09-20-2020

Park Meadows Church

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All right, good. Okay, sorry. Sorry for the technical difficulties, and I still would rather have technical difficulties than me try to play that guitar, so we'll just go with that.

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We can have Bobby come up. You do need to plan. Would you like to be live across the nation and play something for us soon?

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All right. How about next Sunday? You can let me know. Anytime, though.

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That'd be awesome. All right, let's review just a little bit. We're in Romans chapter 8, verse 30, and remember, we've come from before time where God foreknew us, and where he knew us as his own, and then he predestinated us, and then we come into time where he calls us by the

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Holy Spirit, regenerates us, and then at the same moment, many things happen, one of which is he justifies us.

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Moreover, whom he did predestinate, then he also called, and whom he called, he justified. Those two things happen in time, the calling and the justification, and it says those who he justified, he also glorified.

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That goes out the other end of time into eternity, future, if you want to say it that way.

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Today, we're still talking about justified. Remember, the word itself means to be rendered righteous, so someone bigger than you has to do that to you.

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God has to do that to you. He renders you righteous. It's not something you do for God. It's something

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God did for you, all right, and the word study,

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I just want you to remember that the word justify and the word righteousness in the

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Greek come from the same root word, so dk, which means just, same root word, so it's kind of interesting because when we talk about positional righteousness, we have it because God made us just.

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It's the same word as just, all right, so he justified us, which made us righteous, or you could say we are righteous because he made us to be righteous, or you could say we're righteous because he justified us, and then remember justified, a good way to remember it, on the far right over there, just as if I'd never sinned.

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I had a couple of people tell me in the audience here that the print is not large enough. I think it's pretty good for the online folks, but we can fix that, so starting next

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Sunday, I'll have less words on each screen, a whole lot more screen, a whole lot more slides, but it'll be bigger, all right, so you guys can see it better.

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All right, we went into this passage in Romans chapter 3, and in that little passage from verse 23 to 28, it lists seven things that we have to understand if we're going to even understand what it means that God justified us, and we've been studying those, okay.

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We were on the first one, well, let's see. Let me go back. Yeah, we were on the first one a while back where you got to understand the fall and depravity of man, and the second one is you got to understand the meaning of grace, and we've kind of been on that meaning of grace for a little bit here, all right.

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Now, with regard to total depravity, John Calvin called it that, but actually the

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Apostle Paul called it that 1600 years before John Calvin, so that's not Calvinism.

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In fact, this is what the Holy Spirit wrote with the Apostle Paul being the penman in Romans chapter 3 verses 10 through 18.

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There are 12 reasons why it's true that the human race is totally depraved, and I've had people debate me on that all across the country.

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They'll say, well, it doesn't really mean that. Yeah, it does mean that. We covered all 12 of the things that the Scripture says it is.

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

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God. That's exactly what it means from Isaiah 53 all the way to Romans chapter 3 all through the

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Bible. It means that, and we've already studied that, so this is rebuke, all right. So then on the meaning of grace, we went into Romans chapter 3 verse 24, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ.

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It's kind of interesting because it's kind of redundant. Grace by definition means free. It's a free gift, so it's like saying given free, free gift.

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Salvation is a free, free gift, right? Justification is a free, free gift, so if you look at Webster's dictionary,

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Webster was a Christian by the way, but the word grace means unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration.

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So we just remember it this way, unmerited favor. That's what I like to call the definition for grace.

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So unmerited, though, what does that mean? It's free. It's not something you can pay for. It's not something you can deserve.

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You cannot deserve it, and so yet all the major world religions, all are based on man doing something to deserve

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God's favor. It just doesn't work that way with the true God. He says it doesn't, and we need to know that.

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Listen, too many people try to get to God their way rather than God's way, and God has shown us the way, and the way is

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Jesus Christ. So it's tied in with redemption.

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This free grace, this free, free gift of salvation, of justification is tied into the word redemption.

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As you can see, that in redemption is in Christ, and remember that redemption in the Greek is the same, it would translate into the

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English word ransom. So when you think about who gets ransomed, it's the person that the money got paid to release them.

