Grace: Amazing Or Accustomed? (part 2)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Our Father in Heaven, Lord, we come before you this morning just mindful of your goodness to us, of your kindness to us, your overwhelming kindness to us in sending your

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Son, the Lord Jesus, to take our punishment upon himself, to take your wrath upon himself, and to grant us what we do not deserve by your grace to give us life everlasting with you.

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Father, I just pray as we look this morning at what your word says about grace, Lord, that you would bless us, that you would encourage us, that you would keep us mindful that it is by grace alone we have been saved.

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We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I have a few things.

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Let's start with the Silly. I know you've heard this before because Pastor Mike, I think, reads this like once a year, at least.

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But a redone hymn, because I was thinking about it last night, and I'll get to why

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I was thinking about it, but something called Arminian Grace. Arminian Grace.

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How strange the sound, and you sing it obviously to Amazing Grace. Salvation hinged on me.

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I once was lost, then turned around, was blind, then chose to see. What grace is it that calls for choice made from some good within?

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That part that wills to heed God's voice proves stronger than my sin. Through many ardent gospel pleas,

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I sat with heart of stone, but then some hidden good in me propelled me toward my home.

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When we've been there 10 ,000 years because of what we've done, we've no less days to sing our praise than when we'd first begun.

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It's kind of funny, but the whole idea just kind of drives me crazy. And so yesterday,

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Facebook is good for one or two things, and not many, but there's this document posted by a

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Southern Baptist pastor. It's called An Introduction to a

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Statement of the... Well, this is his document. It's called A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God's Plan for Salvation.

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Now, what I find fascinating about this is, listen to what... I have a bunch of stuff underlined, but I just want to get to a couple of things here.

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This is what stands for traditional. He says here, let me see if I can find it.

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He says, basically, I'll have to kind of summarize it since I can't. I've just underlined too much stuff.

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But he says basically that, you know, even though Baptistic understanding of salvation, if you go back to 1689 and other confessions, they are extremely

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Calvinistic. In other words, God is sovereign. But he says the traditional

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Southern Baptist understanding of the plan of salvation is Arminian. Oh yeah, here it is.

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I love this. While some earlier Baptist confessions were shaped by Calvinism, the clear trajectory of the

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Baptist faith and message since 1925 is away from Calvinism.

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So I'm like, okay, so tradition starts in 1925, I guess. And I just don't think that's a very good answer.

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But anyway, just a couple of quick things here. How about this? Article 4, the grace of God, because we're going to be talking about the grace of God this morning again.

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He says, we affirm that grace is God's generous decision to provide salvation for any person by taking all of the initiative and providing atonement in freely offering the gospel and the power of the

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Holy Spirit and in uniting the believer to Christ through the Holy Spirit by faith. Anybody, can you hear anything wrong with that?

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I'll read it again. We affirm that grace is God's generous decision to provide salvation for any person by taking all of the initiative and providing atonement in freely offering the gospel and the power of the

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Holy Spirit and in uniting the believer to Christ through the Holy Spirit by faith. It really puts the initiative on the last word there, which is faith.

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And that's not what we would see in Ephesians 2 if we looked at that in detail, but I don't want to go there. But here he says, we deny, that's what they affirm.

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We deny that grace negates the necessity of a free response of faith or that it cannot be resisted.

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In other words, grace can be resisted. And I always, it's fascinating the scriptures they list, because they start in the

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Old Testament and you know, go on to some of the news. But I'm like, I would love to see or hear, how would you like to hear this pastor here explain the conversion of Paul, his free response to the gospel.

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Regeneration. We deny that any person is regenerated prior to or apart from hearing and responding to the gospel.

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What does that mean? Faith precedes regeneration.

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In other words, you believe, and then you are born again. Now I want to open, enough of that stuff.

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Anybody who wants this quiz, I started it last week and we have the second half of it this morning, and it is pass fail.

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If you give some of those out. John, would you just give some out? I'd like to open by reading first Peter chapter three.

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And I think this is just an important concept. Peter writes, blessed be the

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God and father. First Peter chapter one verse three, blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

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Now, when you see that word faith there, does faith seem like it's the cause or the results?

