Calvinism Sermon: Perseverance of the Saints (Part 7 in Series)

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Father, we come before you, Lord, dependent upon you for your guidance, for your equipping.

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God, we need you to teach today, God. We need you. We need to understand you.

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We need you, God, to renew our minds, redirect our passions. Help us,

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God, to walk humbly with you, to be dependent upon you. God, help us to understand how great a salvation that we have.

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Help us to understand your grace in salvation. God, I pray that by your Spirit you teach your people.

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Open our eyes to beautiful things. Let our ears hear your voice. God, remove our fears.

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Remove the stumbling blocks. God, grant to us hope rooted in your promises.

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I pray, God, that you would cause me to decrease Christ, to increase

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God. Remove, Lord, me from this, and I pray that you would be the centerpiece,

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God, and teach. We pray, God, you'd help us to understand the glory of your salvation.

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In Jesus' name, amen. So doctrines of grace. If you guys haven't been with us since the very beginning, of course you can go pick up later.

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All the studies are on YouTube. You can get access to all the messages, and so I don't want to rehash every bit and piece of the entire series, but I can say that we do this series once a year with our church because we believe that understanding the grace of God in salvation is one of the most important things when it comes to our sanctification.

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Having a wrong view on these particular points about our condition and God's electing grace,

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God's freedom, God's sovereignty, the atonement, having a wrong view on these issues will bleed its way out into other areas of your theology, and theology matters a lot.

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What you believe about God, what you believe about the world, what you believe about yourself dramatically impacts how you live in the world, how you respond to tragedy and difficulty and blessing from God.

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And so having the grace of God in its biblical place, understanding what the

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Bible says about the grace of God and our condition, understanding what the Bible says about our salvation that Christ has accomplished is one of the vitally important truths, things to understand as a

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Christian, whether you are a young believer, new in the faith, or a mature believer. And doing these studies every year,

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I can tell you this, without question, doing this study, as often as we've done it for seven years as a church, every year, it impacts me as a minister, it transforms me, it encourages me, it continues to give me hope, it changes me, it challenges me when

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I teach on these things, and every time we do it as a church, God blesses our church.

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He blesses us as a family with humility, and I think that's probably one of the most dramatic things that you notice is that when you study the doctrines of grace, is that when you really understand it and embrace it and are really changed by it, what you see follow an understanding of the grace of God is humility.

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When you understand that salvation is centered upon God and what God does, it brings you to your knees.

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It actually removes anxiety and worry and fear. It grants to you hope for your own life and sanctification, hope in the difficult situations you face in the world, whether it's your job or your marriage or you raising your children.

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It grants to you hope. It grants to you hope for the future. It grants to you a riskiness in terms of how you face the world with the gospel.

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I want to say that every time we study the doctrines of grace and we actually get ourselves oriented to the situation before God, every time it creates within our family, our body, it creates a godly, risky, missionary lifestyle to us.

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Because when you understand that God is the sovereign over salvation, He is the one that can give eyes to blind people and hearing to deaf people, when you understand that, then it humbles you and gives to you awe for God.

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It gives to you a heart that desires to worship God and know Him and understand

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Him because you understand that it's His work, not yours. It removes from you fear about the future because you know that you are kept by God.

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He stops your foot from stumbling, ultimately. And it also gives to you a view of the world around you and understanding godly wisdom about approaching it, saying, no,

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I know that this looks dark and broken. It looks like an obstacle that cannot be overcome, but I also know that God, who is able to give life where there was death,

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I know that God, who is able to speak light and darkness, disperses. You see, when you understand the doctrines of grace, these truths, it dramatically changes you.

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I've seen the doctrines of grace, understanding these truths, change how families actually endure tragedy, loss, death, disease.

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Understanding these truths, the network of things that are involved in the doctrines of grace will impact how you actually face the hospital bed.

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It does. It impacts how you stand next to the casket. It truly does.

