Beyond The Basics 5 - The Need For And The Necessity Of The Work Of Christ (part 3)

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Beyond The Basics: Evangelism (part 4)

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Father, we delight in being here. We thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for your
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Word. We're thankful for the Gospel, for the truth contained therein, for the simple fact that you save sinners.
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Father, as sinners, we can do nothing but rejoice in that. And Lord, we ask that you would bless this time, in Christ's name,
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Amen. Well, we've been talking, in case you haven't noticed, we've been doing a rather, this is an expanded
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Gospel presentation. And I say that because if you look at the name of the lesson, the need for and effect of the work of Christ, that is the
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Gospel. If you want to explain to somebody how they need to be saved or how they get saved, you have to tell them why they need to be saved.
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What's the need? And then you have to explain what Christ has done. And so that's what we've been doing, as I said, specifically focusing on the work of Christ.
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We talked about how all men are guilty. We've talked about the fall of Adam and how it affects everyone.
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We've talked about various theological challenges. We've talked about man's problem. And our main problem, what everyone needs to stress when you do present the
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Gospel, is that God is holy. God is perfect.
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God hates sin. God will punish sin. You know, it's an amazing concept, and we're going to be discussing, we've mentioned it a little bit before, but does
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God have wrath? Why?
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Why is God wrathful? Because He's holy.
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Because Becky? He's angry. He's jealous about what?
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About sin? About our affections? I like that. You know why He's jealous about our affections?
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Because we are, as I said a few weeks ago, our hearts are idol -making factories.
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We worship almost anything but the living God, the one who deserves to be worshipped.
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And the problem we have in today's church, today's Gospel, as it's known, I mean, if you go to, you know, don't watch
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Christian TV on my behalf, but if you find yourself in some sleepless state, unable to do anything, and you turn on TV and you go to some alleged
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Christian show, listen to the Gospel. What are you going to hear? I'm sorry,
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Bruce? Not much. That's right. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
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He wants you to be happy, prosperous, healthy.
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You know what, and just think about that healthy one for a minute. Why do any of those people ever die, right?
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They should all just die of old age. And even that, you know, pretty questionable. If God wants us to be completely healthy, then we should all live to be 120, keep our minds forever and ever, and you know, that would be that.
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But they get cancer. They die of pneumonia. What's going on? Didn't have enough faith.
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Yeah, they didn't send enough money to their own ministry. I didn't give enough! The problem with today's church, the problem with today's
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Gospel is there's no wrath. God's happy. He's happy.
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He wants you to be happy. Why is anyone downcast? The happy God of the universe, that's the
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God they're peddling. That is not the God of the Bible. Here's a little bit of a conundrum though.
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He is happy, I suppose. He's pleased, but at the same time, he's wrathful.
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He loves, and at the same time, he hates. You say, he hates.
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Well, what does God hate? Does the Bible ever say God hates anything? Sin and sinners.
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Let's just look at Psalm 5 real quickly, and then we'll get back to where we were. But I just want to establish this concept because the
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God who is presented in so many Gospel presentations is not the
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God of the Bible. I mean, we can find many places that talk about how God is a jealous God, how he will not share his glory with another, how he hates those who do various things, and including in Psalm 5, the psalmist,
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David, writes this in verse 4. For you are not a
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God who takes pleasure in wickedness. No evil dwells with you. You want to get to heaven?
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Don't have any evil. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes.
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You hate all who do iniquity. Now, may I please have a show of hands of those who do not and have never done any iniquity?
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Raise your hands. It says right there, you hate all who do iniquity.
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God hates those who do iniquity. Well, what's the concept there? It's not anyone who has ever sinned and has repented and been forgiven by God who has been saved by Christ.
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The concept there is one of someone who continually does iniquity, someone who continually sins and has not been saved.
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And it says there that God hates those people. Well, how is it that God loves and hates at the same time?
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Stephen. Dan, go ahead, Stephen. Okay, he sheds common grace or he loves everyone.
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Does he not provide good things to everyone? Yes. And yet, he has a specific love for some and a hatred for those who work against him.
