09-13-2020

Park Meadows Church

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Odd, that's what he saw, none, not one. And so if he saw people getting saved, which he did with his omniscience, that's not what foreknowledge means, but if he saw people getting saved, what he saw was his grace bringing his

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Holy Spirit to call them to open their eyes and ears and give them light and bring them out of darkness into his marvelous light.

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That's what he saw. So the person doing the thing was not the cause, it was the effect of the salvation.

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And that's where Arminianism gets it wrong, and that's where the modern church, for the most part, gets the gospel completely backwards.

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But we've covered all that, haven't we? So it starts before time began. He foreknew and predestinated who his children would be.

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Then it moves into time, and there we have two things. Those who he foreknew, he predestinated.

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Then it comes in and says in our verses for today, those who he predestinated, he also called. And those who he called, he justified.

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And that's really the word that a Baptist, when they say I've been saved, they mean I've been justified, to be made just as if I'd never sinned.

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And that happens in time. The calling and the justification happens in time. And then it says in the same ones that are justified or glorified, that goes out the other end of time into eternity.

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So it's everything. These two scriptures cover everything, two or three verses right in through there.

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So we're actually on this one, and we've been talking about justification. We gave a word study, kind of a lengthy one the other day, the other

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Sunday. But just remember this, justified in the Greek means to be rendered righteous.

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It's in the passive. It means someone greater than you had to do that to you in me. So to be justified means you were rendered to be righteous by God.

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God rendered you to be righteous. And we talked about that. And then we went into a doctrinal study. State you don't think you do, but you did.

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Why? You can prove it because why didn't you get saved three minutes before you got saved or two weeks before?

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Because you didn't want to. You didn't want it. All right, and then the Holy Spirit came to you and changed your want to, and then you did it because you wanted to.

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You received Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. And everyone this side of the cross that'll be in heaven did do that, but they did it because they wanted to because the

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Holy Spirit opened their eyes and ears and they wanted Jesus and they received him. And all of that, we talked about all that, right?

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So you go into Genesis. What's interesting, God didn't start with John 3 .16. The whole world today thinks that he did.

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He started with Genesis chapter three. And what's interesting is not verse 16. It's half of that. It's verse eight.

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But Genesis 3 .8 is where it starts. And you have to understand that first. And it's where Adam and Eve hid from the presence of God.

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From that point on, man was depraved, came into the world hiding from God and no man, let's put it up there.

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There is none that understand it. There's none that seek it after God, Romans 3 .11. None. The world today, the church at large does not understand the depravity of man.

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Therefore, they feel that Jesus died for everybody and he just presented this gift and it's your decision to decide whether to take it or not.

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The problem with that theory and that gospel presented that way is there's no one that will receive it that way.

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There's not one. No one is seeking that gift. And so salvation in the modern church is of man.

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It's instituted by the church. It's not that far from Catholicism. That's why I talk about Bapto -Catholicism and Pento -Catholicism.

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And so many of our denominations have gone the same direction the Roman Catholics went where it's all about the church.

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It's all about the plan of salvation that that church has. And that other church over there is evil because they don't get saved the same way.

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And the truth is they're all fighting over effects, none of them had the cause. The cause happened long before that person left the pew and came down here to ask what

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I do to get saved. They wouldn't have got up and come down here if the Holy Spirit hadn't already opened their eyes. And that's what the

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Bible teaches us very clearly. So we have to understand the depravity of men before we understand justification.

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Then last time we went in, we looked at this little passage in Matthew 13, 27 about the wheat and the tares, all right?

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And Jesus told this story. And what's interesting, they asked, he's telling the story and they come ask the man who represents

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Jesus, the landowner, he said, did you plant good seed or bad seed? Because you got weeds coming up in your field.

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And he said, I didn't plant the weeds. I didn't plant the tares. He said, an enemy did that. And later when they asked him to tell them, explain this parable to us, he said, well, the enemy is the devil.

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So we talked about this last week that the devil, Jesus, Christ said the devil put the tares here.

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Now the tares are people who will never be saved. They will not be saved because they're not, if you wanna put it in the sheep and goats type of allegorical understanding that Jesus gave us, goats don't get saved, lost sheep get saved.