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These things change you. I've seen the doctrines of grace, these truths, what God says about these things.

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Take a person who is hostile and prideful, haughty, and transfer them into a gracious,

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Christ -honoring evangelist. Once you understand that God is the sovereign and you are not, it can change the course of your life.

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It really does. It has practical importance. People oftentimes say, well, that's a very difficult discussion, the sovereignty of God, the grace of God and salvation.

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Christians disagree on it, so perhaps we just don't talk about it. Perhaps we actually just don't spend time on it, but I want to say that these are things that God has spent pages and pages and pages of Scripture on.

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He wants you and I to ask these questions that he has provided answers for.

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He wants you and I to understand these things because these things give him glory.

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They take the boasting away from you and I in salvation, and they bring all the boasting back to God.

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These things humble you. Why does it matter? It matters because God has said it.

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First and foremost, when God says something, that matters. He wants you to understand, to believe, to obey, but it also matters in a practical way because God gives us these truths, listen, not to create online debating theologians.

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God gives us these truths so that we worship him because of them, and then they change us.

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They make us like Jesus. You saw in this text when we read in Romans, what's the point of this foreknowing, this predestining?

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God gives us this. Is it because we're so great and wonderful and amazing and God saw us and was like,

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I got to have that because this person is so desirable?

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No. What's the purpose? It says in the text that God works all things together for good, and it says what?

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It says for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to do what? To be conformed to the image of his son.

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God's electing grace, God's salvation wasn't just to punch tickets for heaven one day.

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It was to conform human beings into the image of Jesus.

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Jesus, listen, is the image of God, the perfect image of God. We are image of God.

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We share that. We are image of God, but what kind of image of God are we? We are broken, fallen, distorted, disfigured image of God.

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It hasn't been erased. It's like a coin with an image on it, right? You can take that coin with the image on it and you can throw it into the mud.

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You grab it out of the mud and you start to wipe it off a bit, and what's on it is still mud and dirt and grime, and the image is still there.

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The image isn't lost. It's still there. It doesn't go away, right? It's just marred.

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It's dirty. It's covered, right? That's you and I. We are imago Dei, image of God, and what

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God is doing, has done in Jesus, is he, Jesus, is the image of God.

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He is the perfect humanity. He's what God intended for us to be in all aspects, and so when

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Jesus comes into the world, he is what God intended us to be.

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He is the righteous one, the blameless one, the one who obeys the Father, who loves

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God and loves others with perfection, and so when Jesus dies and rises from the dead, he redeems us, he purchases us, and then when he comes out of that tomb in glory, he enters into a new world.

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Jesus is that new creation, and what God is doing is he's taking humanity and he's shaping us into the perfect image of God, bringing us into conformity with the image of Jesus.

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That's God's purpose, and let me just say that God is powerful, mighty, and dedicated and zealous to that task and goal.

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He is not done with you. What you should learn in the doctrines of grace is that God is the sovereign and you are not, that God gets the glory and you don't, and that, listen, though you and I are weak and feeble and powerless,

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God is mighty, and he is able to accomplish what he says he will in the world.

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Remember that. These are vitally important truths to get. Let's just do this overview real fast.

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I talked about the fact that when we talk about the doctrines of grace or the five points of Calvinism, as they're called, we're not talking about a system that was just conjured up for no reason.

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What we're talking about is a conflict in history. We've had these fights many times in history, right?

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God allows false teachers, heretics to rise up, sometimes within the body of Christ.

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He allows them to rise up so that the believers get around the Word of God and they actually respond to the error with the

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Scriptures. From the second century, we had Sabellianism. Church rises up against that.

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We had to fight against the Marcionites, people who were saying that the law of God didn't matter anymore. The Old Testament was irrelevant.

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The Christians formed together and they actually declared what the canon is in response to the Marcionites who were denying the

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Old Testament, essentially. We had to fight against Arius of Alexandria. This is where Saint Nick punched him in the face, at least that's how tradition goes, right?

