Remember the Love of Jesus | Behold Your God Podcast

Media Gratiae

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Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratia, and I'm joined today by Albert Bisson, pastor and professor at Mississippi State, originally from Liverpool, England, but a

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Mississippian now for about 23 years, I understand. Originally you came over to attend

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Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson to study for the ministry, and you're a pastor now, serving at Faith Baptist Church in Sturgis, Mississippi, which

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I know where that is well, because it's between Ackerman, Mississippi, where my father is from and where our people have lived since coming over in the 1800s, and the great

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Starkville, Mississippi, home of Mississippi State University, where you've been teaching for 15 or 16 years?

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15 years. Yeah, and have served as an undergraduate religion program coordinator for 10 years or so.

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So Albert, welcome. Thank you for coming. Thanks for coming on this Lord's Day to preach for us here at Christ Church New Albany, and taking time to sit and talk today.

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So you're a British expatriate, all right, in Mississippi. You're an

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RTS grad, and yet you've come to hold confessionally Reformed Baptist convictions. You're a rural pastor, and yet you're involved in great intellectual pursuits there at Mississippi State University.

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Help us make sense of some of those things. Tell us how you first, maybe how you came to know the

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Lord. Hmm, well I came to know the Lord when I went off to university.

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It would be my first year at university, and the Navigators, a Christian organization, were quite active on the campus, and they tried to engage students in discussions about biblical matters.

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And I remember having a discussion with a student during the first week, and it was an interesting discussion as much as I felt as if I was getting the better of him in the arguments that were being explored.

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That may or may not have been the case, but that was my perception. And he invited me to come to a

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Bible study, and I thought to myself, hmm, that might be a good idea because that way, you know,

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I'll understand the Christian arguments more thoroughly and be able to respond to them more effectively. So my motive was merely to be better acquainted so that I could better engage and discount even

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Christianity. So I went along to some Bible studies, and we were in John's Gospel, and I never really got a great deal out of them.

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I could see what the text was saying, but it never registered with me at all. My understanding of Christianity didn't progress very far.

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And as the semester continued on, I got towards the end of the semester, but was curious enough to want to get to grips with what

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Christian teaching is about that I began to read on my own. And I got as far as John chapter 3, and I'd borrowed a

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Bible. I didn't have a Bible. I borrowed a Bible off a friend. It was Gideon's Bible written in the

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King James. Now a lot of people think that, you know, people in Britain, you know, are enamored with the King James, but most

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Brits don't read the King James. If they're going to read a Bible, they'll read one of the more modern translations. We don't speak in, you know, the language that we spoke in a couple hundred years ago here either.

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Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, these things change. But I was trying to get to grips with John's Gospel, which I didn't understand very well in the

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King James. I got to John chapter 3, where Jesus was talking to Nicodemus, and he was describing about the need for new birth, and I couldn't quite understand that.

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But what struck me was the way in which Jesus was interacting with Nicodemus, and it seemed that Nicodemus, as well -educated as he was, wasn't quite able to grasp what

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Jesus was saying. But there was something about Jesus that registered with me.

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For the first time, and it's almost embarrassing to say this, but for the first time, he actually came across to me as a credible person, as someone who actually is real.

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I hadn't, in all my, you know, young years, ever thoroughly processed who

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Jesus Christ was. My background was a non -Christian background, and I, you know,

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I had no thorough grasp of the person and work of Christ.

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But in reading that particular passage, for the first time, I thought to myself, maybe Jesus Christ was real.

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I mean, very few people would doubt the, you know, existence of Christ, whether they regard him as the

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Son of God or not is another matter. But that, I think, was a point on my ability to comprehend what was being expressed in John's gospel and elsewhere about Christ started to improve.

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After Christmas, another student engaged me and took me through a series of studies in which we built up an understanding of what the gospel is.

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That is, we looked at the doctrine of man, we looked at the doctrine of sin, we looked at the doctrine of Christ, and so on.

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And that slow painstaking process brought me to a point where I came to understand what the

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Christian gospel was. And it was a slow and painful progress because I really was very much in the dark about these things.

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And, you know, intellectually, it just didn't register with me. It had no foothold. But when

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I went through these consecutive studies, the pieces began to fall into place. And I got to a point where I was convinced from the study of the biblical material that Jesus Christ is who he claimed to be, the

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Son of God, and that he did what he did, and that is atone for the sins of his people, and that I was a sinner in rebellion against God in need of salvation.

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And that if I didn't, then the end was not a particularly pleasant one. And then

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I was convinced that this is true, persuaded that this was true. Not that I was looking to be persuaded, there was no crisis in my life or anything like that.