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Whoever it got paid for, that person gets released. Think about that when you want to say you're a four -point

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Calvinist, because if you're a five -point Calvinist, you believe that he died only for the elect. There's the proof of the fact that that's how it works.

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When you pay the money to ransom someone, it doesn't ransom the other guy's kids. He has to pay the money for that, right?

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It only ransoms the people for whom it was paid. So everyone that Jesus' blood was paid for, it cleared their debts, and they'll all be saved.

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That's just a fact. Well, we know not everybody's going to be saved, so we know that that blood was not for everybody. Now, I will say this.

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Sometimes when I'm speaking with people that I know don't get this because most preachers do not preach it this way.

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You go back to 1600s, 1700s, early 1800s, 95 % of all Baptist preachers would preach it just like I'm preaching it right now.

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All you have to do is go read history, read it. They believe that Jesus died only for the elect.

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Now that's flip -flop. 95 % of Baptist think he died for everybody. The problem with that is if he did, he failed on most cases, because Jesus said, why it is the way, and many there be that go to hell.

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So why didn't the blood, why wasn't it sufficient for them if it was paid for them? Why didn't it ransom them if it was ransomed for them, if it was paid for them?

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You see, there is a terrible logical flaw there, and I hate to say it, but God said, come let us reason together.

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That's not very reasonable to believe that, and yet you're not taught, you know, most folks never hear a preacher get up and teach it right, so they're misled by their preachers.

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The biggest problem with America today is in the pulpit. All right, so redemption means to be set free by paying a price or a ransom price, and Jesus did that for us, and so that's the first thing to understand is the definition of grace.

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It means free, free gift of justification. Remember, what does justification mean?

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Same Greek word as righteous, so God made you righteous as a free gift that you didn't deserve and I didn't deserve.

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Does that make sense? We all know that here. Grace is free, and it is tied to redemption, which means to set free by paying a price.

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So there's a lot of the free, free, free. It's free all through there. God puts free in there at least three or four times to get us to understand we can't pay for it, we cannot deserve it, so that's the meaning of grace.

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Now remember, what we're talking about here is you cannot understand what it means to be justified if you don't first understand the idea of total depravity.

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No one was seeking God in the first place. It's a fallen race. Secondly, you cannot understand justification unless you understand what grace means.

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It means it's free. You can't earn it. You can't even do anything to help it, and that's where so many churches get in trouble.

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Well, I believe in Jesus, but I've got to also go to church all the time and tithe and get baptized in such and such water, right?

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I don't think so. I think those things are lovely if they're effects of your salvation, but they play no role in the cause of it, and an effect can never be the cause of a cause, so it plays no role in the cause of it, and yet so many churches get into that, and Paul wrote on,

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I mean the Holy Spirit through Paul, wrote an entire book on churches that have that problem. It's called the book of Galatians.

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Oh, foolish Galatians. Why do you think that you got saved by faith, but you got to keep saved by doing a bunch of stuff, and he said that's foolish.

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He said that's not God's plan. You've been bewitched by a false preacher. Think about that. So these are just things we understand about the fact that what grace is, so that helps us understand how justification works.

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It's free. It's something God does to us, not something we deserve, not something we can do. By definition, by the way, in this particular passage last week, we talked about it gives in Romans 11, 5 through 7.

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In Romans 11, 11, it gives the definition of grace and shows what it is and what it can't be, and so what these scriptures here that we studied last week show, it is impossible to add any works of man to grace.

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You cannot add any works of man to grace with regard to salvation or the security of the believer, and that's where people mess up a lot is they think, well, yeah,

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Jesus saves you, but you got to stay saved by living right, going to church, quit your smoking, quit your dancing, whatever they want to add.

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Every church adds something you got to quit, right, and they think that's part of the salvation, and it's not. It might be in effect.

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I mean, there's stuff God takes out of our life when we get saved. It's different for all of us, right? With me, he just took dancing right out of my life.