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God has caused us to be born again on the basis of faith. No, we're being preserved through faith.

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It is something that we now have. But anyway, I just think that's completely upside down.

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We're going to see a little bit more of this this morning. Last week, we started with the first eight.

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And basically, I really started thinking about it at my dad's funeral, just thinking about amazing grace, the words and how we didn't even sing the words because they just played it on the bagpipes.

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And then we got started in the service. But so many people are familiar with the tune or could even sing the words.

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But have you ever thought about the words? And I've been reading this book by Sinclair Ferguson, which is really excellent.

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And we did the first eight questions last time we left up with number eight. Is there a difference between addressing

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God as father or God? And I've so much this week just tried to focus on addressing

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God as my father. Why? Because he is my father. And it indicates the kind of closeness we have with him.

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And I think we sort of we can forget that and the fact that he has adopted us as his children.

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So I want to press on number nine. True or false? Nothing biblically good can come out of 12 -step groups.

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I'm going to say false with explanation. That's kind of like, you know, when we would go to traffic courts, people could plead, they could plead guilty, not guilty, no contest or here was the one

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I liked, guilty with explanation. And so this is false with explanation.

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One of the 12 steps is admitting you are powerless over your addiction. Now, I don't really care much for the word addiction, but if we substitute sin and we say, you know,

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I admit that I'm powerless over my sin. Well, before salvation, that is 100 % true.

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Listen, what Sinclair Ferguson says. He says, when we try to free ourselves from sin, we discover that we are just as powerless to do so as we have been helpless to resist it.

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Then we begin to see how much we need God's grace and why it is so amazing. No one discovers the nature of God's grace without first discovering the reason he or she needs it.

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In other words, it's that moment where you realize you are in bondage to sin for the first time in your life.

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Maybe you thought sin was fun, whatever you thought. And the realization that sin has made you impoverished, sad, lonely, isolated, feeling weak, whatever.

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And he says, no one discovers the nature of God's grace. Reminds me of the hymn that says, you know, thine eye diffused a quickening ray, you know, cutting loose the chains as it were.

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I rose, went forth and follow thee, all those kinds of things. Let's turn to Luke chapter 15.

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We're going to, I'm going to read something very familiar to you and we're going to look at it, not from a different angle, but I want to explain things a little bit in here.

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The prodigal son, the parable of the prodigal son. And he much expands and he goes through several things here.

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But I just want to kind of illustrate a few things. Starting in verse 11 of Luke 15.

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And he being Jesus said, there was a man who had two sons and the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the share of the property that is coming to me.

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And he, the father divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country.

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And there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country and he began to be in need.

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So he went and hired himself out to be one of the citizens or to one of the citizens of that country who sent him into his fields to feed pigs.

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And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate and no one gave him anything.

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But when he came to himself, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger.

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I will arise, go to my father and I will say to him, father,

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I've sinned against heaven and before you, I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

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Treat me as one of your hired servants. And he rose and came to his father.

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But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him.

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And the son said to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you,

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I am no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, bring quickly the best robe and put it on him and put on a ring on it, put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet and bring the fattened calf and kill it and let us eat and celebrate for this.

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My son was dead and is alive again. He was lost in his found and they began to celebrate verse 25.

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Now his older son was in the field and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing and he called one of the servants and asked him what these things meant.

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And he said to him, your brother has come and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has received him back safe and sound.

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But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father.

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Look, these many years I have served you and I never disobeyed your command.

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Yet you never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him.

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And he, the father said to him, son, you were always with me and all that is mine is yours.

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It was fitting to celebrate and be glad for this brother for this. Your brother was dead and is alive.

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He was lost and is found. When the story opens up, we see really the total disrespect that really the hatred the prodigal had for his father.

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And in essence, as you know, if you've studied this before, he really basically was saying,

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I wish you were dead because the things he was asking for were well beyond. I mean, his audience,

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Jesus's audience would have been shocked. They would have listened and thought, what a scoundrel. This son is an ungrateful fill in the blank who should be taken outside the city walls and stoned to death.