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So you have three kinds of people. You got saved sheep, lost sheep and goats, right? Now, I don't say that we know who the goats are because you and I know when we were lost sheep, we ran with the goats and we acted just like them, didn't we, right?

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Because we're part of the human race. But God knew the difference. Jesus knew the difference when he walked up and looked at some of the

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Pharisees who he could see were goats just by looking in their eyes. And he said, where I go, you cannot come.

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He didn't say you won't choose to come. He said, you can't come there because he said, I'm from above, you're from below, you're of your father, the devil.

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So he knew they were a tare. But you and I don't always know that, but we can pray about it. And I'll tell you this, you should not witness to everybody.

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You should witness to who the Holy Spirit tells you to witness to. Lest they turn and rend you, the scripture says.

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So the modern church has got it a little bit wrong today. And that's not unusual, because if you go back for 2000 years, every church group has gone through a cycle, starting with God is sovereign, man gets more and more important, and it swings around to a full

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Arminianism where it's all about the church and all about what we do as people. And we take over from God and it becomes human salvation.

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And it never works because it's not real. It's not the true gospel anymore. And so we talked about this little parable.

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And we asked the question, okay, if Satan puts the tares in the world, and Jesus puts the lost sheep who will become saved sheep in the world, how does

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Satan do that? Can he create something out of nothing like God? Absolutely not. And we looked at that a little bit because it actually is in the story in the first portions of Genesis, where God gives the curse on the woman.

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And most of us when we read that, we think that it just says she'll have pain and childbearing. But if you read it carefully, it doesn't say that.

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It says that what will happen is that he will multiply not only the pain, the sorrow, but also he will multiply the conception, which means she had more babies than she would have had.

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And that may extrapolate all out through all of history. And those extra ones are the tares that would not have been born into the world had there been no fall theoretically, but there was always gonna be a fall.

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God only had one plan. Jesus was slain before the foundation of the world. We know that.

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So it's interesting right there is how Satan introduced these into the world. He used humans and he used things, material

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God had already made. And as children are born, some are tares and some are wheat.

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And people don't like that doctrine. And they never have. They didn't like it when Jesus preached it.

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In fact, if you remember the one time when a whole hundreds of disciples walked away from him and he looked at his own apostle said, well, you leave also.

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And they almost as if they were going to, but they didn't. But he had just taught on the sovereignty of God when they left him.

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So people have never liked the fact that God's in control of who gets saved. It's so interesting. Charles Worden said one time, well,

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I think he said, I find that odd that people don't like that because among humans, we don't think it's a problem for the man to choose who his bride will be or the bride to choose who the husband will be.

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But we don't want Jesus to choose his bride. Well, that's what that is. He chooses his bride.

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And would you rather have human endeavor cause who gets saved or you would rather have a loving, kind, all knowing

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God to be in control of that? Well, I would choose the latter. Not the former. And thankfully that's how the

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Bible says it works. So we talked about all these things and it goes in in that same parable, talks about when the wheat and the tares will be separated.

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And that's at the end of this age, when the rapture happens and the first resurrection and so forth.

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So let me read to you something a little bit about how if you go back 2000 years and you want to see what your brothers and sisters in Christ have thought about certain passages because you don't ever want to have what's called a private interpretation where you just say, well,

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I think it means this. We're not allowed to do that. You can think it means that but you're not allowed to teach it means that until the

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Holy Spirit's proven to you. And it fits with all of scripture and the Bible as a whole. And you're using all 10 rules of proper

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Bible interpretation. And it helps if you find some other brothers and sisters in Christ in the past 2000 years that have believed it the same way you think it means.

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That helps a lot. And that's why we should always be studying. But let's look at John Calvin. And you say, well, that figures because he started

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Calvinism. No, he never called it Calvinism. He was a Bible teacher. And when you read what he said in a few moments, it just blow your mind to read what this wonderful man said.

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Now, what's interesting about it, he did talk about total depravity, but what modern people that want to argue against Calvin say that he meant is not what he meant.

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And you have to read him yourself or people will lie about it to win an argument. And by the way, if you're visiting, you probably haven't heard me say this.

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I say it all the time though. Calvin didn't invent Calvinism because 1400 years before Calvin, Augustine taught the same thing.

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He taught the sovereignty of God. He taught election. He taught predestination. And he taught eternal security.

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And he was a Roman Catholic. And before him, you can go back to about 88 AD, Chrysostom and some other early church fathers taught the same thing.