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I mean, I was amazing before I got saved at dancing, wasn't I, Charlotte? The Lord took that away.

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Hallelujah. I'm teasing, of course, but I'm still a really fine dancer, but anyway,

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I'll dance for the Lord for you sometime. Not today.

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So, you see the point. If you want to try to say that you got to do stuff to stay saved, the

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Holy Spirit says, no, you don't. You're wrong. In fact, you got taught that by a false preacher.

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Do you hear me? It's just the way it is. I know he's nice, and he looks good. He wears a suit, probably.

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Nowadays, maybe not. Blue jeans and a t -shirt or an undershirt in a lot of the big baggy churches now, and I'm okay with that, but I'm not okay with him teaching false doctrine.

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I don't mind a dude gets up there in blue jeans and barefoot and a t -shirt if he teaches free grace, and then salvation is free, and it's a gift from God, and you can't do anything to help it, and you can't do anything to keep it, but you know what?

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If you have it, you want to live for the Lord, don't you? So, the effects come if you really have it.

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You have effects, and there's no case where you have it and you don't have effects. That's a double negative, but you see what I'm saying.

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There's no case where a person can say, well, I'm saved, but you don't see any effects. Now, I know sometimes we got to watch for five years to see any, but still, because we have to be careful judging, because God can see the heart, and we can't, but you will over time, see effects in a true born -again person.

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It has to, listen, you can't be the same in your natural state as you are when the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in your body, and your body becomes the temple of the living

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God. You just can't be the same, so there has to be some effects, but those effects don't play any role in the salvation.

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That's why we call them effects. They're not the cause. They're the effect of the cause. The cause is free grace.

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That's the cause, if you want to put it the way where we're studying right now. So, the cause is

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God. God did many wonderful works to save us. The Godhead, the

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Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, all did wonderful, amazing, miraculous works to save us and to justify us.

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All right, so now let's move into something kind of sweet here.

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We're still talking about understanding grace a little bit more so that we can understand justification better, and we can understand how it works.

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I want to read you something that was written 1 ,400 years before John Calvin was born.

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So, this is not Calvinism. That's why I tell people when I say you're a Calvinist, I say, now I'm an Augustinian, and they don't even know what that is usually, but really

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I'm not. I'm Pauline, but really I'm not. I'm a Christian, right? You can trace it all the way back. All these teachings are traced all the way back to Jesus Christ, and Jesus taught them to Paul, and Paul taught them to us, and Augustine learned it from Paul and other teachers in between there.

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He was what, I forget, was about 350. I don't remember, Augustine, 450, something like that.

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So, there were some other wonderful teachers he probably studied under too, but it all goes back to Christ.

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Now, here's what Augustine said 1 ,400 years before John Calvin was born. He said, without exception, and he's trying to help us understand what grace means and what it doesn't mean.

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So, he says, without exception, we all long for happiness. So, he's going to use this as an example. So, he's not really teaching on happiness, but he's going to, we all sort of understand happiness and how it comes and how it goes, all right?

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So, without exception, we all long for happiness. All agree that they want to be happy.

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Would you agree with that? Everybody wants to be happy, just as if they were asked, they would all agree that they desire joy.

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So, all humans desire happiness. All humans desire joy. That's his point.

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Would you agree with that so far? All right. Now, he quotes

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Galatians 517, which I think I'll pop up there in a second. Let's see. Yep.

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How about that? All right. So, he desires, I'm still quoting Augustine.

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He desires true happiness. Now, here's the kicker, but is not able to will himself to be happy.

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Now, think about that a minute, because this is going to help with grace and with justification, all right?

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Every human desires to be happy. Would you agree with me?

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All right. But he is not able to will himself to be happy all the time. You can't, like, you ever been depressed before and you wished you weren't?

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You can't just make yourself be happy. Now, you can think positive, like Philippians 6 teaches us to do.

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Think on things that are lovely. Think on things that are good to report, but you have to do that over a long period of time in your life to have that habit to have healthy mental health.

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That's redundant. Good mental health. All right. So, if you're not practicing that, then it's really hard to will yourself to be happy.