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That's what they would have thought. But many details are left out of the story.

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Sinclair Ferguson says this. And we we can infer some of this from just reading the story.

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Listen, he says the father is a substantial landowner. We know that because obviously he he has vast holdings, something has to be sold and he's able to see him from far away.

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And so we can speculate a little bit that he's up on a hill, whatever the case is or everything that's flat. But he sees him from a ways off.

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But listen, he says the father is a substantial landowner, but land must be sold because before it can realize its monetary value.

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Right. If you say, well, here here's one third of the land, which is all that he would have gotten, you know, go and be on your way.

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That wouldn't do the son any good. He wanted cash. Faced with the need to sell land quickly to meet his son's demand, this father stands to take a big loss.

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Why? Because his neighbors are going to go, hey, he's going to sell all this land.

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He has to sell this land. So what are we going to do? We're going to offer him pennies on the dollar.

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Once the land is gone, it's gone. In other words, he loses any profitability, any use of that land.

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Sinclair Ferguson says the son impoverishes his father. He takes money right out of his wallet, as it were.

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And then tragically, he ends up wishing he could have had the same diet as the pigs for which he, a

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Jew, was responsible. This is the most demeaning. Again, think about the audience. These are the scribes and Pharisees.

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We know that if we look back at Luke 15, verse two, these are the scribes and Pharisees, the legalists.

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And they hear about this guy who gets stuck in a foreign country after he's disrespected his dad, wishing he was dead, acted like a scoundrel, took off and frivolously wasted all of his money.

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And he winds up doing what? The most base, low thing you could possibly do, which is to take care of pigs.

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This guy is not worthwhile, which is exactly what? It's exactly what the

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Pharisees and scribes were saying about whom? The tax gatherers and the prostitutes and those people that were coming to hear

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Jesus, that he was hanging out with, that he was eating with. Look at question number 10.

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And I got out of the true -false thing and went for a why question or two. Why do you suppose the prodigal went to a far country?

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Why did he go far away? He wanted to get away from anybody in that neighborhood, anybody who would know who he was, anybody who might say,

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I can't believe what this kid is doing now. Look at him.

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The grass on the greener always looks hill. The grass on the other side of the hill always looks greener, right?

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If you want to express contempt for your father, contempt for everything that you've known, what do you do?

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I mean, one thing is you could say, well, he'd stay in the town, but I think Barry's right. But I think also you just take as much as you can and you go as far away from as possible.

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He wanted to escape. He wanted to be free from all that. And I think this is typically true of most sinners.

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They want to feel isolated. They want to feel like nobody's watching them. They want to feel free to do whatever they want to do.

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Listen to what St. Clair Ferguson says. He says, there is not a square yard in the universe to which an individual can go where he can say,

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I can hide here from God and escape from him. God is already there.

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But it doesn't even have to be in this case, obviously it was a physical space he was looking for, a physical removal he was looking for.

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But isn't it also true that sinners sometimes just want an intellectual removal from God? They just want to think independently of God.

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They don't want to be accountable to him. So what do they do? Romans 1 tells us they suppress, they hold down the truth and unrighteousness.

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They feed themselves lies like evolution or whatever, whatever it takes to just kind of remove

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God out of their whole way of thinking, to give a naturalistic explanation for where we are.

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But it's amazing after all he's done, after this prodigal son, after all that he's done, that he decides to go home.

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I mean, when you think about the, again, and that would be a shocking thing, right? What would the audience be thinking?

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What do you think they'd be thinking, the scribes and Pharisees, when they hear this guy decides he's going to go home? What's going to happen to him when he goes home?

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What do you think they were expecting the punchline of the story to be? The dad to kick him out.

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What else might they have expected? I mean, I think I came up with a small list and I think all these things are reasonable for them to have expected.

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Judgment, persecution. I had, you know, maybe a beating. I certainly, that would fit in the Old Testament context that they were living in.

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Shunning, mocking, like you mocked me when you left, hit the road.

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How about maybe the father to take the offer of slavery? Sure, be my slave.