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And you go back before that, Paul taught it. You go back before that, Jesus taught it to him in the wilderness for three years. So it's

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Christianity. It's not Calvinism. But if you really want to find out about what

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Calvin thought, read him. It's glorious. You know who Charles Spurgeon's favorite person to read was?

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John Calvin. And what were they separated by? Three, 200 years, something like that.

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Two or 300 years. So that was sort of his mentor. Well, anyway, in this little passage in John 3, 10, it says, as it's written, there's none righteous, not one.

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There's none that understands. There's none that seeks God. This is what total depravity actually means.

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It means that man and woman and boy and girl in their natural state are not seeking

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God. And the reason is they think they're God. They're in control of their life. They like it that way for a while.

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And unless the Holy Spirit comes and shows us that that life is rotten and not going the right way, or unless a parent tells a child, look, you've had a few spankings.

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Why'd you get those? Well, because I didn't do right. Right. And then the Lord says none of us do right. So we need

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Jesus. We have to explain it, put it on their level, right? But it's the same thing. It's the same thing.

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We're all children in a sense. But there's none righteous, not one, none that understands, none that seek after God.

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They're all gone out of the way. They're all together become unprofitable. That means to God. Humans are not profitable to God.

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He didn't save us to profit. He saves us because he wants to.

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And he's loved us from the foundation of the world. He's loved us and known us before he made anything. We've always been his.

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We have always been his in his mind and heart. And he knows. And Jesus said, no man will come to me unless the father draws him in.

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Listen to this. He said, I will lose nothing, but we'll raise it up at the end. Jesus will not lose a single one of the sheep.

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And all of the sheep are his responsibility, not the sheep's responsibility.

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And all of these different religions in the world that rely on man doing something and keeping good to be saved, none of them are true because we're not our own shepherd.

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We have to have a shepherd. And it's Jesus. Their throat is an open sepulcher.

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Boy, we can sure hurt people with our words, can't we? We certainly can. Their tongues, they've used for deceit to win an argument, whatever.

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For whatever reason, we will lie in an instant just to win an argument. I think the older we get, the less like, we get where we don't like that anymore.

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We just rather know what the truth is. You know, that's kind of when you start maturing, I think, as a Christian. But their lips are like the poison of asps are under their lips.

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So this is the way natural man comes into the world, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.

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Their feet are swift to shed blood. I played round of golf with my youngest son,

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Matt, yesterday and we were out there taking a break. This old man, nice old man, just a natural man out there.

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He's working on his golf cart, trying to get the wheel off of it. And man, something slipped and that wrench hit his finger and you do not wanna hear what came out of his mouth, right?

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Isn't that what it says? Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. It was amazing. And as soon as he's done with all that, he was just friendly as he could be.

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Well, we all came into the world like that. Destructive, destruction and misery are in their ways.

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I mean, listen, John Calvin did not invent the depravity of man. Paul didn't either, even though the apostle

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Paul penned that, the Holy Spirit wrote it. And the way of peace have they not known?

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Who is the way of peace? Who's the prince of peace? They haven't known him.

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You can't know him naturally. There's no program a church in this city can come up with that will cause people to get saved.

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No program. There's no prayer formula when they come down here that I can tell them to pray and cause them to get saved.

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And as I've said in recent days, if you go study church history, you don't have to go back very far. My great -grandfather, no, let me take that back.

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My grandfather told me a story about Gypsy Smith coming through Coors County, Texas, putting up a big tent out here and preaching.

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And in those meetings, people would come down the aisle and they'd go down there and they wouldn't say, hey, repeat this little prayer after me and you'll be saved.

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What they'd tell them is you need to keep praying all week, pray that the Holy Spirit calls you because if he doesn't, you can't get saved.

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Now that doesn't sound like they're giving the gospel, does it? But you know what they're not doing is they're not using sales techniques to try to get people to get saved and grow their church.

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They were telling the gospel truth. Look, Jesus died for his people. If you're his child, he'll call you, pray that he'll call you.

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And they'd stay down there on their knees every night for two weeks. And then towards the last three or four days, the Lord would come down on that place and my grandfather described it to me, said it was like a wind blew through.

