazy ones like the word on the street, which is like a very modern street vernacular Bible and those kind of things.
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So there's all kinds of paraphrases.
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You can get really crazy.
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My recommendation has always been, if you stick with an essentially literal translation, you're getting as close to the Greek as you're going to be able to get without studying Greek.
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Another benefit of the Internet now is that if you do want to know what the original language says, you can go and get free resources.
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You can go to Bible Gateway, Bible Hub, there's several different sites that have free commentary that are good commentaries.
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You got to be careful, though, because they also have some nutty ones.
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So you kind of got to know a little bit going in.
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But if you want to know what the original says, it's possible to go and look and do a little bit of research, a little bit of investment in studying.
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You can figure it out.
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But that being said, be careful, because as they say, a little Greek is a dangerous thing.
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A little Greek can be dangerous because people make arguments from the Greek all the time which are unfounded because they don't understand the language.
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They understand something about the word.
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And so they make that word mean something that it doesn't.
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The whole agape philo argument is often overplayed.
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You know, you've heard the word agape love versus phileo love.
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This means sacrificial love.
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This means friendship.
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No, they're used interchangeably all over the Bible, all over the New Testament.
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Phileo does mean love, and people say it means brotherly love.
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No, phileo adelphos, adelphos being brother, means brotherly love.
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Yeah, the adelphos becomes brotherly love.
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So my point is people make these assertions when they're not really necessarily founded.
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So now I've gone way off.
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Let's get back to this week.
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The next thing I'm going to give you is I'm going to give you a tool.
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You want to memorize the text.
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Here's something you can do.
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And I didn't put this in your notes.
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You might want to write it down.
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You want to memorize the text.
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Here's what you do.
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Write it ten times.
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Say it ten times.
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No, I'm sorry.
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Read it ten times.
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Say it ten times.
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Write it five times.
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That was what it is.
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It's read it, write it, say it.
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Read it.
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Ah, I keep messing up.
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Read it ten times.
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Say it ten times.
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Write it five times.
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And you say it out loud.
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Yeah, say it out loud.
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You will be surprised how well you remember something if you say it, speaking it.
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So read it to yourself, then read it out loud, and then write it.
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Once you do that, most likely you will internalize it to the point of recall.
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Now, here's the other part you want to consider.
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Memorize also where it is.
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As I'll tell you, this is my biggest Achilles' heel, is I know a lot of scripture that I couldn't find without a concordance, because I'll say a verse, and I'll say, well, where's that verse? And I'll say, I've got to look it up, because I spent, you know, so many years in seminary, I would hear a professor say a verse, and I would internalize that verse, because I would think about it, but I wouldn't internalize where it came from, just what it said.
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And I'm sure you've done that before.
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I'm sure I could start four or five verses, and you could finish them, and if I said, you know, for the wages of sin is death, but the, where is it? It's one of the Romans, it's Romans 6.23, but that's the, that's one of those verses that you could recite, but you don't know where it is, or you might not know where it is.
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Knowing where it is is important, because contextually, it's important.
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You might have to take somebody there, you might say the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord, and they'll say, well, what is that? What's the context of that? And you say, well, I don't know where it is.
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I know it says it, you know, but if you know it's in the context of Romans chapter 6, and Paul discussing sanctification and those things in Romans, that helps you to be able to understand.
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That's why we're going to go where we go tonight.
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Not just learn the verse, not just learn the location, but learn the surrounding context, because that's important.
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All right, so, the gospel in 15 words, ESV, for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
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NASV, he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
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KJV, for he hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
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NASV, and that's the one that I want to focus on.
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Not because it's the hardest one to read.
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But I want to focus on the words, so that you know why the English translators translated the way that they did.
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One of the things we know from Greek is this.
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The original language, when I say original language, the Koine Greek did not look like this.
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Koine Greek was written in what was called unseal text, meaning it was all capital letters, no spaces, no exclamation, no punctuation.
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So it would be like if I said, what does that say? Yeah, it says I and Miss Ray are friends, right? That's what it says.
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It's I and Miss Ray are friends.
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Okay? But that's not easy to read, is it? It really isn't.
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It's not easy to read.
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That's the way the original looked.
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It was in the first half of the second millennia after Christ, I think, that we went to minuscule.
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That's the term.
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I have to look that up.
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I might be wrong on that.
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But the minuscule is when you have capital letters and lowercase letters and spaces, and the punctuation will come later, but the changing it to readable text came much later in the development.