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Okay. So, let's follow his logic. Everybody wants to be happy, but yet, man is not always able to will himself to find it since it is found in God alone.

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So, Augustine believes that the only true happiness in the whole world is because God brings it.

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Satan brings sadness and, you know, unhappiness and so forth. God brings happiness.

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So, though man always wants to be happy, he's not always able to find it in and of himself because it's of God.

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Happiness comes from God in whom he cannot delight. The man cannot delight in God while the man is in his flesh still.

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He's not saved yet. He's a natural man or woman. Do you get it? So, what's

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Augustine teaching? He's teaching depravity of man, right?

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Man can't even be happy if he's in the flesh. He'll find something to complain about, and I'm not just talking about men, ladies.

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I know you're amening me out there, but men and women will find something to be unhappy about, to complain about, in the natural state, right, when we're not spirit -filled, and if you're not saved, you don't have spirit -filled.

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If you're not saved, you're just flesh all the time. So, his point is all men want to be happy. All men and women, the vast majority of the world, that huge gulf of people that won't make it to heaven, they want to be happy, but they can't in and of themselves make themselves happy because happiness comes from God.

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Now, this is his example that he's using. Augustine means this. We all desire true happiness, which is found only in God.

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However, our will alone is not strong enough to enable us to achieve happiness.

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Now, if that's true, how could it help us achieve salvation is going to be his point. Likewise, as brother

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Otis said, we always do what we want to do. We do what we want to do, but we can't be happy in the natural state.

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So, God has to change our want to. He has to make us want different things than the flesh wants, and so Augustine says this.

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Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you want me to do.

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This is his prayer to the Lord. Give me the grace. What is grace?

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Undeserved ability. God, give me the undeserved ability. I'm not capable.

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I don't deserve it. I'm no good, but please give it to me, and that's the definition of grace.

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Please give me the undeserved ability to do as you command, so that I will want to live like you want me to live.

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Not like the flesh, or the world, or the devil want me to live, but like you want me to live, and then help me to live as you command, and then command me to do what you want me to do.

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Do you catch the logic? Here's the steps. They say, okay, first, Lord, change my want to.

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Well, that's what the Holy Spirit does at the calling when he saves us, when he regenerates us, when he justifies us, when he makes us righteous.

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Same thing as justifies us, right? So, give me the grace to do what you command. Now, think about that.

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Give me an ability that is absolutely impossible for me to have in my natural state.

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So, that makes it a miracle, doesn't it? Lord, give me the ability to want stuff that I don't want in my natural state, and not to want the things that I do want in my natural state, so I can be more like Christ, all right?

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Give me that miraculous ability that I don't deserve to do what you command.

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Now, watch this, okay? God answers that prayer. Are you with me? I now have the ability to want what

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God wants for me, and to want what God wants. Now, God, command me to do what you want.

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You follow it? So, he already gave me the ability to do what he commands, which is impossible, but he gave it to me as a free gift, and now he says, now command me.

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Now, tell me what to do, and only tell me to do the things you want me to do. Boy, that's beautiful. Now, I mean, when you read these guys, you got to stop and think about it.

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It's not like reading stuff written today, right? These are very thought. Augustine is probably one of the most giant philosophers of all time, of all history, and he was a lost, hellish person before his conversion.

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If you read the story of Augustine, he was bad. He was a bad boy, and when he got saved, and God brought him out of darkness into his marvelous light through Jesus Christ, and through grace, free grace, which is what

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Augustine taught, it totally changed his life, and now he has this ability to be one of the brightest lights in the whole universe,

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Augustine was. All this makes clear, oh holy God, that when your commands are obeyed, it is from you that we receive the power to obey them.

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You see the difference between that and modern teaching and other world religion teaching, where it's all about the man and humanism, the man doing stuff, good stuff, and being a good person, and hopefully making it to heaven?

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Augustine, one of the greatest Christians who ever lived, said if I ever keep one of God's commands, it is only because God helped me to be able to keep his commands and to want to do it.