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We've had to fight against Pelagianism and semi -Pelagianism. If you're new to Christ and these things are going over your head, don't worry.

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Just know that they're very important things, right? People have come against Christ and who he actually is.

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The church gets around the Word of God and they fight against error with the truth and we develop creeds and confessions to set guardrails around the truth.

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We had an instance in history during the time of the Reformation where light broke in once again after darkness.

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We had a moment where the followers of a man named Jacob Arminius were essentially protesting what the church at large was teaching at the time and they were saying, we don't really agree that people are really dead fully in their sins.

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They're sinful but they're not so dead that they can't respond to God's grace. We think when

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God elected people, he elected them based upon what he saw they would do in response to him.

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When it comes to Jesus' death, we think God died to make people save a bull but not necessarily purchasing individual people and accomplishing salvation.

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We think he gave a general atonement to make people save a bull so if they would just reach out to God, then they could actually make that worth something.

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We think that God can desire to save somebody, Jesus could die for them, the

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Holy Spirit could try to save and that human beings can resist God and just thwart his purposes.

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What happened was the remonstrance, the protest happened and the

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Christians formed together at the time over a hundred theologians, scholars, pastors, missionaries to get into the word of God and to respond to this protest.

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What they responded with is what's known today as the five points of Calvinism.

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You've seen the famous clip of Donald Trump when he's being interviewed by the news guy and Donald Trump says, well, he started it, right?

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Is that kind of childlike? He goes, well, he started it, right? Well, in this case, it's kind of true. They started it.

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This is a response, TULIP, T -U -L -I -P is a response to the protest and it's about very important truths and so we're going to talk about those truths now, but what

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I said in the very beginning is really it needed to have an additional point. The additional point that needs to be there is the sovereignty of God.

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It was assumed throughout this, the sovereignty of God, God is completely sovereign, not kind of sovereign, totally sovereign and so really you need to explain this, you really needed to say

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TULIP. TULIP, sovereignty of God has to be up front always.

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God is the sovereign. It says in the scriptures that God declares the end from the beginning, that he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth and no one can stay his hand and say, what have you done?

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Nobody thwarts God's purposes. Jesus goes so far as to say that God is so sovereign that the very hairs on your heads are numbered.

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That's insane. That's sovereignty at the micro level, not just the macro over the big things.

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He knows the very number of hairs on your head and for some of you older guys, that might seem easy, but it's tremendous and Jesus actually says that a sparrow doesn't fall dead from a tree without your father knowing about it, determining it.

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Even the birds, when they fall dead flat, that was because a sovereign God was the one wielding that situation.

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He is not ever thwarted. God is the one who can say in this very text before us,

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Romans 8, what? That he causes all things to work together for good.

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For whom? Those who love God. What are they? Everything. Called. According to what?

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His purpose. He's that kind of sovereign. He's the kind of God, watch, who doesn't just know the future as though he's taken in information about the future.

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He's the one who determines what does and doesn't take place in the world.

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He gives history its shape, which means, listen, in the sovereignty of God, there is nothing that happens in our lives, in this world, that isn't first strained through his sovereign hands.

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As Dr. R .C. Sproul has said famously, he says, there isn't a maverick molecule in the universe.

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That's true. According to the scriptures, he's that kind of sovereign over the entire story of history and the little bits and pieces.

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Every detail, even the casting of the lot, that is in God's hands.

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You may develop plans in your mind and think you know your trajectory, where you're going, but it says that God is the one who directs your steps.

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Every detail is ordained, controlled by God so that, listen, ultimately, this is the point.

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Listen closely. There isn't anything that happens in this world ever that happens without purpose.

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That's fundamental. You have to capture that because we love that when we look at the blessing.

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When we see the blessing and the good things we call good things in the world, we see that and we say, well,

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God had his purposes. He's sovereign. We love to declare the sovereignty of God in the garden, but we find ourselves oftentimes in the desert.