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So that being said, how do you, in a language like that, identify what's most important? Word order becomes very important.
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For instance, in Romans 9, we talked about this last night, we had a little impromptu dabs and dudes, and I was talking about Romans 9, and I said, Paul says, who are you, O man, to answer back to God, right? The most important word there is O man, because it's identifying our creatureliness.
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So in the Greek, that comes first.
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It actually reads, O man, who are you? But we say, who are you, O man, because that's, in English, the more appropriate way to identify how that works.
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So in this phrase, that's why we, you know, all of this, I wanted you to see the Greek to kind of give you an idea of what the most important parts of this are and how it flows as a sentence.
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Ton me genonta hemartion.
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Who no sin knew, or who no new sin, is the opening phrase of this.
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Who no new sin.
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Now, if you want to take a little circle, put around the word ton or who there, and make a line all the way around to the very last word in the Greek, not that line, but the very last word, alto.
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You see the alto? It looks like a regular A and a U and a T and then a W, but that's actually the omega.
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So it's alto.
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See that at the very end? That's the who.
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The who is identified at the beginning, because it's Jesus, who no new sin would later be identified as him, in him.
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That's who we become righteous in, okay? Who no new sin, for us sin made.
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Now that sounds funny, and this is why, you know, I'm not reading it exactly, I'm just giving you the meanings of the words.
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Amartion, amartion, have you heard me say that before? Hamartia? Sometimes hamartia, hamartiology is the study of sin.
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Hamartia is the Greek word for sin.
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It means to miss the mark.
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It is an archery term.
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If you were to shoot an arrow for a bullseye and you were to fall short of the bullseye, you would say amartion, or you've fallen short.
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Make sense? So when we talk about hamartion or hamartia, what is hamartia? What is it? It's God's standard, God's law.
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And here's the thing, who no new hamartion, who no new missing that standard.
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I know this doesn't sound like good English, but I'm trying to help you here.
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The one who never missed that standard, who never knew what it was like to miss that standard, who's that? Jesus.
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He's the only one that qualifies for that first little section.
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He's the only one who knows what it's like to not miss the standard.
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For us, hamartion epoyason, sin he was made.
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And then it goes on.
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Ena, in order that we become righteousness of God, and the word theou there, those of you young people who've done the Greek class with me, so I've taught you the letters.
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The letter that looks like this, always be on the lookout for that, that is the theta.
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If it ever begins like that, you'll see the theta and the epsilon there, you'll see those two together.
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That's normally, you'll see, and then the omicron sigma, that's the theos for God.
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You'll see also theou, which is putting the epsilon there at the end.
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That makes it of God.
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So it becomes, it becomes a ownership.
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It's God's righteousness, becomes God's right, the righteousness of God in him.
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Okay, so that's where we're seeing this in the sentence.
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It says, so ultimately what it says is the one who knew no sin for us became sin.
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In order that we could become God's righteousness in him.
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Okay, that would be my translation of this text.
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Very simple, right? Not perfect, and certainly choppy, much more choppy than 40 different translators coming together with the ESV or whatever.
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I'm not saying I'm on their level at all, I'm saying that's just a simple translation.
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So now that I know what it means, I can find a translation that is appropriate, and I can memorize that.
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One that maybe flows a little better than my own.
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But now you've got the whole understanding of what it says, but you don't yet know what it means.
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You just know what it says.
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Now let's talk about interpretation.
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Because all we've done so far is the linguistics, we've learned what it says, now what does it mean? And this is important because MacArthur makes a very astute observation, the meaning of Scripture is Scripture.
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If you read the Scripture and you get the wrong meaning, you didn't get the Scripture.
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So the meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture.
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That's hugely important.
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How do we come up with a meaning? What's the three C's of Bible interpretation? Oh, come on.
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Context, context, context.
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That's how you know what it means.
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Context, context, and context.
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So that's why we have the whole context here.
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Context for verse 21 begins in verse 18.
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And really further up, but you can get the context going at verse 18, because it says all this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation that is in Christ.
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God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
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Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us.
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We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
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By the way, before we even go to verse 21, is there a word that's repeating? It's been used four times already.
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Reconciled, right? Anytime you see a word that's repeating in the text that indicates to you value and importance and you should look at why it's repeating.
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The reason why it's repeating is because that's the theme of this particular section.
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Reconciliation is the theme.