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Otherwise, I wouldn't have done it. That's what he just said in plain English, right? Pretty amazing.

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Galatians 1, 3 through 9. Grace be to you and peace from God the

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Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ. So we're still talking about grace and what part that plays in justification.

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Grace be to you and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins.

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Now that little word for in the English is interesting in the

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Greek because it can mean because of our sins. He gave himself because of our sins, or it can mean he gave himself in place of us dying for our sins.

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Do you see the difference? It's both. It carries both meanings. He gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from this present evil world.

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Is that beautiful or what? Now listen, is there ever a time we needed this worse than now? Maybe right before the flood, but I mean it's pretty much like that now.

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I mean you have one thing after another going on now, right? I mean you've got a virus that we've never had before.

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It makes everybody wear a mask where you can't see their face, and God made your face to let people know you, see into your eyes, and see your facial expression so you can communicate better.

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Now you got to cover that up because man said to. I'm almost to the point where I'm going to disobey that just because I don't think

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God wants me to wear it, but I'm not going to say that because he wants some of you to wear it, all right? So I can't make that, but that's how

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I feel. It's wrong, but it's how I feel, okay? So some people need to wear them.

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They don't totally help, but they help a little bit perhaps. The hole in your mask is this big, and the virus is the side of a smaller than the point of a pen compared to that hole, so you tell me how well that works, but we've got the governments of the world, everyone in the world.

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Now I want you to think about that a minute. I'm gonna get on a rabbit trail that I need to get on for a second. How long did it take the governments of the world to get every single human being to wear a mask?

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About a week or two or maybe three weeks? So does that prove to you that something could happen where everyone in the world has to do something?

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It's never been like that before, has it, Brother Bill and Brother Raymond? Never been a time when that could happen like that.

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So what if they wanted you to have a mark in your forehead or on your hand, and maybe that mark tells the people in the grocery store where you go to buy your food that you've had the vaccination?

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I'm not trying to scare you, and I'm not saying this is going to happen this way, but I'm just showing you how fast things have changed this year.

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They've been changing already my whole lifetime. They've been getting us ready, you know, in my grandmother's lifetime, and before that getting us ready for the second coming, but listen, it's going so fast.

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So now we jump from a pandemic that started in China right in the same like a block away from a world -class biowarfare unit of China.

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It happened like a block away from that. That's where it came from, and now it shut down everybody's economy, and only the big rich have benefited from it, and they're wealthier than they've ever been, and the middle class is almost gone now, and so they've got us all where we're wanting free money from the government.

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Can't make any money, so just send me 1 ,200 bucks a month, right? Sounds in time -ish to me, and then as soon as the pestilence is over, all of a sudden now we've got the entire west coast is burning, and the smoke has arrived here now.

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Did you notice yesterday? You got to look around, breathe the smoke, so now your country's burning up, right?

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So next thing, we'll see a huge earthquake somewhere, and then the other thing Jesus said, we'll have race will be against race.

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Race will rise up against race. I skipped that one. That happened before the fire started burning, didn't it?

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In fact, I think, Emily, you were telling me that that fire started right after something, some governmental thing.

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You remember what that was you were telling me? Which law was it?

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Some weird law was passed in California, naturally. We don't want to talk about that.

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I haven't checked all the footnotes out on that one, but I mean, if it happened, it was a law that made molesting children a lot easier to get away with.

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Anyone else read that? All right. As soon as that was passed, the fires started in the same state where that was passed, and now the smoke is all the way here, so it's just one thing after another, but we still have work to do to get ready for what's coming, because what's coming is way worse than what we're seeing now, okay?

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So he gave himself, look at this, that he might deliver us from this present, what?

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Evil. Let me hear it. You're not talking. You're sleeping. What is it? Evil world. So we see it more than ever right now.

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It is an evil world, but we've already been delivered. We're being delivered now, and he will ultimately deliver us at the rapture, and that's amazing, but we're going to have to hunker down and live for seven years through that somehow before that event takes place, or at least a big part of that seven years, because I'm not trying to tell you right where the rapture happens, but I'll tell you where it doesn't happen.