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And we saw, we didn't, but my grandmother saw Rocky Freeman who became my mentor later, cause

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I got saved later after this happened, do a revival meeting in little Mahea, Texas, a hundred and something people got saved.

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It was supposed to be a four day meeting. It turned into a 14 day meeting. God came down on that place and people were saved.

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And God is the one who has to do the saving because we are not ready for it.

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We don't want it. The Holy Spirit has to open the eyes and that's the true gospel. There is no fear of God in the eyes of a natural man.

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So not one righteous among the race. Let's look at the points in those few verses and let's see if John Calvin was right about this.

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Was he correct about total prayer? There's not one righteous person in the human race that scripture just said, not one.

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Number two, not one that understands God or godliness. Not one human understands that in their natural state, that scripture says.

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Number three, not one that seeks God. Nobody's looking for him. You can put a gospel up on a billboard and it's fine.

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We need people to hear the gospel because the lost sheep need to hear it because the Holy Spirit will use that when he saves them.

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But it can be in any form. It doesn't have to be King James. It could be like a grandmother told a child about Jesus.

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It can be any missionary. It can be, they heard it on the news, read it in a book, but they have to hear the gospel.

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You have the water and the spirit. The water is the word of God. It has to be there. So I'm not mocking putting up billboards, but I'm just saying what you put there won't save a natural man unless the spirit comes alongside that word and brings it to life.

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There is no salvation aside from the Holy Spirit, regeneration. While we were yet in our sins, hath he quickened us, brought us to life.

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It's all there. Number four, right here in this little passage, all have gone their own way, not God's way.

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We are God's and we know it and we like it until the minute the Holy Spirit changes our mind.

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And do you know what the word repentance means? Everybody says among the Baptist, you gotta do, some of them will say, you gotta believe to get saved.

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That's actually salvation by works. I don't know if you ever figured that out. And they say, we don't believe in salvation by works.

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Well, what do you gotta do to be saved? You gotta believe. Well, that's a work you're using your brain. Or the really serious

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Baptist, and I pick on them because I grew up Baptist, by the way, but the serious Baptist will say, you gotta believe and repent.

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But the Bible says the Lord brings repentance. So it's not something you gotta do, it's something you receive as a gift.

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You receive it as a gift at the moment you're regenerated. It's not something you did, it's something God gave you.

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Because repent means to change your mind. Well, how are you as a natural man or woman, boy or girl, gonna change your mind about who's most important person in the world when you think it's you?

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It's not God, right? It's you. You're not gonna change your mind or you would have done it yesterday.

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It takes a miracle. In fact, it's such a miracle that God himself could not make your old man better.

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So he slew it on the cross with Jesus and created a new man or woman or boy or girl inside of you to save you.

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And that's called the new nature, the new man or the new woman, if you're a woman or a child, whatever.

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But God did that and it's just as miraculous as physical birth, which I have gotten to see five times in my family and nine times with my grandbabies and it's amazing every time.

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I can't keep my hands off the new babies when they come into the family. Nothing like looking in their eyes and they look back at you and you see the love of God and you go, oh,

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I feel this all over my whole body. Oh, this is amazing, right? That comes from God.

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That's physical birth and it's miraculous. And I figured the ladies particularly would say, amen, you know,

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I mean, how do you get through that without God, right? But it is a picture of spiritual birth.

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Jesus said, you must be born again. Humans are not naturally able to accomplish that.

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Number five says there's not a human being in the race that's profitable to God. Number six, not one is good in the whole human race.

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So if God's looking out like the Armenians say, and they think foreknowledge means he's just looking out there, finding the good people and electing them, it's based on a lie.

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That's a false presupposition because it says if he looked out, he wouldn't see any good human beings. In fact, he would see a race that was fit for hell, just like it was before Noah and his ark.

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And it says God looked out and had grace on Noah. And we think, oh, well, he found one good man.

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No, grace means undeserved favor. Noah was as bad as the rest of them. We see we don't get that in our little

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Bible story, but he was as bad as the rest of them. And God showed his grace on him, which means undeserved favor.

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And he saved him by grace and stuck him on the ark, right? That's how we get saved because this proves it.

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And then number seven, they're all liars. Oh, I'm saved? Really?

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Well, I'm saved too. Why don't we watch each other for a few years and then we'll kind of get that good brotherly feeling.