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When we get to the desert, we oftentimes don't want to give God his sovereign props.

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We don't want to say that he's the sovereign there. We oftentimes, in a human level, we want to say when the bad things happen, well,

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God had nothing to do with that. That wasn't God's will. He wasn't in charge of that. The truth is, we live in a fallen, sinful, corrupt world.

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It's a world that we wanted for ourselves and we want for ourselves as sinful image of God.

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And what God does in this fallen, corrupt, sinful world is he still wields his sovereignty over it so that you can see an incident in our own history, the worst crime ever committed by the hands of sinful human beings.

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What was it? The murder of Jesus. Jesus is murdered. He's innocent.

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The son of God brought before the Jews on trial.

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All those little moments, every piece, every person involved had different motivations.

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The church prayed that in Acts chapter 4. They talk about it. Gathered in this city against your holy servant

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Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, the peoples of Israel, the Gentiles to do what?

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They said this, to do whatever your hand had predestined to occur. Here's the worst crime, the worst sin in the history of humanity, murdering

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God as a man on a tree. And what does it say? That God had predestined that.

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And why? He predestined it for his glory, his praise.

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And for what? For your good. So you see everything.

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Whether it's a physical disease, whether it's the financial collapse, whether it's loss, whether it's death,

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God is the one who is the sovereign. And you must see that.

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If we don't embrace and understand the sovereignty of God in all things, we ignore the text of the

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Bible. We create a fictional God, a functional Savior that's not a very good one.

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And listen, if we don't embrace the truth about the sovereignty of God, listen, we are dramatically impacted at the hospital bed.

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If we don't know this truth, then we don't get to taste it. We don't get to feel this beautiful truth and the impact that it's supposed to have on us as Christians.

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The sovereignty of God is the foundation of it all. Next, the T, total inability. What did that mean?

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It didn't mean, listen, that we are total depravity as bad as we could possibly be.

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It meant what? When they said it in response to the Armenians, they said, we are

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Ephesians 2, dead in our sins and trespasses. By nature, children of what?

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Wrath. By nature, children of wrath. Dead in our sins and trespasses. You see, here's what's important to get.

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The Bible doesn't say that we are sinful and therefore sick.

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The Bible says we are sinful, hostile, enemies of God, dead in our sins and trespasses.

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By nature, children of wrath, helpless, ungodly, wicked. There's some terms.

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That's in the first five chapters of the book of Romans, essentially. That's what the Bible says about our condition.

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And so what does that mean about us? It means, according to the Bible, that of course we're making choices.

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We have what's called a creaturely will. We are doing things that are the things that we want to do.

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They're according to our desires. But our wills are not free.

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Jesus says in John chapter 8, what about our wills? He says about our condition. He says, whoever commits sin is a free man.

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No. Whoever commits sin is a, what, slave of sin.

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How could we say that after the fall takes place, we have a free will when

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Jesus says you're a slave, when the Bible says you're dead? So total inability meant that we are in ourselves apart from the grace of God and regeneration and the work of God in our hearts, we are completely unable, unwilling to come to God apart from His work.

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It's what the Bible says in Romans chapter 8. Those who are in the flesh, listen, cannot submit to the law of God.

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They don't have the ability to do so. They can't do what's pleasing to God. If you want to have total inability summed up in a verse, one, here it is.

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John 6, 44, Jesus says to people who are right in front of Him, right in front of Him, they look like followers.

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He walked into a megachurch. Everybody looks like they're with Him.

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I bet you if you would have asked them, if you would have said to them, who's the Messiah, I'd be willing to bet they would have all pointed right towards Jesus, and they would have said, there

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He is, that's the Messiah. There's so many people in front of Him, and He says to them, you've seen

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Me, and yet you don't believe. But yet they were there. They're hanging out with the

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Messiah. They would have, I think, acknowledged, checked the box, and He says, you've seen Me, you don't believe.