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It does not happen until after the first resurrection. It seems to me that Jesus and Daniel and Paul date that at the end of the seven years, but I'm not going to be dogmatic on that quite yet, but wherever it is, the rapture won't happen until after it, and there's only two, and all these people that try to lie to you and tell you in their theology books, oh, there are many resurrections.

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That's a lie. If you really study it, that is not true. There's two. The Bible says there's two. There's one at the end of this age, the church age, and there's one at the end of the thousand year millennial kingdom.

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That's it. The rapture can't happen until the first resurrection takes place, which is at the end of the church age.

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So anyway, and yet these false teachers teach you the church isn't even here during the seven years. It is here.

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The saints in heaven are looking down, seeing their brothers and sisters on the earth, having their heads cut off, and it says so in the book of Revelation.

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So yeah, the church is here. Anyway, nonsense, but we're not talking about that. What we are talking about, he's already delivered us.

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Isn't that wonderful to know? We're already delivered. He gave himself for our sins that he could deliver us.

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Now everyone for whom he gave his blood is delivered. He gave himself for whose sins?

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Everybody? Does that say every man, one boy, and girl in the whole world that was born? Or does it say our? And who is our in the context of this passage?

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It's born again Christians. Go back and read the first three verses of Galatians chapter one. You'll see who he wrote it to.

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It's written to Christians. So he gave himself for the elect. He gave himself for those who

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God knew before time began and predestinated before time began, and then who he called in time and justified.

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That's what we're talking about is the justify part. So he gave himself for our sins. I don't hear, is this not working?

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Okay, good. Who gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from this present evil world according to what?

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The will of God. See, that's people who understand what

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Calvin taught, which he learned from people like Augustine, which he learned from Paul, which he learned from Jesus.

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People that believe like that understand that people get saved are the ones that God wanted to save because nobody deserved it, and no one was going to get saved in the natural state.

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Not one. Nobody was seeking God, the Bible teaches. So you have to understand two things so far to understand being justified or made righteous before God.

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One is no human is able to do that in and of themselves or even to help do it. That's depravity of man, and number two, you got to understand it's free.

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It's grace. You don't deserve it. You can't deserve it. Can't do anything to get it. You can't do anything to help it. So he gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us, not the whole world, not every man, woman, boy, and girl, but us, the elect, from this present evil world according to whose will, according to what

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God wanted to do and determined that he would do. Of course, if you're God, you do what you want to do, but you know what's wonderful is if you're

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God, you're good. So the things you want to do are the perfect things that should be done. Not like men and women, right?

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According to the will of God and our Father, to whom be glory forever and ever.

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Amen. Do you know with Arminian Christianity, God doesn't get all the glory. The church gets a lot of it.

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If you're way, way Arminian like the Roman Catholics, the church gets tons of glory, right?

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If you're sort of Arminian like Baptists, then the church gets a lot of glory still, and men get a lot of glory, but if you just are a

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Bible believer and you understand it's free grace, you didn't do anything, God gets all the glory. So you can end up everything you say with to whom,

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God to whom, the Father, our Father in heaven, let him have the glory forever and ever.

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Amen. That's good doctrine, Brother David. See, y 'all are impressed.

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I marveled that you are so soon removed. Uh -oh. See, see that stuff up there is what

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Paul taught his new believers. Then he left, went on a trip, and a false preacher came in who had a prettier suit than Paul's, stood up and had a better elocution than Paul's, and he said, well, wait, you got to get circumcised too.

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You got to kind of do some Jewish stuff, and you got to keep the Ten Commandments, and you got to worship on Saturday, not

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Sunday, not the Lord's Day, not Resurrection Sunday like church likes to worship, but you got to do Saturday, and they started adding a bunch of rules, and the foolish

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Galatians were bewitched by this person. We're going to talk about what that means in a minute, but they were bewitched, and they changed their doctrinal viewpoint, and Paul comes back and finds that, and he rebukes them, and he calls them foolish, and he marvels at it.