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That'll be fine. Sinclair Ferguson says this, he says, the father's embrace of forgiveness means that his returning son, listen, never says the last sentence of his carefully crafted speech.

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Remember what did he say? He said, I'm going to return to my father and I'm going to do what? I'm going to offer to be one of his hired servants, one of his slaves.

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But he never even utters that. And he says, you know, it was a carefully crafted speech. I think that's right.

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Do you think maybe since he was in a far off country all the way home, the son is thinking to himself,

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OK, when I get home, this is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm going to say. I'm going to throw myself on his mercy. I'm going to offer to be his slave.

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And he doesn't even get those words out of his mouth. The father will not have his son home as a hired hand or a household servant.

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This is his son. The father welcomes him home not to be a slave, but a son raised from the dead and adopted back into the family.

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Now, the older brother represents the Pharisees and the scribes. As I said before, listen to what

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Ferguson says. He says the Pharisees were repelled by the grace the Lord Jesus displayed and utterly demeaned him.

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He's talking about in terms of how he treated the lowest of the low, the scrubs of the

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Jewish universe, of the Jewish society. And they hated him for it.

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Speaking of the older brother, St. Clair Ferguson writes this in his eyes.

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The younger son does not deserve what he is receiving. He does not deserve what he is receiving.

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What we call that when you get what you don't deserve, that is. It's grace.

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Question number 11. What should have been the older brother's response?

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What should have been the older brother's response? Stephen. Well, he doesn't get what he deserves either.

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That's right. That's right. And really, that leads right into where I was going to go with that.

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Do you ever resent someone getting what they do not deserve? The Lord was very gracious to me.

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And I remember being in a situation. I was actually in seminary and I was working for somebody who, let's see, for reasons of gender, was, she was 200 spaces below me on the promotional list.

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And she was my boss. And I remember thinking at the time, I go, you know, there's something wrong with this.

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On the other hand, I also thought, I'm really thankful that they're not looking to promote me right now because I'm in the middle of seminary.

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What would I do if I got promoted? I might have to, you know, go somewhere else and work. My hours might not be the same.

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It might take me another three or four years to get through seminary. How should we think about it when people get things that they don't deserve?

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I don't think we should let it bother us. Keep your fingers there in Luke 15.

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Turn over to Luke chapter 7. Luke chapter 7.

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And I think this story really illustrates how we need to think day in and day out.

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Verses 41 to 43. And would somebody read that please? Luke 7 verses 41 to 43.

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Pretty. Okay.

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So how do you think I would apply that? And it is an application. It's not an interpretation.

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How would I apply that principle to the concept of the Pharisees or the older brother?

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Or even when someone gets something and you think, well, gee, that's not fair. I should get that or they don't really deserve that.

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However, you're thinking. Let me ask you a different way.

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Are you in that parable there? Are you the person that got forgiven 500 or 50?

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He forgave them both. True. But who loves him more? The one who.

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And so I'm like it. And what did Paul say consistently? He said, you know, I'm the chief of all sinners.

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I'm the least of all the apostles, all these kind of things. When you view yourself rightly, when you view yourself in light of what you deserve, when you just start thinking of all the sins that you committed before you got saved, how you did, you know, how you hated

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God, how you were his enemy, how every day you live for yourself. And then you think, and God, by his grace saved me.

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Now, how should I think about other people? How should the prodigal have thought? He should have thought, I am amazed.

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I am thankful that my brother is home safe and sound, even though he wasn't saved. We can presume since he represented the

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Pharisees and the scribes, he should have thought how great it is that this brother at least came to a census that he's back home from a human perspective.

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You got to be thankful. But us as believers, we ought to be thinking, you know what?

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I am blessed every single day. I am blessed. God has graced me.

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God has given me what I can never deserve. We need to think of ourselves as those who have been forgiven the greater debt, the greatest debt.

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Let me just apply that here at the church. Do you realize how wonderful church life would be?

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How little strife and struggle and difficulty there would be within the body of Christ here at Bethlehem Bible Church?

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If we all just thought this way, that in light of the grace of God poured out on me,

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I need to be forgiving of other people. As God has forgiven me the great debt that I owed him,

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I ought to be willing to forgive other people. In light of the fact that a holy perfect God has granted me forgiveness of my sins, how should

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I think about other people? How willing to forgive should I be?