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Why? They were coming for the wrong reasons. They didn't really trust in Jesus. They were there for the different bread that perished.

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They didn't want the bread of life. And in John 6, 44, Jesus says to them, no man can come to Me unless the

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Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up.

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There's total depravity, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints in a sentence.

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No man can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up. That's it.

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No man is able to come to Me. And so the next point in TULIP was unconditional election.

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And what's that mean? Essentially this, listen closely, that God chose. God chose. God has sovereign freedom, and before the world began,

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He determined that He would save a people in Jesus Christ. And you might want to think when you hear that, if you're nude right now, you might say, but wait a minute, that's not fair.

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He chose to give grace to these people and to leave these in their sin? Answer, yes.

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And if you think that's not fair, you don't understand the holiness of God in our sinful condition.

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Because what would have been fair for God, just of God, would be for God to look at all of humanity and say, you hate

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Me, you want your sin, I'll leave you to it. I'll give it to you. I'll let you have it.

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There are times, Romans 1, you know that takes place. What's God saying in Romans 1? When He talks about us knowing

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God and suppressing the truth of God, it says this, they profess to be wise, they become fools.

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They don't want God in their knowledge. They don't even want to know Him. Get out of my head, God. I don't want you.

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And it says what? Therefore, God gave them over. To do what?

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He gives them over. Okay, I'll let you have it. I'll let you have your sin. I'll let you enjoy it.

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I'll let you experience the results of your choices. You don't want Me, then I'll give you to what you do want.

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See, here's what's important pastorally, I think, that I address, especially with a lot of new people in this room right now, listen, listen, the display of judgment isn't always the hurricane, it isn't always the earthquake, it isn't always the calamity.

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You know, sometimes Christians die in those things, right? We see these great big earthquakes and buildings topple over and they kill lots of people and oftentimes you have people that come on television and you say, that's judgment from God.

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And the truth is, well, yeah, maybe, but you don't know for what.

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And there were children of God who died in those things. He's not condemning them. So but you know what is a sign, surefire way to know that God's judgment has fallen on a people or a person?

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Romans 1. Therefore, God gave them over. To do what? To do what's against nature.

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He starts listing things, haters of God, disobedient to parents, all these things get wrapped up in there.

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And you see that God giving people over to their sin is a just thing and he does it.

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Unconditional election says that before the world began, Jesus promises to save.

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What's it say? That our names are written in the Lamb's book of life before the foundation of the world. That Jesus is a lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

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That's what the Bible says, that God chose us, Ephesians 1, in him before the foundation of the world.

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Romans 8, this very text, it says what? Read it in verse 29.

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For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

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Watch. And those whom he predestined, he also called, and those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified.

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That's the golden chain of redemption. Here's what you got to gather. Unconditional election is that God foreknew, chose to enter into intimate relationship with a people in Jesus Christ.

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Before the world began, your name, if you trust in Jesus, if you're believing in Jesus, it means that your name was on God's heart before he ever spoke a giraffe into existence, before he ever made the mountains come forth, before he ever spread the oceans across the world.

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Your name was in God's heart. He chose to save. The Father chose a people in Jesus Christ, gave them to Jesus.

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Jesus determined to give his life for those people, and the Spirit of God brings their salvation into their life at a point in time in their life.

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Unconditional election. Listen. When God chose to save, he chose to save irrespective of your good works or anything in you.

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He chose to save you because of his mercy, because of his grace, because of his love.

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It wasn't motivated by your response. If God looked through time, if that was even possible for God not to know something and have to check it out, if he looked through time to see who would believe in him, what would he see?

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Romans 3, there is no God seeker. What would he see?

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Ephesians 2, people who are dead in their sins and trespasses by nature, children of wrath.

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So what did God do? He chose to set his love upon an undeserving people.

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Doesn't that cause awe? Doesn't that create within you worship, to understand that when

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God chose to save you, listen, he chose to save you knowing all about you when he did it.