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Right? It takes time to know if a person's really saved when they say they're saved. But with time, we can.

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Our spirit can witness with their spirit because we both have the same Holy Spirit and he connects us and he connects us to Jesus and he connects

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Jesus to the Father, connects us to the Father. And we can sort of tell, especially in a smaller church when we've been around each other for a little while.

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But you don't know just because somebody says it, do you? You just don't know. But you treat them with love and you hope that they're hearing strong preaching because that will do one thing or two, one or two things.

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It'll make them start to grow or it'll drive them away every time. This is how it works.

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So there's no good people and they're all liars. They're all cursers and they're bitter in their hearts about life in general.

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They're quick to hurt others with their mouth, particularly and their lives are filled with destruction and misery.

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If you understand that, you can begin to understand all of the work that God had to do to save you because you didn't do anything to save you.

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So people ask me, maybe figured this out in 2020, you believe in salvation by works?

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I used to say, absolutely not. Now I say, oh, absolutely I do. But God did all the work. He did so many things to save us.

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Who knows what all that took? But I know one thing, we don't even understand what Jesus bore when he bore our sins on the cross and God turned his face from his son.

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We will never know what that was like, praise God. Because the only way to know it would be to spend eternity in hell.

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We will never know that, but he did it for us. And so we're saved by the finished work of God.

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I thought I had 10 points. I had 11. We do not know the way, the truth or the life.

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You can't naturally know Jesus. Only when the Holy Spirit calls you and opens your eyes, can you even see him.

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How many times did Jesus say, those who have ears to hear, let him hear? Was it in the hymn this morning or in your sight?

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One of you two guys were up here preaching around and I was thinking, wow, there it is. Ears to hear, probably was one of the hymns

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I'm thinking. Yeah. Well, I noticed one thing in the hymn, our hymn book is the modern version because in the old hymn book, it said we're worms and the new one, it said we're sinners.

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I like sinners better than worm too, don't you? Oh, look, I got another one.

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We have zero fear of God. Okay, so there's the depravity of man, right? The Apostle Paul called it the depravity of man 1600 years before John Calvin lived and Augustine did it 1400 years before John Calvin did.

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So it's not Calvinism, it's Bible, it's the truth. And all of salvation is based on it and you can't understand salvation if you don't understand it because if you don't understand this, you will think you did something to save yourself or the church helped you get saved.

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Some human thing caused you to get saved and you'll feel so good about it. And guess who gets the glory for that kind of salvation?

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The church and the human. It's humanism or in theology, we call it

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Arminianism. All right, so that brings us to number two point you've got to understand. Okay, and the church goes, amen, because he moved to another point.

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Don't worry, I'll review that one next Sunday. But anyway, the second thing you gotta understand to understand justification and what does justification mean again?

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It means to be rendered righteous by someone greater than you, to be made righteous. The Greek word for righteousness and justified is the same root word.

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So it's just two sides of the same coin. But the same thing we have to understand is we gotta understand what the word grace means or we'll never understand how a person is justified.

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And you say, well, that seems like almost the same thing. Well, no, think about this. If you don't understand that grace means undeserved favor, you'll forget the undeserved part and you'll think you played some part in your own salvation.

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Some little part, I helped it a little bit. Well, I had to believe. Even if you add that little bit, you gotta be really careful what you mean by that.

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Because the Bible, the true Bible, the Greek New Testament says that we are given at the moment of our calling a wonderful gift, we're given about 33 things, but one of them is this, it's called the faith of Jesus, not faith in Jesus, it's called the faith of Jesus.

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We're given his belief, his faith, and we are saved because of it.

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Now, do we as humans believe? Yes, we have our own belief, but it's like a tuning fork and you hit it and you put this one over next to it, it'll start chiming at the same exact frequency.

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That's our belief. But you know, as well as I do, our belief comes and goes. First time

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God chooses to say no to one of your prayers or to wait for a while, you go, huh, I don't know if he's there.

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Why didn't he hear me? Even King David, I think he's deaf, God's deaf. Oh God, hear me, as if he can't hear me, right?

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That's our belief, it's on one day, off the other. Belief today, doubt tomorrow. How would you like your salvation to be based on that?

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And yet the modern gospel says it is. It's not. Listen, your belief was an effect, and an effect can never be the cause of the cause.