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But it was just simply through the study of Scripture. And yet, I didn't have it in my heart to believe upon Christ.

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You know, I knew that if I were to turn to Christ, then I ought to do it unfailingly with genuine commitment.

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But I didn't find that I could do that. I was reasonably content with the life that I was living, though I know that from a

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Christian point of view, that would not be regarded as the best of lives. It was not overtly, terribly sinful, but there would be things that need to change.

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And so I prayed. I said, help me, God. Here I am. I'm persuaded that the truth of the gospel,

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I'm persuaded of that truth. But I have no heart to believe upon Christ.

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Help me. And then about two weeks went by and I went to a church service.

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And that was of some help, but not really in resolving my position, my condition.

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And then at the end of those two weeks, I was in conversation with a graduate student who had spent quite a bit of time helping me to put

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Christianity together in my understanding. And in that conversation, I was led to a point where I realized that there was nothing in the way of me coming to Christ, that whatever obstacles

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I had erected were no longer there. And now, you know,

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I could freely come, not under any coercion or anything of that nature, but the barriers that I thought were there were no longer there.

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And the fellow who spent quite some time with me, Lawrence was his name, said, well, do you want to pray now?

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And I said, no, I'd rather be on my own. So he left. And there I was in my room in the hall of residence on my own, and the sense that I had was now you've come to see what you wanted to see, whether it was true and you now are free to come to Christ, what are you going to do?

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And it was as if I was standing on the edge of eternity all alone. And the sense

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I had was an unusual one in the sense that I thought if I don't respond now, then the window of opportunity that is open whereby

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I can see the worthiness of Christ and the rightness of responding to Him might close. I can't presume that the perspective that I had at that point would remain.

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And it wasn't anything coercive. It was just a sober realization that I'd come to see something that beforehand

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I hadn't, and that if I was going to respond, I must respond then. So I did. I yielded my life to Christ as my

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Lord and my Savior. And I thought bells would ring, but nothing happened. And it was almost a letdown in one sense because I didn't feel any difference.

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The room was just the same. There's no light or anything like that. But the following day, my resolve to serve

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Christ was tested. And that was very helpful in that it brought out the genuineness of my commitment to Christ that I was going to put

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Him first and not myself first. And then following on from there, the

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Navigators were very helpful in helping me to be grounded in what the

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Scriptures taught about living the Christian life and engaging with God's people and being well -informed and sober -minded in terms of how

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Christianity was to be expressed. So it was a very helpful time in establishing my understanding of the faith and the practice of the faith.

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And during that period, there's a massive transition between how I used to live and the friends that I had, and now how

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I am living and the new friends that I have. And it was a matter of readjusting how I engaged folk and the kind of social activities

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I got involved in. But God graciously helped me to understand further how to live for Christ and how to walk stably because there was a period of instability in trying to get my steady footing as a

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Christian and trusting God that the way in which He laid out for me to live was the right way to live and the helpful way to live and so on.

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But for me, Christianity was an absolute conviction that this makes perfect sense.

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And then the conviction of that was then borne out in living out that reality of loving

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God and loving others. Well, praise God, first of all. It's amazing just to trace

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His mercies back to us and to see. And, you know, in every conversion, every testimony of conversion, there is a place where the story sort of converges.

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And I came to an end of myself. I realized that I had to call on the name of the

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Lord, and He heard me. But before that point, it's always amazing to see how varied and how different and how the

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Lord never seems to deal with people the same way twice. And yet the way that He deals with us, in a sense, it shapes.

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It does have a shaping effect, I think. And being familiar with your ministry, having listened to you preach and had the privilege to do that for several years now as you've come over and as I've heard things on the

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Internet, some of the maybe the emphases that are there that I'm very grateful for,

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I hear maybe in the way that the Lord dealt with you. So it's remarkable, I think, that you came initially thinking, well,

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I'm going to solve this problem. You know, I'll find a way to put the sort of the nail in the coffin of this whole, you know, theistic thought.

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And then coming to hear Christ and coming to a knot you couldn't unravel, you know, what does it mean that you have to be born again?

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And then even coming to a place where through studies of these subjects, you saw the mechanics.

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Okay, so, okay, so imputation, you know, double imputation, my sin on Him, His righteousness on me.

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Come in to see how the gospel works mechanically. And yet something must be known and felt.

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There was still, I mean, someone could have slipped in right then and said, welcome to the family of God, brother.

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You got it. You know, mark that day down in your Bible. And in the Lord's kindness, He didn't allow that sort of false closure to come leading you down a path of thinking, well, all you have to do is understand.