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I can't believe you guys changed to believing doctrines of demons, he said.

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I marvel that you're so soon removed from him that called you. So not only did they just go into false doctrine, they didn't not only move away from the truth, but they moved away from him.

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Who's that? That's the lawgiver himself. That's Jesus Christ and God our Father, so that you don't ever just move away from good doctrine, because when you do that, you move away from God too, and you can quickly move away from him if you listen to the wrong people or read the wrong books.

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You just have to be so careful. You've got to judge the book. That's more important than learning from the book.

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Judge it against the Word of God. I marvel that you're so soon removed from him that called you into grace of Christ, the grace of Christ, to another gospel.

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Whoa, boy, that's been big in every century for 2 ,000 years, but Paul says it's not another gospel, because there's only one true gospel, but there be some that trouble you, false teachers, and they would pervert the gospel of Jesus Christ, and they do it, he said later in other passages, for their belly's sake.

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They do it for money, but though we are an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel.

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So Paul said, look, if you hear me preaching something else five years from now, or you hear an angel, you think it's an angel from heaven preaching a different gospel than the gospel of grace, or if you hear anybody preaching a different gospel unto you other than that which we have preached unto you from the beginning, then let that person be cursed.

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That means let them go to hell. Now, we don't talk that way today, do we? We just say, oh,

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I got a lot of friends that are going to churches where they got false doctrine, and it's just, that's how they believe. I just don't believe that way.

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We don't think about saying, well, may their pastor go to hell, do we? And I'm not advocating that we go around and say that.

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We'd be idiots to do that, wouldn't we? But Paul was an apostle, so can he do that? He can say it, can't he?

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Well, guess who really said that? Right. The Holy Spirit wrote this material.

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Paul was the penman. So the Holy Spirit, I think it's very appropriate for him to look at a false preacher and say, may he go to hell, because he will go to hell, he says.

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Now, you read the book of Jude, if you don't believe me. It's like a one -page book, so go read it when you get home. It talks about false preachers that were ordained from the foundation of the world to be false preachers, because God ordained that they wouldn't have said, and to them is reserved, that's predestination, the blackness of darkness forever.

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Wow. We don't treat false teachers that way now, but they did, see, back in the 1600s, 1700s, when 90 % believed the right way, that's because they would point out the false preachers back then and run them off.

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Now we just embrace them and be friends with them. God loves everybody, right? We've got to love everybody.

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So we have major problems in the church now. It's the weakest church that's ever existed for the 2000 years of the church age so far is the

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American church today, in my opinion. I can't prove that.

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That's David Mitchell's opinion. As we said before,

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I'll say it again now, if any man preach any other gospel unto you, then that which you have received, let him be accursed.

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Now, did he just say that twice? He did, didn't he?

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It's emphasized. So without, here's some points we learned in this.

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Without grace, there is no peace. Then we learned the definition of grace, okay?

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He gave himself to deliver us, and then we learned the reason for grace, right?

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The reason is God's will. God determined certain people among a fallen race that he would bring unto himself, according to his own will.

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That's the reason for grace. Then we learned the result of grace. What is the result? We got delivered, right?

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Then we learned when you move from grace, you are removed from God.

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There's a good saying. When you move away from grace, you're removing yourself from God because there is no other gospel, and you can be accursed if you're teaching it that way.

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You may already be accursed, and that's the reason you're teaching it that way. I'll tell you this, though. There's two kinds of false preachers, at least.

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One is a preacher, like all preachers, who preaches wrong because he hadn't studied enough yet, and then eventually he gets it right and then apologizes for what he taught that was wrong.

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You've seen a preacher like that. That's me. Then there are other preachers who preach wrong because Satan sent them to preach it in the church, to take away their freedom.

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We've seen one like that, I think, in this church a long time ago, right? You've got two kinds.

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I can't judge that, but God can. The second kind, the ones that Satan sends into the church to take the freedom away, they're ordained to hell forever.

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That's where they're going to go. That's where they were elected to go by God. I won't call it elected, but same thing.