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All your failures, all your sin, all your rebellion, all your sinning against God with a high hand.

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He knew all about it. And he chose to give you grace and not justice, grace, mercy, and not be fair with you, but to give you his mercy and love.

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Next is the sometimes controversial one, limited atonement. What's that? It's important to get.

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Everybody limits the atonement. Everybody limits the atonement unless, of course, you're a universalist.

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If you believe that there is a place called hell and that people will be going there, if you believe that God actually does bring his judgment into people's lives, if you believe there are people who know

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Jesus and are saved and people who don't and are lost, then you believe in limited atonement. It's a question of what kind of limited atonement.

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Do you believe that it is limited in terms of the people it was dedicated to or do you believe it was limited in its power?

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The Arminian says that Jesus died not for anyone necessarily in particular to fully purchase them, but he made a death to where if people would reach out, it would actually apply to them.

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That's essentially what they believe. So they limit the atonement's efficacy. It doesn't really save anybody because it's dependent upon something that they do for it to be operational.

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So they limit its efficacy. The Reformed Christian says that the atonement was limited in terms of its scope.

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In other words, when Jesus died, we believe, John 10, that he's the good shepherd who lays his life down for the sheep.

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For who? The sheep. And he says what? I have other sheep which are not of this fold, them

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I must also bring, and they will become one flock with one shepherd.

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And he says, what about those sheep? He says to the ones that are there now, he says, tell us. Quit keeping us in suspense.

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Are you the Messiah? Tell us plainly. And he says, I told you. And the reason you can't hear me is because you are not of my sheep.

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My sheep hear my voice. They follow me. I give them eternal life and no one can snatch them from my hands.

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They're in my father's hands and no one can snatch them from my father's hands. That's what he says,

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John 10. The atonement, we say, actually accomplished something.

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That when Jesus died, you can say as a believer, he died for me. He took away all my sins on that cross.

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He bore the wrath of God and exhausted it in himself on that tree, and I was purchased.

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There was a time where God brought that into my life and applied it, but I was saved ultimately on that cross.

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Limited atonement means a number, and I did tell you, the great benefit of being a post -millennialist and a

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Calvinist is I get to believe what much of the scripture talks about, that when Jesus does return,

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I believe that it is the vast majority of humanity that will have been saved. I do believe that.

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If you want to find out more about that, listen to the messages we've done on the kingdom of God and history and the victory of Jesus, but I do personally believe what

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Revelation says, that before that throne, there is a number which no one can count.

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It is descendants of Abraham, as numerous as the stars, but watch this.

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Last thing I'll say on this point here, if Jesus, the

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God of all the universe, the eternal one, the holy one, the one we've offended, if he saved one person on that cross, one, it would be a devastating act of grace.

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One. It just doesn't make sense that God would redeem rebels like you and me.

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Here's the thing, if you think that the grace of God is owed to everybody, then you don't understand the holiness of God and the devastating effects of our sin.

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The fact that God saves one is glorious. The fact that God has saved descendants of Abraham, as numerous as the stars, is unspeakable and incomprehensible.

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Limited atonement. Jesus actually died for a people and accomplished their salvation on that cross.

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When he died, he exhausted the wrath of God in their place. Next, irresistible grace.

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Very simple. What's it mean? Regeneration. Regeneration.

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It's very simple. Ready? You and I are dead. We would not respond to God. We don't want

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God. When he gives us light and goodness and mercy and causes, ready, the rain to fall on the just and the unjust, we still rebel against him.

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And so what is irresistible grace? Is it that nobody can resist God? We resist God constantly.

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We don't want his will and his ways. What's irresistible grace? It's this. Ready? New birth.

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I'm going to ask you a question. Now I don't want you, as one pastor says,

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I don't want you to answer out loud because you'll embarrass you and me, okay?

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How does this work in terms of the chain of events? How does it work in terms of the chain?