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Your belief did not cause you to be saved, it was a result of the fact that God, Jesus, and the

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Holy Spirit had given you the gift of Jesus' faith, and that faith can walk on water, that faith can move mountains, that faith can save your dead, lost, deaf, blind soul, and mine, and it did.

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It's the greatest miracle that ever happened, is when David Mitchell got saved. She remembers me, we were married before I got saved.

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But so, undeserved, that is, listen, that part we have to understand.

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Romans 3, 24, being justified freely by his grace. Well, what's interesting is if the word grace itself means undeserved, and you put freely in front of it, it's redundant.

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It's like, now he's being saved freely by free grace. And grace means free, so it's freely by free, free grace.

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Do you think God's trying to get something across that we don't pay for it, we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we don't do it, we receive it as a gift and it's free?

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Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and that word redemption in the

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Greek is the same word as ransom. Now think about what a ransom is when you wanna decide whether you believe

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Jesus died for everybody or not, because I don't believe that he did. 95 % of Baptists didn't believe he did in 16, 1700.

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Who did they believe he died for? The elect, and the reason that's true is because everyone that he died for is going to heaven, because he said, of them

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I will lose nothing. So either every human that ever lives is saved, or like Jesus said, no, they're not, as broad as the way to hell, and many there be that go there, and few there be that go to heaven.

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If he's right about that, then he didn't die for everybody, he died for his own.

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He died for his own people who he knew and predestinated before time started, who he called in time, justified in time, glorified right out the other end, like the

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Bible says. Once you get that, the whole Bible will fit, you won't have anything, even when we get to Romans chapter nine, eventually, which is the next chapter, it will fit the whole

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Bible, but until you get this, it'll never fit, you'll just leave it out. In fact, it's never been in the Southern Baptist Sunday School quarterly ever in my lifetime.

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Why do they leave it out? They won't talk about it, doesn't fit the modern gospel message of humanism.

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God chooses, it teaches it so clearly, I can't wait to get there. So, this word freely in the

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Greek means I like it, without a cause, that's even stronger than our modern word freely, isn't it?

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So we're justified without a human cause, you like that?

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That's pretty strong. You are justified, you are rendered righteous without a human cause, that's not the modern gospel, that's the gospel of the

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Bible, that's Calvin's gospel, that's Spurgeon's gospel, that's

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Torrey's gospel, that's Whitfield's gospel, that's even

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John Wesley sort of, he didn't totally understand this, but I think he knew who saved people, that it was

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Jesus, Augustine's gospel, he's a Roman Catholic, so I mean, it's the

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Bible. So, without a cause, and grace means this, if you just look up the

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English word, unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration, that's pretty good.

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You do know Webster was a born again Christian, right? What was his first name, Daniel? Noah Webster.

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Now, when you look at grace, we're saved freely without a cause, without a human cause, by his grace, grace in English means undeserved, that's what unmerited means, undeserved favor, but in the

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Greek, it is kharis, and it means graciousness, excuse me, a gracious act, which means

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God performed a gracious act upon us when he saved us, and it means favor.

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It comes from kairo, which means to be cheerful, which I think is pretty cool.

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So, where does joy come from? Joy comes from having the grace of God in your life,

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God saved you by grace, and we have a reason to be cheerful. Now, let's look at this word redemption up here, and as I said, it means to be ransomed in full.

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So, one of the things Calvin taught that's so unpopular, you'll hear people say, well, I'm a four -point

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Calvinist, and I have trouble, I understand that, but I had trouble respecting it, because it just means you haven't finished studying yet, that's what that means, because the fifth point that they want to leave off is they don't wanna believe, oh, let me put it in the positive, they wanna believe

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Jesus died for everybody, so that's the one point they'll leave off, and Calvin called it limited atonement, which means he didn't die for everybody, he died for the elect, they don't like that, so a four -point

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Calvinist believes God is sovereign, except they believe that Jesus' blood was ineffectual for the largest number of humans, it didn't work, he died for them, but they went to hell, so his blood was ineffectual for the largest number of humans, which

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I find that weak, to me, that's a very weak argument, but the interesting thing about it, when you look at the verse, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption, the word through is dia, which is like a pipeline through which things go, so the pipeline through which grace and salvation came is the pipeline of redemption, and the word redemption means to be set free by paying a price, it literally is the word for ransom in the

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Greek, and we've told the illustration so many times, but just think about it, it's just logic, you have to use logic to understand scripture,

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God said, come, let us reason together, so if a man pays a ransom for his child, and the kidnapper has two or three other parents, children too, but they don't have the money, who gets set free?