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How is a person reconciled to God? Verse 21, for our sake, He who never sinned became sin for us.
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He didn't become a sinner.
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That's important too.
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He became sin.
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How did He become sin? He became the sin bearer.
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He took our sin on Himself.
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So that's how He became sin.
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He didn't become the sin doer.
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He became the sin bearer.
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He made Him who never sinned become sin for us or on our behalf.
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So that, in order that, we become, and this is one of those times where the word might sometimes in English can have a weird, because you say might, maybe is like a maybe.
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I like, this is actually one of the times where I think that N-E-T, which is an essentially literal translation but I didn't mention it earlier, it says would become, not might become.
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I think the might can add the idea of maybe or doubt.
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There's no intention in the Greek here of doubt.
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The word might is included in the English so that we understand that one had to happen so the other could happen.
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We couldn't become the righteousness of God without the righteousness of Christ.
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But because of the righteousness of Christ, now we can.
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So it's intended to indicate the necessary first step before the second step.
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We couldn't have done it outside of Christ.
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So it goes on to say we're becoming the righteousness of God in Him.
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And then I included the next couple verses from chapter six.
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And the reason why I did that is because I think chapter demarcations can sometimes really confuse people because there are parts to the next chapter which, you remember when Paul wrote this, this was not written in such a way that there were chapter and verses.
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So these chapters and verses are placed in there very later and so we ought to look at what comes after.
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And if we come to a verse that's at the end of a chapter, that doesn't mean that thought's completed.
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And right here's a good example.
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Because it goes on to say in verse one of chapter six, working together with Him then, who is the Him? Well you could argue that the antecedent of Him could be God because it's the righteousness of God.
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But if you look in the Greek, the last word is not God, the last word is auto and that's referring back to Jesus.
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Remember I pointed that out to you earlier.
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So the six, one, Him is Jesus.
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So yes, the answer is Jesus.
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Working together with Him then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.
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For He says in a favorable time, I listen to you.
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This is a quote from scripture, and in a day of salvation I've helped you.
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Behold now is the favorable time.
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Behold now is the day of salvation.
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Why did I bring that verse out? Well this whole idea is reconciliation, right? That's the context.
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Reconciliation.
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He's told us how to be reconciled.
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Now it's when.
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When should we be reconciled? Today.
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When is the day that we should be reconciled? Should we look forward to a future day? Should we look forward to another day that is to come? No.
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Be reconciled today.
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Now is the time of salvation.
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Today is the day.
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This brings about the urgency of the message.
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Our message is simple.
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Be reconciled to God.
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How is someone reconciled to God? They're reconciled to God by this.
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He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf so that we could become the righteousness of God in Him.
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So what do we do? We respond to Him today.
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That's how this all flows together very simply.
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I'm being very basic, but that's the basic context of where this passage falls in.
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So knowing that, let's fill in our three blanks.
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Number one, according to this passage, we have been entrusted with the ministry of what? Reconciliation.
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Reconciliation is the answer there.
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We have been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation.
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As a result of this trust, we've been given a title.
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What is it? Ambassador for Christ.
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So before we get to verse three, let me just kind of unpack those two because they go together.
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We've been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation.
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Who are the two warring parties that we are trying to reconcile? God and man, right? God and the sinner.
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Who has already done all the work of bringing reconciliation? Christ.
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So we then become not the reconciler, but the ambassador of the reconciler.
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We are representing He who has already brought the reconciliation.
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We're representing the one that already did the work.
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We are not the reconciler ourself.
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We are the representative of the reconciler.
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We come in His stead.
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We come in His place to say to the sinner, you are a sinner.
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God and you are at enmity with one another, or you and God are at enmity with one another.
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And because of that enmity, be reconciled to God through Christ, for there is no other way to be reconciled to Him.
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You see now how this is the gospel.
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I said it's the gospel in 15 words.
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It is the gospel.
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You're a sinner.
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Christ is not a sinner, was never a sinner, never sinned once.
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But for our sake, He became the sin bearer so that in Him we could become the righteousness of God.
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That's, again, I've quoted it now two or three different ways, but you understand the gist of what it's saying and how you would use this in a conversation with someone who doesn't know Christ.
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If we, you know, you go back to what we learned in the way of the master.
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What was the big focal point of the way of the master? And by the way, one of these weeks we are going to learn all 10 commandments in order.
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And you will learn.
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Huh? Are you a good person? That was the basic question.