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Do we believe in Jesus in order to be born again? Do we believe in Jesus in order to be born again or are we born again and then we believe in Jesus?

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Do we believe to become born again or are we born again so that we can believe?

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Think about it. Think about our condition. Think about what it means to repent and believe in Jesus.

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The scriptures teach that God raises people to newness of life.

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He gives them a heart of flesh where there was a heart of stone. He removes their rebellion by giving them new life and it says in Ready Philippians 129, to you it has been granted, gifted, not only to believe in Christ but also to suffer.

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Faith there is a gift from God. You're believing in Jesus. My believing in Jesus is a gift from God.

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How about this one? Ephesians 2, 8 and 9. You know this one, right? Say it with me. By grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not according to works, lest any man should boast.

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Watch. By grace are you saved through faith and that, the grace and the faith, not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.

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Faith is a gift from God. Second Timothy 2, 24 through 26 says this, that the

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Lord's servant must be patient when wronged, able to teach in humility, correcting those who oppose themselves, listen, if perhaps

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God may grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth.

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Irresistible grace just means this. When God wants to save somebody, he saves them.

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When God wants to save somebody, he saves them. When God wants to raise someone to newness of life, he raises them to life.

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Here's what it is. Ready? Lazarus in his tomb was dead, rotting, stinking, unmovable, unwilling, and what the

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Lord of glory does is he stands outside of our death and he says, Lazarus, come forth, and Lazarus responds to the voice of his maker.

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Jesus speaks light into darkness. That's what irresistible grace is. It means this.

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You and I, we really believed in Jesus. When you turn from your sin to trust in Jesus, you really believed.

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God wasn't doing the believing for you, but you believed in Jesus because God raised you to life.

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Did you ever notice that? Maybe in your own experience you remember a time, maybe you were young and it was a thing God did over time and you can't really pin where it actually took place, but for those of you guys that were like in a messy place and you turned to Jesus, did you notice the flip or the switch that flipped?

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Do you notice how you thought one way, you felt a certain way, you loved your sin, and all of a sudden someone gave you the gospel or you read it in the word of God and you felt broken and ashamed and full of sin and all you saw was

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Christ and you wanted him and you fell before him and before you were resisting him and you wanted him, you wanted to love him and obey him.

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Something happened and it wasn't you. It wasn't your strength. It wasn't your abilities.

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You turned to Christ because God. That's irresistible grace and finally perseverance of the saints.

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This is actually rather quick. I'm just giving you a couple of verses because hopefully you see these texts coming together.

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You understand already. It's all over. These truths, it's a network. They're all connected.

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It's a question in perseverance of the saints whether you believe that when God saves somebody, they will ever be lost.

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What you believe about that is dependent upon whether your view about salvation is theocentric or anthropocentric, whether it is

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God -centered or centered on man, on women, what you do. Is your view monergistic or synergistic?

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Do you believe that God saves and he saves by his power? Do you believe

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Jesus in John 6 where he says this? Listen close. My favorite. He says,

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I have come down from heaven not to do my will but the will of him who sent me and this, this is the will of him who has sent me that of all that he has given to me, listen,

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I should lose nothing but raise it up on the last day.

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You see, that's it. That's the sum of it. That Jesus has been given people and he says,

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I'm not going to lose them, none of them. Is your view that God and his power saves or is it up to us?

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That's John 6. How about John 10? Read those passages later. John 10.

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Well, actually, let's do that one now. We have time. I'm trying to keep it shorter tonight. John 10.

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Here it is. Jesus says in verse 1, truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in another way, that man is a thief and a robber.

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And he moved forward through the text. In verse 7 he says, so Jesus again said to them, truly, truly,

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I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. Verse 9, I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.

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Verse 11, I'm the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for whom? Come on, say it with me, guys.

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The sheep. He lays his life down for the sheep.

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Verse 12, he who is a hired hand and not a shepherd who does not own the sheep sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.

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He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. Verse 14, I'm the good shepherd.