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Daniel, did you have anything to add? Okay. And so we see this problem that God will assert his holiness and demands conformity to it.
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We talked last week about God's solution to this problem. You know, we could also call
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Roman numeral two man's problem. We could call it the bad news. And if you want to give someone the good news, you have to give them the bad news.
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You know, when you go to the doctor, he doesn't write you a prescription generally. If you have a good doctor, he doesn't write you a prescription without telling you what's wrong with you, right?
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He doesn't give you a list of drugs to take and you just go, okay, leave, you know, and go get it filled and take the drugs every day.
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You want to know why he's giving you these things. And in the same way, we can't tell somebody, you know what?
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God loves you. You're a great person. Keep it up. Keep going. And by the way, why don't you just slap
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Jesus into your life somewhere? And that is the gospel that is being presented here.
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The problem is when we go out to people, we need to say, you know what? You're not a good person. Nothing you do pleases
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God. You need to receive Christ because you are a horrible person.
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You sin and in God's eyes, one sin is enough to send you to hell forever.
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One sin. Yeah, it just reminds me of that John Piper video.
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Maybe you've seen it. You know, John Piper's bad, where they've said it to the old Michael Jackson song and it's, you know, just him saying
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John Piper's bad. He's really, really bad. All of us are bad.
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None of us are good. That's where Romans 3, we walk through that. No one is good. And so God solves this problem where he is perfect, he is holy, he demands that we be perfect and holy, and yet we can't do it.
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Solves that problem by sending his son, Jesus Christ. We talk about the work of Christ, what he did, what he suffered, and that gives us some kind of idea when we talk about what he suffered, what price did he pay to redeem us.
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It gives us some idea of how much God hates sin to see how
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Christ suffered, how he was even separated from the father.
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The son said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
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Why have you left me? Why am I experiencing this separation from you? So now,
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Roman numeral 3 .D, what words describe what Jesus accomplished for us?
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It is important there in the sub Roman numeral 0 .1. It's important to consider that his work did accomplish what
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God intended, not just make it possible. Why is that important? Daniel, that's right.
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Yeah, let me just kind of reword that, but Daniel's straight on here. Here's the, again, this is the common evangelical view of the gospel.
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God chose people based on his foreknowledge, not on his sovereign will. This is the common view of things.
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And that then in time, men are free agents able to accept or reject so that in the end, it is entirely possible that no one, because if they're really free agents, they could choose to reject the gospel.
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They could choose to reject the work of Christ so that when Christ went to the cross, he could have conceivably have achieved nothing, nothing.
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He went there for no specific set of people, but for a general purpose to redeem people from sin, but only by their own choice could that be applied to them.
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And so the concept then would be it's possible that Jesus maybe didn't do these things, but the
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Bible never talks about it in this way. It doesn't use the language, as we see there in the
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Roman numeral two, the New Testament does not use the language of the possible, but the language of accomplishment, what
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Jesus did. These are the things that he absolutely did achieve on behalf of those who believe.
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First of all, forgiveness of sin. Forgiveness of sin, our sins have been forgiven by God.
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And that required the shedding of blood. Let's look at Hebrews 9 .22, I think we all would be familiar with this concept.
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And when somebody has that, if you would raise your hand, Stephen. Okay, no forgiveness without the shedding of blood.
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This is the legal act whereby God removes the charges that were held against the sinner because proper satisfaction or atonement for those sins has now been made.
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God forgives them. It's as if we have accumulated for ourselves a massive debt.
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In fact, I'll be talking more about this in the weeks that come. How do different religions talk about or explain how our sins are forgiven?
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Even religions that call themselves Christian. How do they explain it? John? Okay, confirmation baptism, or more generally, we could say works,
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I think Pam said. Good. Brian? Confession. Okay. Again, another work.
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In other words, we've established a debt and now we're going to pay God back on the installment plan.
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Okay? Yes. Okay, like a means test, a medium average.
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Daniel? Simple denial of hell, yes.
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Okay, they all seem to think there's some good in people, absolutely. Forgiveness of sin, well, how about this?