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But what was the basic point that he was trying to push people to? The law, right? He was trying to get them to answer questions about the law.
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Why? Why was it that he wanted to point people to the law? Go ahead.
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That's it.
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Yeah, it shows them their sin.
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And that's the thing is once you have shown someone their sin and once and this is the part that I think as much as I love Ray Comfort, I love the program that we did.
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I think, you know, there are times when these scriptures could come to bear and oftentimes he would be going through and he would talk about the judge and the jury and the rapist and all these different things.
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He would use a lot of good illustrations.
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But we also need to use good scripture.
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You know, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word.
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We need to have the scripture.
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I once but let me just back that up by saying this.
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I heard a guy recently who was a King James only advocate who said that you can't be saved unless you be saved with the King James.
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That's foolishness.
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He was very adamant.
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Unless unless somebody used a verse from the King James in witnessing to you, you have not been saved.
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That's utter foolishness.
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But I do think this it is the word of God, which brings the truth of God and faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word.
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So we do need to bring the word.
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I just don't think it has to be a 17th century Anglican translation.
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I don't think that's necessary, but I do think the word is part of what we should have in our conversations with the laws.
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Like I said, I have a friend.
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All she does is she takes Bible verses, she hand writes them as she meets people.
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She she has these Bible verses and she's talking to them instead of giving them the gospel tracts like we might normally hand out.
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She gives them these handwritten Bible verses that she's written down for them to think about.
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And oftentimes it's verses just like this versus that encapsulate the gospel in a very simple way just to give them something to have to look at.
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That's God's word whenever they go away from their conversation.
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And so that's, again, using the word in our interactions is very important.
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Because the word is what's going to ultimately bring conviction in the heart of the center.
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And that's, again, learning the law, which we'll do later in the series.
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We'll actually learn the commandments and learn because that's part of the word.
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That's Leviticus 20 or Exodus 20.
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I'm sorry.
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You can learn the Ten Commandments and memorize that text.
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So knowing these two things, we've been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation.
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We're trying to bring reconciliation between God and a person, not that we are doing the reconciliation, but we represent the one who did.
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That's what we say.
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Our ministry is a ministry of reconciliation, but we're not the reconciler.
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We're the ambassador of the reconciler.
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Thirdly, the message that we have rests on the foundation of substitution.
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Substitution, substitutionary atonement or substitutionary sacrifice is the very heart of the Christian faith.
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And you've heard me explain this, most of you, many times.
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God's wrath was placed upon Christ on the cross because his wrath, which was due me, Christ willingly took as my substitute.
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So all of the wrath of God was poured out on Christ.
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And at that moment, he became me on the cross in the sense of he became everything I deserve.
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He became my substitute.
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And then God imputed, that's what we call imputed means to transfer to an account.
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He imputed the righteousness that Christ had to me so that when I stand before God, I stand not having a righteousness that comes from the law that's my own, but righteousness of the righteousness of Christ.
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That's mine.
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So that's the great transfer or the great.
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Oh, goodness, I just dropped my word, the transaction, the great transaction of the gospel.
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You have.
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Our sin is transferred to Christ, Christ's righteousness is transferred to us, and this passage explains all of that in 15 Greek words.
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So it's the heart of the gospel in 15 Greek words.
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So there's so much here that we need to understand, and if we memorize this passage and put it in our heart and have it in our hearts, we know this, we may get tongue tied.
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We may be in conversations with people who have PhDs and CBDs and LSD.
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I don't know, not LSD, but all kinds of letters behind their name, MD, LFD, that's a licensed funeral director.
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They may have any kind of letters behind their name, but you know what? Even in a conversation with somebody like that, if we can't tell them anything at all, we can say this, that God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in and see that your recent trip that you said you were among a bunch of very educated people.
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That was Earl Blackburn who had that who had that situation.
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He shared it with me and I shared it with you guys.
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I wasn't the one who was in that.
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Earl Blackburn is a pastor who we also need to be praying for.
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He actually just had a heart attack, had to have a stent put in right after the conference that we went to.
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So we need to add Earl to our list.
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But Pastor Blackburn from Louisiana, he was in the midst of a bunch of men, doctorate level, PhD, but these guys were PhDs, theology guys, and no one could give the Ten Commandments in order.
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Amazing.
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So I want to leave you with a thought to consider.
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We're coming close to the end of our time and then I'll take any questions that you have.
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This is from C.H.
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Spurgeon.