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And yet, and He brought you to a place where, no, you had to deal with the person. And even giving insight beyond what you could have possibly known in that moment that my ability to hear is a spiritual thing.

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And I better not squander this opportunity in a sense. So anyway, it's amazing to hear.

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Just today, I want to talk about your sermon that you mentioned, that you just preached to us today.

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I can't get into all of it, but you preached to us from John 13 and then brought in John 14 as well.

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And the initial message was one of, how do we have assurance that God loves us?

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And so many things, I want to tell you, if you're listening, you can go on our blog, you can go to our page, we'll have it linked in our sermon notes, would encourage you to listen to the sermon.

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But there are so many things I think that if you're a believer, you'll identify with there. Ways that we can have assurance, maybe a derived assurance.

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I don't know if that's the word I'm trying to, but so, okay, if A plus B equals C, then

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C means I have assurance. Okay, God loves His church. I'm in the church. Well, then

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God must love me. But the question lingers, does He really love me? And so could you just tell us without having to re -preach your sermon, what were some of the main points from today?

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We often may struggle with believing that God actually loves me.

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We know that God is love, though that doesn't totally define Him. It's an expression of how

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He engages with His people and how we are to engage with one another. But the very notion that God loves me,

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I think, speaks to our human insecurity and even frailty.

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And it, for some people, is not an easy thing to talk about because they don't want to reveal what's beneath the surface because we all want to pretend that everything is fine.

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But for all of us, the assurance that I am truly and fully embraced by God and that I don't need to perform in order to become more acceptable to Him is important to grasp.

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And we can tend to torment ourselves into thinking that this is merely a mystical effect of faith itself, that if I have faith, then

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I will be able to read the Scriptures and thereby be moved by that to the understanding that God loves me as an individual.

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But in practice, it very rarely works that way. And someone who tries to go down that particular avenue can end up quite frustrated because the more they give themselves to the reading of Scripture, the more they give themselves to learning about what

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Christ has accomplished through His life and sacrifice. And yet, not getting any closer to the recognition that God loves them, it can leave a person feeling somewhat helpless, really.

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What more can I do? How can I grasp hold? There must be something wrong with me.

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When in reality, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with such a person that they are simply trying to approach the matter in a way that's not going to give them the answer that they need.

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And so it was a desire to try and deal with that. And it really came out of a conversation that I had with someone where they had been listening to something and they said, well,

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I know that the text of Scripture says that God loves me, that Christ loves me.

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But how do you feel that? How do you know that? How do I know that Christ loved me? And here was someone who was faced with the

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Scriptures but wasn't assured individually that they were one who was loved by Christ.

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And so that led me into looking at this particular passage to try and bring out the nature of assurance with respect to the love of God.

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And the first point that I covered was that we must let Christ love us. And this really speaks to our fundamental engagement with God.

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And the irony, it would at least to me appear to be that a person may say they're a

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Christian and that they are yielded to God. But what does that actually mean?

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Does that mean that I am yield to certain assertions about who God is? Or does it mean that I follow a certain morality or accept certain norms for Christian behavior?

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What does it mean to really know God or to be open to being loved by God?

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And in the passage in John 13, it deals with the need for cleansing and Christ symbolized that in the washing of his disciples' feet.

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And it's at that level that we really, in many ways, engage

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God by virtue of a faith that rests in him. We trust him to work his salvation in our lives through the sanctification of our life before him in delivering us from the power and the guilt and the pollution of sin.

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It's not simply a matter of coming to faith in Christ and then resting in the thought that there's a terminal judgment to come.

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Jesus Christ has died in my place. I don't have to worry about that terminal judgment. I'm saved. No, Jesus saves present tense.

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And we come into that reality as we yield our lives to his work in cleansing us of our sin to the end that we may come before God and be blessed of him and know the reality of his love towards us.

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Because as we walk in holiness, as he is holy, then we have fellowship with him. So it's very much a matter of us engaging with God in his work through his spirit in sanctifying us.

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So when Jesus says in the very next chapter in John 14, 21, and then verse 23, he who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me.

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And he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love him and will disclose myself to him.

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And then if anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our abode with him.

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You connected those verses with this concept of how do we know that God loves us?

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Well, we need to trust him and trust his word and trust. Stop self -evaluating whether I'm doing this right or I'm thinking, what should

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I do? Stop. These aren't your words, but to stop trying to be the captain of determining whether I am doing what

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I should be doing and to let God tell us in his word what we should be doing. And as we have his commandments and do them, then this promise that not only will we be loved by the father, but that they will come to us and Christ says,

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I'll disclose myself to him. He says, the father and I will come and we'll make our abode with him.