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That you have to defy the definition of ransom to say all of them got set free, no, he didn't pay the ransom for everybody, he paid the ransom for his kids, and 100 % of them are set free, and that's what ransom means, so you have to be illogical to believe

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Arminianism, you have to be illogical to be a four -point Calvinist, but I don't wanna pick on you,

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I mean, I don't care, I was a three -point Calvinist, all through my 20s, and then by the time

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I was 30, I was a four -point Calvinist, time I was 31 and a half, I was a five -point Calvinist, no, I'm kidding, I don't know the exact ages,

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Charlotte probably remembers, because I got really irritating when I became five -point. All right, so redemption means ransom in full, it comes from the little word oppo, which means completely, plus the word lutron, which means to loosen or to set free.

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You were loosened or set free from the world, the flesh, and Satan by the price

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Jesus paid to set you free, isn't that wonderful?

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So grace is free, and it is tied to redemption, which means to set free by paying a price, all right?

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All right, so grace is free, now, when we look at the meaning of grace, let's go into Romans chapter 11, verse five, for a second or two,

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I need you to get up, run around for a second, you're getting a little relaxed out there. This is doctrine, right, maybe we need to figure out some practical application to wake you up, well, let me give you some, if you don't get saved this way, you're not gonna be saved, how's that feel, for practical, all right,

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I'll just put it this way, if we don't tell the true gospel, will a person be saved from anything, effort you made, no, now, well, if they're gonna get saved, will

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God get the true gospel to them, yes, has anyone in the room ever told someone to be saved the wrong way, yes, can

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I stop people from being saved, no, because I'm not in control of their salvation, neither are they, God is, so you can't really mess it up, but you should sure try not to, you need to try to tell the true gospel, and the true gospel has to include the fact that Jesus died for his own, he was buried and he rose again and he saves them all, that's the gospel, now,

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Jesus never told the gospel till after Genesis chapter one, all the way to, and then chapter three, verse eight, there's the first area where God actually told the gospel was right in that little area, so even so then, at this present time, also there is a remnant according to the election of grace, now, if Jesus talked about a huge, large, gaping gate through which many human beings go to enter the gates of hell, you remember that, when he said that, and narrow is the gate, and few there be that enter into heaven, there is a remnant, only a remnant of a fallen race, only a small, little remnant of that entire fallen human race is saved and goes to heaven, and it's talking about that remnant right there, it even uses the word in verse five, even so then, at this present time, also there is a remnant according to what?

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The election of grace, so God chose who the remnant would be, he loved them before he made anything, knew you by name, knew the number of hairs on your head or lack thereof, and he sent his son to die for you, and he gave his blood as a ransom to pay you and buy you out of the slave market of sin, and to bring you into this grace, which is by election, and if by grace, then it is no more of works, otherwise, grace is no more grace, that's a little cumbersome, but listen to what it's saying, it's saying, look, if you wanna be one of these churches around town, that teaches, oh yeah,

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I believe you're saved by Jesus, but you gotta, and then add something, I believe you gotta believe in Jesus, but you gotta, and whatever you wanna add, you gotta get baptized in our water, you gotta believe, you gotta repent, you gotta never dance, that'd be

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Baptist, right? Primitive Baptist, Baptist don't believe that anymore, what else could we say?

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Smoke, never smoke, always pay your tithes, always come to church, I mean, literally, there's church groups in this town that say, if you don't pay your tithe and come to church, you're not saved, because that's part of your salvation, they don't understand all those things are effects, they're all effects, they don't cause your salvation, they don't understand, so they fight with, we all fight over the effects,

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Satan uses that to cause division in the church, but God says that if it's grace, and it's free, and it's a ransom, and that's what saved you, then it cannot be works, otherwise, you defy the definition of grace, that's what that says, it can't be grace if you add works to it, to cause it or to keep it, now, that's the whole problem with the book of Galatians, is some false teacher had come into Paul's, maybe

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Christians there, and then told them, yeah, Paul was right, you got saved by grace, but you gotta do this and this and this to stay saved, and they bought into it, and he called them fools, he said, oh, foolish

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Galatians, who has bewitched you, which we'll get to that, I don't wanna get ahead of myself, we need to think about, how can you believe a false gospel?