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I can tell you this, that if everybody in the church has thought that way, this would be an unbelievable place.

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If we all just thought, I'm going to put other people in front of myself, I think it's a good church.

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I think it would be, dare I say, a perfect church. I don't really dare say that, but it would be even better.

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Well, what if I just don't like the way somebody does something? Well, here's the first question.

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Is it a sin? If it is a sin, there's a way to address that. If it's not a sin, I'm amazed at the grace of God and pardoning all my sins.

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How should I respond with grace? I should always be thinking, in light of what

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Christ has done for me, what God has granted me, how should I live? Sinclair Ferguson goes on talking about different examples of people who get saved.

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I just remember one of my children, I won't identify her, but one of them said, I have a really boring testimony.

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I'm going, I think that's good. Some people have amazing testimonies.

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They were drug addicts, they were burglars, they were this, that, and the other thing, and they get saved. But the question isn't how boring or how thrilling your testimony is.

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The question is, are you in Christ? Have you been saved by grace? And if so, then what should everybody else's response be?

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It should be joy. That's the whole point here. He says the Pharisees and scribes didn't get it.

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They were upset that he was meeting with the lowlifes of society. And instead, what they should have been saying is, isn't

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God good that he would grant this grace to even those kind of people?

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Not thinking about themselves, of course. We ought to be joyful people, ought to be thankful in light of, you know, again,

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I just think every day, I know Pastor Mike's going to talk about this tonight, but if every day, if we preach the gospel to ourselves, and we just thought, in light of what

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I deserve, it is amazing what God has given me. I think our countenances would be changed.

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Our lives would be changed. Number 12. This should be an easy one.

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True or false, Christianity is a divine summons to do better. Be good.

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Sinclair Ferguson writes, Paul makes it clear that the gospel is not about something we do. It is about what

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God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.

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I mean, you know, we've heard this many times. But if we go to people who are in spiritual prison, as it were, and we say, be good, be better.

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That's not good news. Improve your life. I hate it when I go into the secular bookstores, the

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Christian books are in what section? Self -help. I'm like, self -help is kind of pointless.

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Let me, I guess, I guess I have to tell you to turn because I don't know if we'll get back to Luke 15 or not.

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But let's turn to 2 Corinthians 5. And I'm going to read verses 14 and 15.

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Paul writes, For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this, that one has died for all, that one being

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Jesus Christ has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

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Now, just from that phrase there in verse 15, no longer live for themselves. What is implied then about how we live before we became

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Christians? That we live for ourselves. But in light of Christ's dying for us, we're to no longer live for ourselves.

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And again, I just go, this is just a contrast in thinking. This is exactly the opposite of what the world tells us, right?

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What does the world say? Fulfill yourself, make your dreams come true, be happy.

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Life is all about making yourself happy, getting what you want. And nearly anything is justifiable in light of that.

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Sinclair Ferguson says this, he says, Our greatest need, whether we are Christians or not, is to respond to the gospel.

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I'll say it again, then I'll ask you what it means. Our greatest need, whether we are Christians or not, is to respond to the gospel.

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Why do Christians need to respond to the gospel? I believe. Why would you need to respond to that?

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Karma. Yeah, we need to understand daily the magnitude of God's grace in our lives.

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Charlie, in light of Christ's selflessness, we ought to be selfless.

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I agree with that. Let's put it this way. If we don't, as Pastor Mike is going to say tonight, if we're not preaching the gospel to ourselves on a daily basis, if we're not thinking about how great

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God is, how sinful we are, what Christ has done for us and how we need to respond, then what does our life probably look like Monday through Saturday?

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It probably looks like everybody else. Yeah, it looks like the world. It's probably like this. If they were measuring our spiritual heartbeat during the week, would it be a flat line?

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And then on Sunday they go, oh, wait, he's got a pulse. Don't pull the plug yet. Moving on to 2

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Corinthians 5, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

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I like what St. Clair Ferguson said about being a new creature. He goes, you have to be a little careful with that.