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How about there's a place you can go where you get punished for your sins and then after a couple millennia you get let out on parole, probation, purgatory, right?
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I mean, I've never completely understood that. If Christ died for your sins, then why do you go to purgatory to have them purged?
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Not really clear to me. Let's talk about this a little bit more, point two.
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It is used of a cancellation forgiveness, used of a cancellation of debt. Let's look at Colossians 2 .13.
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See none. When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive together with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions.
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Now again, it's interesting, the language here. Having forgiven us, and who are the us?
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Believers, okay? All our transgressions, not some, not a partial forgiveness, not a conditional forgiveness, but in fact, that's a perfect tense.
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He has forgiven all of our transgressions. And the concept here is that, in the bigger context, that our debt was nailed to the cross, that Christ paid the debt for all of our sins.
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Forgiveness forever solves the problem of sin, all sins past, present, and future.
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And why is that so important? That all of our sins, past, present, and future, have been paid for.
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Does this mean now that we should just, as Christians, and I know this is how I would have looked at it in my previous religion, does this mean that now that I know that all my sins are forgiven, past, present, and future, that I am free to do whatever
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I want? After all, can't lose my salvation. Christ paid for them all, so I can do whatever
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I want, right? By no means. By no means, what do you mean?
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Slave of someone else? Yes, that's right.
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Should we sin more so that grace may abound more? And the answer found in scripture is, may it never be.
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That is absolutely right. Okay, down to point four. This is viewed manward. Man has sinned.
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In other words, if we're looking at man, man has sinned and needed to have his sins dealt with and removed.
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Before Christ, before salvation, if God was to look at you, he would see not an island of righteousness, not a good person, not somebody who's above 70%, not somebody who might eventually, you know, after some serious purging, get to heaven.
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He would see sin. He would see decay. He would see spiritual deadness.
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And he would see someone who deserved hell. The word expiation also applies here.
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Expiation implies the obliteration of sin. I like that. The obliteration of sin.
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Our sins have been obliterated through Christ's atoning death.
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And again, Colossians 2, 13 and 14. Yes. Yes. Yeah, if it didn't cover past, present and future, then there would need to be some kind of re -sacrifice, some kind of new ceremony to cover them.
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What it does is it frees you from, we've talked about the power of sin in your life, the penalty of sin.
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What it really does is give you the capacity to...
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Well, let's put it this way. I'll ask you a question. Should you mourn over your sin even though you know it's forgiven?
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Okay. And then what? Depression? Medication for the next three years?
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No. What is the right response? I mean, it's kind of a balancing act because you just can't say, oh,
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I really blew that. Sorry. See, confess, repent, move on.
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But confess means agreeing with God. And I think it means that there needs to be a serious inventory of what led to that sin, why we were involved in it, and how we can avoid it in the future.
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We need to look at that sin. When we say, I confess my sin, and if it means to agree with God, then we have to look at it and we have to hate that sin as much as God hates it, as much as is humanly possible.
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And that's why when Jesus says, you know, if something caused you to stumble, cut it off, he's not suggesting amputation.
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He's saying you need to hate that sin as much as God does. I saw a comment or a hand,
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Pam. That's right. Well, that's true.
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When you mourn over your sin, you're comforted because you think, you know what, it's just an evidence of salvation.
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Six. I would say that if you, in that specific instance, if you know the person and you can do it, then
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I would say yes. Let's say you were, I don't know, yeah.
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Let's say it happened, you know, 20 years ago, and there's no way of reasonably tracking the person down.
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Well, then, you know. But if you know that person, I would say yes. If you were a bank robber before you got saved and you had the means to pay back the bank, then
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I would say yes. But I would also say that there are some sins that you can't make up for, that you can't restore the person to.
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And there are some things that you just can't take back. But in terms of property issues, yeah,
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I think that's the right thing to do. Well, that's exactly right.
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And I think, you know, speaking of contrite heart, I think David is probably a good example of repentance.
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Why? Because his sins pierced him. They caused him anguish when they were brought to light.