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I mean, this sounds marvelous, but tell us more into what is

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Christ promising here? God's commandments are not simply instructions that we follow and then in consequence of following them, everything falls into place.

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It's more than that. God is showing us how to walk in unity with him.

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And in walking in unity with him, we have fellowship with him. We come to understand the work of his love in our life through Jesus Christ.

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As we put off the ways of thinking and acting that characterized our lives before we came to put our trust in Jesus Christ and as we think and live in a manner that's consistent with the same as Jesus Christ in living in submission to the father's will, but it's not submission in terms of our will is forcibly suppressed, but rather the recognition that God is good and God is wise and that we have been brought into a relation with him through Jesus Christ, whereby he is bringing us to understand the fullness of who he is and of his work in redemption, a redemption that delivers us from being driven by our own will in its destructive aspects to being driven by his will in its constructive aspects.

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And so his commands are not just simply a matter of do's and don'ts, but rather these are declarations of who he is and if we walk in the way that he has set out in his word, then we will be walking with him and thereby engaging with him.

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But it's not only that aspect, it's the very process itself, because as we see the goodness of the word of God and therefore the goodness of God, we understand something more of his love towards us and we see the transformation in our own life and thereby the reality of God's love in bringing about that transformation becomes more and more real to us.

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So it's very much an experiential matter. Sometimes our tendency today is to want

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God to do something miraculous, something mystical whereby there's an inner change as a consequence perhaps of in some nebulous way putting our trust in him, but he doesn't typically work in those ways.

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It's a real relationship. There's a real engagement with our God and the blessing is

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God himself, the blessing is Christ himself. He is the one who is offered to us in the gospel.

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He is the one whom we receive and it's in walking with him in the manner that he exemplified in his own life and which he then directs his disciples to follow, that we have fellowship with him and if we have fellowship with him, we have fellowship with the

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Father and with the Spirit and the assurance of God's presence with us and the reality of God's love for us comes right home.

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And it then provides the challenge, do I trust in Jesus? Not do

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I simply acknowledge who he is and what he has done and what he will do, but am I placing my trust in his hands that as he directs me to live in this particular way, saying that he is the way, the truth and life, that that way is the perfect way for me to live?

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And it may not feel that way as I try to proceed along it because it's going to challenge my appetites, my inclinations and what seems comfortable and easy for me.

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But like someone going through a training program, it may well be in that training program that they're directed to do things that don't seem easy for them to do, don't come naturally to them.

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But if they are willing to embrace the instruction given, then they will find in their actual carrying out of that instruction the benefits that come to it.

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And our Christianity works out in that particular way. Taste and see that the Lord is good. And as we give ourselves to living for the

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Lord, then we come to understand more of the living Lord at work in our lives and the reality of his love.

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And this is entirely rational. So faith is not some sort of mystical transcendental exercise, but rather it is an engagement with one whom we count as worthy and absolutely trustworthy, and whom many have proven to be faithful in the transformation of their life to the degree that there is that measure of contentment and peace in their life, but not in itself.

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It's a contentment and peace in regard to the relation that we have with God and then in our relation with ourselves and in our relation with others.

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Because for many, there's a conflict that goes on and that defines much of our human behavior and engagement.

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But when there is that settledness within ourselves, we're not striving to be something that we're not, we're not striving to prove something, we're not on the defensive, but where we are able to rest in the reality of being loved and accepted and valued as a person, then this has a psychological effect upon us which has sociological implications.

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Hence, Christ says that, as I have loved you, so you must love one another. And by this, all men will know, all people will know that you are my disciples.

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The Christian gospel is not only a verbal proclamation, but it's a visual demonstration of the reality that Christ saves.

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Amen. Well, I appreciate so much that you just said, and just jumping back a few thoughts in there.

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I appreciate also a clarification of what you don't mean, that this talk of yieldedness, you know, there are some counterfeit theologies out there that use biblical,

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I mean, we only have so many words in this book, and yet, and so they get used sometimes, but they get used in ways that we don't mean them.

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So oftentimes, this talk of yieldedness, and what was known for a while as the

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Keswick sanctification, just, I just need to be more yielded, and as I'm more yielded,

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I'll grow in sanctification, and I'll, that's that treadmill that you were describing earlier, you know, I'll get my assurance of Christ's love by really my performance, but my performance now is a yieldedness, and so I appreciate you saying, no, that's not what

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I mean, and that's not what Christ is talking about, and also, you know, this is a supernatural thing, but it's not a go sit on a mountaintop somewhere until God downloads it into your brain kind of mystical thing.