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Did you know, I am getting ahead of myself, did you know you have to be bewitched? Have you ever thought about that?

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You can't believe the false gospel unless you're bewitched, that's frightening, but that's what

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Satan and his whole demon hordes are doing, and even human beings that belong to him, they bewitch people into believing anything other than the gospel, you can have the gospel and add two or three things to it and believe that and it's okay, but not just the pure gospel.

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Paul told the Jews this, he said, look, I know some of you have heard me preach and you like me, and you like what

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I'm saying about Jesus, but you're going around behind my back and you're teaching my new baby Christian, that they also have to be circumcised, and he said,

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I'm gonna tell you something, if you get circumcised for that reason, because you're making it part of your salvation,

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Christ will have no effect on you. Well, where are you gonna go when you die if Christ does not benefit you?

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So you can't add one thing to grace, or you're in trouble, and it's a frightening trouble to think about, because how many friends just in this room of friends we have in town that add something to it, you know they do, because you know that's what their church teaches, and I'm not saying everybody in that church is lost either, because I've talked to a little sweetness, little saved church

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Christ ladies, and I've talked to some that came from below too, man that chew you up, spit you out when you're a young preacher,

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I've had it done lots of times, that's how I learned to argue so well, the little ladies on their front porch, mostly church of Christ, but then

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I've talked to the sweetest ones, oh yeah, I'm saved, I'm so glad you're saved, and sit there and give you some cookies and milk, and you know, you can,

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I don't know, I think you can sense the difference, especially if they give you cookies and milk, so if it's grace, it's no more works, otherwise grace is not grace, how can it be more plain than that, but if it is of works, if salvation is by stuff you do, then it is not by grace, otherwise work, otherwise now you defy the definition of works, if you're working for your salvation, by the way, mental is work, if you've ever studied, been to school and studied, you know it's work to learn something, isn't it?

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You're burning calories, if you didn't eat, your brain wouldn't work, that's a work, so there's so many different ways

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Satan can twist this to add something to grace, what then?

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Israel hath not obtained that which he seeks for, but the election has obtained it, and the rest were blinded, whoa, that doesn't sound like the modern gospel, does it?

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Now see, the context that this beautiful passage is found in, is where Paul is talking about how

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God brought a partial blindness on the Jews so that the Gentiles could be saved, that doesn't sound human, that's not how we would write the story, is it?

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Does that sound fair to the Jews? No, but wait a minute though, you said, no, that's just pure election sovereignty,

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God's always too hateful and strong, but wait, I seem to remember that humans do what they wanna do, and I remember a crowd of Jews who were standing out there when

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Pilate said, I wanna wash my hands of this man, he is innocent, I'm gonna let him go, and they said, no, may his blood be upon us and the heads of our children, right?

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So, I mean, they did what they wanted to do, they got what they asked for, and yet God's sovereignty and man's will works together all the time throughout the whole

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Bible, it's always working together, we can't see how it can, but it always does, so lest we think this is for Israel only though, where it talks about election, look at verse 11 in the same chapter,

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I say then, have they stumbled that they should fall, talking about the Jews, God forbid, but rather through their fall, salvation is coming to the

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Gentiles, or to provoke the Jews to jealousy, so it all works together in God's plan, so it's for the

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Jew and for the Gentile, and grace is free, so by definition, it is impossible to add any works of man to grace with regard to salvation or the security of the believer,

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I believe we are out of time, unfortunately, because I'm just starting to have fun, but we better stop, so let's have a word of prayer.

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Lord, we thank you so much for this day that you've ordained to come together and to fellowship together,

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Lord, may you bring it to pass that soon we can be having our meals again every Sunday together and breaking bread, as you instructed us to do, and Lord, we pray for those around us who may be getting exposed to the

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COVID virus, and we just pray for your mercy on their lives, and Lord, give them strength, we pray for Teresa today, and ask you to strengthen her immune system, and bring her out of this,

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Lord, and others that we don't even know, and Lord, we just thank you for this time also where we can come together and feast upon your word, and Lord, bring it to memory when we need it as we go out into the world this week, we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.