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He was sort of an obscure pastor back in the 1800s, you might have heard of him.
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By his great love for us and because of his willingness to save us, it's as if Christ says, Father, treat me as if I were a sinner, treat the sinner as if he were me.
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That punishment that is reserved for them, lay it on me.
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And that way, the magnitude of your great love may be known in full degree that your justice will be maintained in all its perfection and to your glory, the sinner is set free.
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That's Spurgeon's comment on this particular passage.
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Substitution is the heart of the gospel.
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This passage expresses substitution to us in 15 simple Greek words.
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To start our course, I admonish you, this memorize this passage and whatever translation you choose that you might have within your heart, a nugget of powerful truth that you can use to share your faith with others.
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All right.
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We are close to the end of our time.
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Does anyone have any questions? Yes, sir.
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I think just to look at and considering the English translation and the Greek, and to come up and something might not be so critical, but you wonder why this happened, OK? But in the original King James, all the personal pronouns of deity were not capitalized.
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And then in the 20th century came out a new King James in which they went through and they capitalized all the personal pronouns of deity, OK? And then along comes in the year 2001, there's this ESV and they go back to the way the original King James did, they removed the capital letters, but that just comes up, not to be critical of it, but just to be aware of that situation.
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Sure.
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When you're translating from English, that would not be an answer to exactly what the verse is saying, whether it's man or it's God.
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Yeah.
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I think that the capitalization of the royal pronouns, what I guess we call the divine pronouns, if we're referring to God, is something I think the ESV, I would have preferred that they had done.
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Obviously, they didn't do.
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The NASB does it, and depending on the translator's choice.
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So it does happen that we see that.
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And obviously, if you're reading a translation that does that, you'll notice sometimes there'll be a pronoun that's capitalized and you'll say, well, why is this capitalized? It's because it's referring to God, it's referring to him or Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit.
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Are there anything? Yes, ma'am.
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I'm probably going to get this not exactly as it was told to me, but Pat and I were discussing something the other day and then she asked you and she came back to me and it was about italics in the King James Version.
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Yes.
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If you see a word that's italicized in the King James Version, it means that it was not part of the original.
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And the Romans 6, 23 is in italics.
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So what does that mean? I would have to go back and look.
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But again, based on my understanding of how they used italics, italics simply means that a word is not part of the original language, but is included so that it makes it more readable in English.
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And certainly if we said the wages of sin, death, we might not understand that.
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But putting the word is helps us to understand the verbal form of the word to be wages of sin, be death, which for us in English would be is.
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But that verbal form must not be there in the English.
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And like I said, the one that I point out to people often is the word unknown in the conversation about speaking in tongues.
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King James Bible uses the phrase unknown tongues.
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But that word unknown is italicized.
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It's not it's not in the Greek.
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That's fine.
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But that but that but that where you'll see if you're reading in the King James, if you see italicized words, typically that means that it was not a part of the original Greek, but it's been included for translational reasons.
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And what? Yes, sir.
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We start to dig it up and read the translation.
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This is going to be the basic King James version, not the original King James version.
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No, no, it's a second time, which is better.
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But in modern English, there were people who knew English in the modern context could actually read the King James version.
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Yeah.
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If you ask if you ask a person, they say they're using the 1611 King James version.
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They're not unless unless you run across a very odd situation.
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They're not using that.
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They're using the 1769 Blaney revision of the of the King James version, which itself comes in both the Oxford and the Cambridge edition.
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So you don't know which one they're using.
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And they usually don't either.
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So to argue that they're a King James only is, again, a to me, a misplacement of ideals.
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Yes.
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Got me a copy of the 1611.
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Can't read it.
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Yeah, you can't read it.
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Yes.
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Poor old John Wickliffe just thought he was saved.
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Yeah, because he didn't have the King James to get saved from.
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But that's yeah.
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Wickliffe, the first English translation, but he translated from the Latin.
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The first English translation from the Greek was by William Tyndale.
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All right.
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Any other anything else? Well, let's close the prayer.
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Father, I thank you for your words.
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Thank you for the truth.
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Thank you for substitution.
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The Lord, it's in understanding substitution that we really do understand the gospel.
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And for those who reject substitutionary atonement, Father, we believe they've rejected the gospel because it's so so simply and clearly explained to us through the word of God that he who knew no sin became sin on our behalf, that we could in him become the righteousness of God.
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We thank you for that promise, Lord.
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In Jesus.