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It's not the second blessing that we need, you know, it's a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a tenth, and a hundredth that come as we walk with the

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Lord in the light of His Word, and as we just saying congregationally trust and obey, because there really is just no other way.

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And God's work in our life in bringing us to Himself is to reveal who

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He is, and to reveal Himself in a way that causes us to respond with a recognition that He's worthy, that He's trustworthy.

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So our worship is an expression of the recognition of the worthiness of our God, and it's so often our pride, our efforts to try and control our own lives, and the view that I understand myself better than anyone else can, so therefore

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I should determine for myself the direction of my life, is ultimately a cause that may bring about some achievement, but it never makes us whole.

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It always creates some measure of insecurity. But when God manifests

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Himself to us, as He does through Christ and the Scriptures, which are a written revelation of who

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He is, then we get to see Him, and it makes rational sense.

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It's not a matter of trying to believe against all rationality, but rather He reveals

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Himself in a way that we can think about the revelation that's made of Himself, the kind of person

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He is, the way in which He acts, and the ultimate demonstration of His commitment in the giving of His Son as a sacrifice for His people.

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All this falls into place, and we see the loveliness of Christ in how

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He engages with the Father, how He engages with His disciples, how He engages with other people, and we are drawn to Him.

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And to the degree that we say, I'll live my life as He directs me to live, so I'll live,

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I'll prove what is true and noble and right as I lay down my life before Him.

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But it's not a denial of who we are. Some might think that, you know, I'm losing my sense of individuality,

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I'm losing the person I am, I'm being subsumed under another figure. But no, no, we actually flourish.

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We become who we are in the most wholesome way as we give ourselves to Christ.

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And if you want an analogy, it might be like two people get married. When two people get married in the ideal circumstance where there is genuine love and commitment and so on, each flourishes.

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They don't lose themselves. They actually fulfill who they are, and the marriage relationship and its dynamic is enlarged by each person being able to freely give themselves to the other in their own unique way with their particular disposition and personality.

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You know, I have a lot of friends, I was converted out of, I was an atheist for a while and still have a lot of friends who just don't have any use for God.

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And they think that what I've done is I've finally just gotten old and decided to put on a moral straight jacket and just stop doing all that fun stuff.

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And what I so desperately wish that they understood and that any person understood is that, you know, before coming to Christ with the old nature that we're all born with, we inherit from our father

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Adam, I was a slave to sin. I lived in those ways because that was the only way to live and that was the only pleasure that I knew.

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But because of this new birth that we just talked about earlier that comes to all those and causes us to call on the name of the

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Lord, there's a new nature now. And in a very real sense,

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I'm now finally free to be everything that I want to be, that I truly want to be.

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And that is the glorious freedom of the Christian that I'm so long that others would know.

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Brother, it's the Lord's day and I know that you have a congregation in about an hour and a half from here who are waiting for you to bring an evening word and the services.

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I don't want to keep you any longer. I'm really enjoying talking with you. I wonder if just here at the end, very briefly, you and I have talked a little bit about how

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Medi Gratia would like for you to consider perhaps putting together a six -week study for the people who follow our

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Bible studies and that sort of thing. And you'd mentioned that you might be interested in doing that on the gospel and some of the implications of the gospel.

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So just as almost a teaser, would you close us with a little bit of insight into that?

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Yeah, I'd like to talk about the nature of the gospel. What is the Christian gospel? Because here we are, we're living in the

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South and many people would maintain that they know what the gospel is.

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But is the gospel that many claim to know and some proclaim really the gospel as we see it in the

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Scriptures? And in essence, I want to try and bring out the gospel about Jesus Christ.

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He is the good news. It's not simply what God has done for us, but it is God Himself who comes to us through Jesus Christ.

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So we're not receiving some gift of deliverance from God's judgment.

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It's far more than that. We're receiving the gift of His own Son. For God so loved the world that He gave

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His one and only Son. And I wish to bring that out as to clarify it for God's people and for others who are looking into Christianity, that they might have an understanding of the gospel that conforms to a consistent reading of the

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Scriptures, that they may be able to respond to it if they so choose on a solid footing as opposed to one that is not completely filled out.

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Well, keep an eye on mediagratia .org or if that's hard to spell in English, themeansofgrace .org.

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We'll post this here. We'll post links to the sermon that Albert just delivered.

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And when we've made it, we'll post links to that study. I look forward to that.