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And yet, what did he do? Think about it, when he's told by Samuel that his son is going to die, and then his child does die.
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You know, the whole time the child is sick, what does he do? He's fasting, he's praying, he's asking
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God to relent. And when God doesn't relent, what does he do? Gets up, cleans himself off, and go has a meal.
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And people are like, well, what happened? He understands the sovereignty of God, he understands forgiveness.
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Good point, though. I mean, and that's what I was getting at. You know, I mean, people can get to the point, when we think past, present, and future, we need to accept that.
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We need to believe it. We need to look at sin the same way God does. But we also need to say, you know what? In the same way that God puts sin, what?
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As far as the East is from the West, puts it behind his back, and he's going to see it no more.
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We need to have that same view of it, too. Other questions?
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Yes. Well, it really is an amazing concept that, you know, we know how bad we are.
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We know how much we've sinned. And we also know how much we've been forgiven. What did Jesus say about it? You know, the more you've been forgiven,
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I'm sorry? The more you love, right? Who, you know, the more you appreciate it.
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Okay, no, I think that's a legitimate thing. I mean, basically, it comes down to, it's a variation.
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You know, I feel like I'm talking about a chess book opening thing here. You know, how many of you have ever studied chess? I don't mean just played the game, but studied it?
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I guess I'm the only one. They list different openings because, you know, they've all been catalogued over the years, and then they'll go, well, this is the
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Sicilian opening with the whatever variants, you know? And you go, oh, yeah, the old whatever variants.
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And this is kind of the Matthew 7 -1, you know, judge not lest you be not judged, only it's the love thy neighbor variants.
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Thank you. Thank you very much. So, I mean, basically, what they're saying is, you know, how loving or how could you possibly judge me in that way and still claim to be a
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Christian because you're not showing me love, unconditional, I sound like Kim right now, love, you know?
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Well, what's the answer to that, Daniel? That's right.
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I mean, they're going to the gallows, they're going to face the hangmen, and they're whistling and having a great time.
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And, you know, what are you going to do while they're walking by going, hey, nice suit, you really look sharp for that execution, pal.
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Is that love? You just say, I can't think of anything more loving than to tell you, friend, based on your current lifestyle, based on what you are doing right now, based on your lack of love for Christ, you are going to hell.
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And that's not a weekend, that's not 100 years, that's forever. You want to know how
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I love you, I love you so much that I'm willing to have you get mad at me so that you can hear the truth.
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That's love. Yeah, for the wrath of...
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Well, and it's true, they need to understand, like we've been saying, they need to understand the wrath of God.
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You know, they only want to think about love. You know, this is the unbeliever's, you know, kind of force field.
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You're a Christian, you have to talk nice to me, and by the way, if you say anything I don't like, I'm going to whip out, you know,
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Matthew 7, or I'm going to talk about how that's not very loving, or I'm going to do... You know, and I'm like,
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I like Matthew 7 -1, it's a perfectly fine verse, but, you know, the whole judge not, lest ye be not judged, which is the
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King James, but, you know, let's keep reading. And in there,
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Jesus very specifically says that, and we can tell he's talking about false teachers, because he says, by their fruits you shall know them.
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What does that mean? By their fruits, by their actions, by their deeds. In other words, we look at people, and we see that they say that they're preachers of the gospel, and yet they do this, they do that, they drive around in big
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Rolls Royces, you know, they have $3 ,000 suits that they wear, you know, six days a week, and then they get dressed up on Sunday.
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And he says, in verse 15, Beware of the false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inward are ravenous wolves.
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You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they?
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So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.
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Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, and he goes on, verse 21, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter in the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my
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Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?
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And then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.
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Only there will be a lot of reverb and a lot of judgment and a lot of power in those words.
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Yes, one more. Last rites.
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Well, and certainly the concept of, you know, if I was a believing
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Roman Catholic, I would definitely have a priest on speed dial. In fact, I'd probably, you know, have some kind of radar tracker on him and make sure
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I was never, you know, more than four or five miles away in case the end was coming and I could get him there in a hurry because you have to have those last rites.