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You don't get changed atom by atom.

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It is talking about your spiritual nature, not your physical nature. The old has passed away.

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Behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

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That is, in Christ Jesus 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, making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

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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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Ferguson says, notice that Paul does not say God reconciled the world to himself by Jesus becoming flesh for us.

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He says, we are not reconciled by Christmas. I like that a lot.

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I don't know why, but it is true. The most important Christian holiday is

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Easter, because if Jesus Christ is still in the grave, then we have no hope.

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St. Clair Ferguson says, God reconciled the world to himself by Jesus becoming sin for us.

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He goes on to note that the word for reconciliation in the New Testament has the root idea of making a change.

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It is used in the ancient world of exchanging money. You give someone money and he gives you another currency in exchange.

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It's not like the old Senate Live skit where they used to give you, you know, four quarters and you get a dollar back or whatever.

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And this is their whole business. And he goes, well, how do you make money? Volume. You know, it's not like that.

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When people change money from one currency to another, they do make money. But that's not his point here.

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Sorry, I digress. But you give someone money and he gives you another currency in exchange. And here is the heart of the gospel.

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Ferguson writes, in Jesus Christ, God has made a unique exchange. He made

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Christ to be sin for us and he counts the righteousness of Christ to us.

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Jesus experienced both the judgment of God against sin and the sense of divine abandonment that is involved.

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He became both the sacrifice and the scapegoat. And he tells the story, the Old Testament, here's what they would do.

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They would bring two goats on the Day of Atonement. They would designate one to be the sin bearer who would go off into the wilderness and never to be seen from again.

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And the other one would be the sacrifice for sin. Jesus Christ was both because he experienced the abandonment by the father when he said, my

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God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he also was a sin bearer.

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All the while, he was perfectly innocent. Listen, Ferguson says this. He says, faith says, yes,

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God counts my sins. Did you ever think about that? God counts my sins, but he does not count them against me.

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Rather, he counts my sins against his son. When I stretch out the empty hands of faith and take hold of Jesus Christ in that very moment, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ becomes mine.

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And in that same moment, I am released from the guilt and bondage of sin. I talked about this last week, that sense when you get saved of just being liberated, of literally having the chains ripped asunder.

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You almost feel like you can float. Question number 13, true or false?

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Guilt is a psychological condition. Well, it's kind of true, but it's really false.

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Yeah, it's a legal standing. I love this. I had to include this just for this. Ferguson writes this. He says, when the foreman of the jury in a trial speaks the word guilty, he is not commenting on the feelings of the accused.

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He obviously feels guilty, Your Honor. Yes. Conscience.

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Yes. But guilt, that's not forensic guilt. This is talking about judicial forensic guilt.

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And guilt is our natural condition. The conscience is another matter. Our guilt, our guiltiness, that sense that we have that we are guilty, that is different.

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But guilt is our natural condition. We come into the world guilty, condemned.

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We are guilty, but there is a way. This is the gospel. We are guilty, but there is a way our guilt can be dealt with.

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We stand condemned, but in Christ we are delivered. The message of the gospel is this. God can forgive you and he is willing to do so.

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That's good news. Number 14, true or false, being justified means we are righteous.

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False. We are positionally righteous and we possess the righteousness of another, but we ourselves are not righteous.

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Ferguson writes this. The only righteousness with which I am righteous is Jesus Christ's righteousness.

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It is as if he said to me, here is my righteousness, wear it.

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It is yours. It fits your needs perfectly and completely. Then he says, as I stand in God's presence and he looks at me,

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I hear him say, where have I seen that righteousness before? And then he recognizes that it is in fact in Christ Jesus now.

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I managed to print all but the last page of my notes somehow. But anyway, that doesn't matter because I have the quiz right here.

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Or I got them out of order. Anyway, let's look at number 15.

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As Christians, we ought to see people in a new way. As Christians, we ought to see people in a new way, true or false.

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It's absolutely true. Why? Let's look at 2

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Corinthians chapter 5 again, verse 16.

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From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded

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Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. So using that same kind of logic, we regard no one according to the flesh.