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It's an amazing truth. We cannot allow people like that to come into this local church and teach anything contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, can we?

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Six, there is no other gospel than the real gospel, and seven, we see the destiny of those who preach works salvation.

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They preach salvation by works. We see their destiny. They are accursed unless they're the first kind of false prophet where they're just ignorant and they get it right later and apologize, repent, get right with God.

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That's possible. Some men do that, don't they? Praise the Lord, they do. All right, so there's a lot to be learned right there, and I think we're just about out of time here, too.

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Let me see what's next here. Yeah, we got time to do one more.

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I'm just going to read this to you, and then we'll end. Okay, so here I want to read you something from John Calvin about this topic.

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John Calvin says, we see that our whole salvation and all of its parts are comprehended in Christ.

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Now, it's not works, okay? All of our salvation, the whole of it,

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John Calvin says, and all the parts of our salvation, such as justification, propitiation, redemption, reconciliation, ransom, how many pieces are there in this salvation?

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It's a huge topic, isn't it? All those parts are comprehended in this one thing, the person, the man,

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Jesus Christ. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else.

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Is that good? Do you get it? If it's the true gospel, it's

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Jesus that saved us, not Jesus plus us saving ourselves. You get that? That's really good the way you put that.

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If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is only of him.

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If we seek any other gifts of the spirit, they will be found only in Jesus' anointing, so it's all in Jesus.

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If you look at Jesus' name, Yah, his name is Yeshua, all right?

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Yah is short for Yahweh, which is God, all right? And Shua comes from Yeshua, which means to save, or to save alive, or to rescue.

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So the name Jesus itself means God, our salvation. I mean his very name, and so Calvin knows that, so he says if we're taught by the very name of Jesus, which means

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God, our salvation, the very name of Jesus said it's all in him. It's not of us.

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We receive the gift. We don't do anything to cause the gift. If we seek any other gifts, even beyond our salvation, just to do good works and to have abilities that help our brothers and sisters and all that, all that has to come from Jesus too.

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So we don't do that either. That's Jesus doing that in us and with us, together with us. So many things are done together with Christ.

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If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion, John Calvin says. If we seek purity, it lies in his conception, virgin born, right?

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If we seek gentleness, it appears in his birth, for by his birth he was made like us in all respects that he might learn to feel our pain.

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Calvin sort of gave a nice translation of that verse, didn't he?

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If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion. In other words, his death on the cross.

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If we seek acquittal, it lies in his condemnation. He was condemned so that we might be set free.

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If we seek remission of the curse, it comes from his cross. If we seek satisfaction, it comes from his sacrifice.

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If we seek purification, it comes from his blood. If we seek reconciliation, in his descent to hell is where we find it.

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If we seek mortification of the flesh, it's in his tomb. If we seek newness of life, it's in his resurrection.

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If we seek immortality, it's also in his resurrection. And if we seek inheritance from the heavenly kingdom, it is in his entrance to heaven.

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If we seek protection, if we seek security, if we seek abundant supply of his blessings, it is in his kingdom.

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If untroubled expectation of judgment and not being troubled by judgment,

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I think is what he's saying, then we find that in the power given to him to judge others and to judge us as righteous.

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In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in Christ, let us drink our fill from his fountain and from no other.

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It's not grace plus works. It's not faith plus works.

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It's not Jesus plus anything. Salvation is by the blood of Jesus plus nothing. Let's pray together.

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Father, we thank you so much for your word. We thank you for a time we could come together in safety away from the world for a few moments and to worship you and to speak with you and of you and to hear from you.

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And we thank you so much that you can use these wonderful truths in our lives to help us and to help us to help others.

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And so, Lord, go with us. Watch over our family that are traveling today. Bring them back to us safely.

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Lord, watch over Teresa Quinn who has COVID. We ask you to strengthen her body and help her to rise up quickly and be well.

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Protect John and the rest of their family. And Lord, watch over our folks here that it would just stay away from us and our folks listening online, the same we ask for them as well.

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And Lord, thank you for your son, Jesus Christ, which gives us and our lives such meaning.