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Otherwise, you know, it's purgatory at least and maybe worse for you. You know, what if you skipped, you know, church last
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Sunday? Did you know that skipping church, and this is a policy we're looking to employ here. Skipping church is a mortal sin in the
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Catholic Church. Well, it'll have to be reviewed by the other elders.
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I don't know. All right, let's move on. Good. Good point.
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What they're really saying when they say, you know, you need to be loving and everything, and by the way, I always think it's interesting that unbelievers think they know more about Christianity and the
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Bible than believers do. You know, people who don't even own a Bible know more about it than you do.
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They really are saying, you know what, just affirm me. I don't even want to use the word tolerate because tolerate has been so twisted.
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Tolerate instead of meaning, you know, I see what you do. I don't approve of it, but I'll tolerate it, meaning
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I'm not going to, you know, hang you from the highest tree. Now, tolerate means I see what you're doing.
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I don't agree with it, but you know what? I'm going to run across the street and give you a big old hug, and I'm going to tell you you're a great person.
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That's what toleration means now. It means never confronting sin, and that's just not what we're called to do.
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Well, let's move on. Redemption. Christ actually redeemed his people.
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Didn't possibly redeem it. I mean, imagine that. Imagine if the whole mission of the
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Savior was to redeem his people from sin, and he only made that possible.
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The definition is to purchase in the marketplace or to purchase back in the marketplace.
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In other words, we are a, before Christ, we are a people who have in a certain sense been sold in the marketplace.
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We have lost our salvation. Well, not our salvation. We've lost our souls.
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Our souls belong not to us because we stand condemned. So listen to this.
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It is the term redemption which relates to a transaction in which someone who is enslaved, and were we enslaved before salvation?
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Yes. We read Romans 6, I think it was last week. Enslaved to sin or held in prison is released by virtue of a payment which is made that satisfies the rights of the creditor or the civil government in order that everything should be done with propriety.
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Again, as we've said, we owe a debt that we could never pay. Christ satisfied that.
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He paid the fine. The believer is purchased out of the slave market of sin and is set free from sin's bondage.
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The purchase price for the believer's freedom and release from sin was the death of Christ. Let's look at 1
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Peter 1, verses 18 and 19. I mean, there are so many scriptures there. I'm going, oh, so many choices, so little time.
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1 Peter 1, 18 and 19, anybody have that? Jeff? You know, such a great,
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I mean, this gets back to the price that was paid. The spotless lamb, the guiltless lamb paid the price.
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There was no amount implied here. There was no amount of silver or gold, no amount of money that could purchase us out of the slave market.
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As one songwriter, not a Christian, once said, we had debts that no honest man could pay.
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We couldn't get it back. Couldn't do it. But Jesus Christ did this.
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He redeemed us. Because Christ has bought the believer, has purchased the believer, he belongs to Christ and is
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Christ's slave. God has bought them at a terrible cost, so they have become
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God's slaves to do his will. You know, do you think about yourself that way?
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We read Romans 6, we'll read it again. Read it a few weeks ago, but it's good to be reminded of this.
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Do you think of yourself as a slave of God? We think about what we've been redeemed from.
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It is our acceptable service. You know, what did Christ say? He said, if you love me, keep my commandments.
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He said, if you want to be a Christian, if you want to be my follower, take up your cross and follow me.
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Romans 6, verses 20 to 22. Who has that? Ann.
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Or Janet, sorry. Okay.
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You were enslaved to sin, and the outcome of that was going to be death.
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And now having been set free, John 8, the
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Son has set you free. You've been freed from sin and enslaved to God. You derive your, not chains, but your benefit, resulting in sanctification, the outcome of eternal life.
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We are being conformed to the image. Does being saved necessarily mean that you're going to obey?
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Is that the idea of slavery here? Because you are saved, now you are no longer capable of sinning.
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Obviously not. But we are commanded to obey.
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We are commanded to do His will. We are obligated to be His slaves. Even as Mike was going through, and will go through,
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Romans 13, when he was talking about Romans 12, and he said, you know, our bodies are, how should we consider them to be living sacrifices?