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What does that mean? We don't judge them like we used to.

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We're in Christ. We think of them in a different way. Our minds have been transformed. Hopefully our feelings have been transformed.

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Every bit about us has been transformed. And so when we look at them, how should we look at someone? We should look at them as Jesus would look at them as someone who what?

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Needs of the gospel. They need to repent. But also every single person, and I've said this upon occasion,

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I would encourage us always wherever we are. I remember having this sense years ago,

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I was in Portland and I'm walking through the mall. And quite frankly, walking through Portland is a little bit like walking through West Hollywood.

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I mean, there's just a lot of really odd people in Portland. It's a very strange town.

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And I remember just thinking, I've got to think properly about these people. Instead of thinking, how could you do that to yourself?

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Or why would you want to look like that? What I'd be thinking is these people need the gospel because they're going to hell.

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And every single person here is a soul that will one day stand before God and have to give an accounting for what they did with the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Now I can either stand here and go, well, that's pretty freaky looking. That guy's really weird looking.

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This woman really needs to wear more clothing. Or I could just say, every single one of these people needs to hear the gospel.

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They need to come to Christ. I need to think about them, you know, the dregs of society, the weirdos of society.

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I need to think of them as people who just need to hear the gospel. Otherwise, I wind up being like the older son and the

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Pharisees and the scribes. Now number 16. True or false?

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A sovereign God takes away our passion for evangelism. That is false.

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I mean, look at... I don't think there was anybody who believed more in the sovereignty of God than Paul. But look what he says, making his appeal, we implore you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

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We implore you, we beg you, we urge you. And then look, Sinclair Ferguson made the point that in chapter 6, you know, sometimes we have this tendency to think, well, chapter 5, okay, that pretty much ends it.

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Next thought. He goes, keep reading. Right after this, verse 21, 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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Keep reading in chapter 6, 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 listened to you. And in a day of salvation,

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I have helped you. Behold, now is the favorable time. Behold, now is the day of salvation.

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We plead with people. Why? Because we don't want there to be a hardening. We want them to hear the gospel.

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We want them to come to faith now. I'm just, I'm also reminded of Acts 17,

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Mars Hill. How does that end? After Paul's done preaching, what do the people say there?

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Yeah, some say, hey, you know what? That was kind of intriguing. We would like to hear from you at some future point.

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I don't want to hear that from somebody, especially somebody that I may never see again. You know, I'd like to maybe hear about that in the future.

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We need to push them. We need to press upon them the fact that there may not be a tomorrow.

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People die every single day. We want them to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. We beg them, we urge them, we plead with them.

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We don't change the gospel to fit their paradigm, but we want them to believe.

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We don't lead them in a sinner's prayer because that won't save them, but we want them, as much as we possibly can, as much as it depends on us, we want to walk them through again and again and again, as many times as they'll listen to it, the gospel, until like my friend

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Han years ago, until you finally get to the point physically where you go, you know what? I'm about to fall asleep.

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Let's just pray. We don't know what

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God will do. We have absolutely no idea. Here's what we know, and here's what we need to live in light of.

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In light of what Jesus Christ has done for me, in light of what God has granted me, forgiveness of sins, in light of the grace that was shed upon me, how should

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I live? I have to live with a mindset that every single person I see is going to give an account for what they did with Jesus Christ.

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I need to live with a mindset that says, I want to beg, I want to plead, I want to urge, I want to preach the gospel to every single person

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I can, knowing that the time is now for salvation. I want them to repent now.

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I long for them to repent. Why? Because I will rejoice when they do. Preach the gospel to yourselves.

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Let's pray. Father in heaven, it is a magnificent blessing and a gift that you have granted us faith, that you have caused us by your spirit to be born again.

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Father, we do not understand the workings of your spirit. We do not know where he comes from, where he goes, or why he saves who he saves.

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But Father, as he has chosen to give us new life, Father, I pray that we would look at other people and think, oh, that you would do that for others.

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Father, would you give us hearts that beat daily for you, that live daily in light of the grace and the love and the mercy that you have granted us, that we might love and compassionately seek after others.