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All right. Daniel. Daniel. Right. That's right.
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That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.
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That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.
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That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.
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That's right. That's right. That's right. Well, just to jump off that, you know, imagine this concept because the
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Bible definitely presents the concept of the church being redeemed, believers being redeemed.
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So imagine this, that Christ paid the price for the church. Christ purchased the church with his blood, and then for some reason down the road, whatever that cause is,
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God says, you know what? At one point, that was acceptable to me, but it's not anymore. You were redeemed, but you're no longer redeemed.
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Again, those ideas run contrary to the
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Trinity. And we talked about the Trinity before. Does the Trinity do everything in harmony? Yes. So we're going to say that if we look at Ephesians 1, from before the foundations of the world, the
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Father chose some to be in Christ. And we're going to say on this end that the
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Holy Spirit sanctifies, calls and sanctifies those who are chosen by the
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Father, right? And then we're going to say that Christ potentially died for those people, or that Christ died for everyone, not the ones that the
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Father chose, not for the ones that the Holy Spirit's going to sanctify, but for everyone.
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And then it's up to those individuals to choose, even though the Father chose who was, you know, it's
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God chooses or man chooses, and there really isn't any way in between. Charlie, good, excellent point.
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Charlie makes the point as the, if Jesus, the Bible would call him the second Adam, the new
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Adam, theologically, the new Adam, the second Adam. If we, you know, we like to be in Christ, that part's good.
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We forget about the in Adam part. You know, did we potentially sin in Adam? No. Romans 5 makes it very clear that we all fell with Adam, that we all sinned in him.
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It wasn't a potential sin, it was an actual sin, that we were born with a sin nature, that we were born in bondage.
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We're born cursed. We're born as a result of the curse of sin.
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And there's no escape from that except through Christ. And again, it's not potential, but it's actual.
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And so Jesus is the one who undoes, as it were, all that Adam did, who sets things right.
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Back to the lesson plan here, page 19, number 4, believers are redeemed from the curse and bondage of the law that only condemned and could not save.
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A curse rests on everyone who does not fulfill the law. Christ died in such a way as to bear or be a curse.
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We who should have been a curse now go free legally. The concept is this, everyone has failed to obey
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God's law. A lot of people like the Ten Commandments. I'm not convinced that we're under all of the
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Ten Commandments today, since, for example, we don't have a
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Sabbath commandment today. But in any event, let's say we're under the
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Ten Commandments. We fail those. Let's say we're under the New Testament commandments to just love the
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Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. How many of you have done that perfectly this week? I see only my hand.
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Christ died in such a way as to bear, I like this, bear or be, I'd say, and be a curse.
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He was a curse on the cross. He bore our curse. And we who should have been a curse, we who should have suffered that penalty, now go free legally.
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It's an amazing concept, because we have nothing like it in our justice system. Imagine this, you know,
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Charlie does some heinous crime. Like that would surprise anybody. And then I go into court and I go,
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Your Honor, I demand that this man be set free, I'll take his penalty. They would never do that.
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But that's what God did. And this word is viewed sin -ward.
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Mankind was in bondage to sin and was in need of release from bondage and slavery to sin.
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God looks at sin as the problem and he solves it by this tremendous debt that we have accrued by just being regular people.
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And he has purchased us out of the marketplace by sending his son, who paid the price for our sin.
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We are out of time, so we will pick this up and let's close in prayer. Father, we rejoice in these truths about the gospel.
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We rejoice that you would redeem us, that you would send your son, the
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Lord Jesus Christ, from his throne in heaven. That he would come, that he would humbly submit to your will and come and bear an awful debt, an awful curse, a curse that we deserved, a curse that we brought about.
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Father, we thank you for forgiveness from sin, past, present, future.
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Lord, we would pray for anyone here this morning who is struggling with sin, who is unsure of their salvation.
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Lord, would you grant them repentance. Would you grant them the joy of knowing that their every sin has been forgiven.
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Lord, would you open our eyes to the greatness of our salvation. We pray in Christ's name, amen.