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Here it is. Here it is. I know my own and my own know me. Just as the

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Father knows me and I know the Father and I lay down my life for the sheep and I have other sheep that are not of this fold,

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Jesus is talking about the Gentiles there, I must bring them also, watch, and they will listen to my voice.

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So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the

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Father loves me because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me but I lay it down of my own accord.

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I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father, watch, verse 22, at that time the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem.

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It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the colonnade of Solomon so the Jews gathered around him and said to him, how long will you keep us in suspense?

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If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you and you do not believe.

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The works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me but you do not believe because this is the reason you don't.

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You don't believe because you are not of my sheep. You are not of my sheep.

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My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me.

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I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

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My Father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of my Father's hand.

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I and the Father are one. Here's the thing, ready? Can you be born again and then unborn again?

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Regenerate and unregenerate? Can you be put into Christ and then ripped back out of him?

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I mean, are we really the kind of people considering these promises where we think we're kind of schizophrenic like he loves me, he loves me not.

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He loves me, he loves me not. He loves me, he loves me not. Here's the thing, ready? Jesus gives what kind of life?

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Eternal life. If Jesus says in John 5 24, my favorite verse in the whole Bible, truly, truly

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I say to you, he who hears my voice and believes him who sent me has, has eternal life and does not come into judgment but is passed out of death into life.

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Watch, if you had eternal life and then lost it, it was never eternal in the first place.

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The gift of eternal life, Jesus says, I know them, they'll never perish, nothing can snatch them from my hands.

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You're taken from death to life. This is the work of God, not the work of man.

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It's not because of you. The promises are complete.

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Finally, two points and again this is just cursory but in Romans 8, there's the golden chain of redemption and this is how it works.

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God foreknows us, he predestines us, he calls us to himself through the gospel, he justifies you through faith in Jesus and what takes place?

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He glorifies you, foreknown, predestined, called, justified, glorified.

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That's the golden chain that can't be broken. From your perspective and mine, we remember when the gospel came into our lives and we believed in Jesus.

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We know that but that was the work of God from before the world was created.

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Here's a text, has everything to do with God, not us. Jude 1 verse 24, write it down,

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I'm going to read it to you now. Jude 1 24, listen to how this goes, now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless and with great joy.

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Did you hear that? Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless and with great joy.

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That's the God that we're talking about. The one who is able to guard you from stumbling, the one who is able to preserve you.

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Now what's the contrast? Ready? This is important. You've heard it said, popular in evangelicalism today, once saved, always saved.

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Now fundamentally, that's true, fundamentally, it's true. If God saves a person, he'll never lose them, he'll never forsake them.

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Once saved, it's true, always saved. However, what we typically mean in our current context when people say once saved, always saved, is they mean this.

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Well, I know that Leroy doesn't believe in Jesus anymore, I don't know why I picked Leroy, I like the name, okay?

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I know that Leroy doesn't believe in Jesus anymore, I know he's off, like never goes to church, doesn't read his

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Bible, doesn't desire God, doesn't live a life or pursue a life of holiness. You know, I know that that's true of him now, but you know what?

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When he was five, he sat on his grandpa's lap and he prayed that magic prayer, right?

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He prayed the prayer that was a sinner's prayer, and so I know that he now is an unbeliever, but you know, once saved, always saved, he got his ticket punched.

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You'll hear that often, right? You hear something called this, watch, carnal Christian. He's a Christian, but he's kind of carnal, right?

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She's a Christian, but not really, right? What we would say is the

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Bible says that if God saves somebody and it's true faith, it's real faith, it's living faith, they were really saved, then they are going to be sanctified and conformed to the image of Jesus, and they will make it to the end with God guarding their foot from stumbling, they will sin and get up, face plant and get up, face plant and get up, and they will always get up because it is the work of God in them, and if somebody falls and doesn't get up, if somebody abandons

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Christ, then John says, 1

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John 2, 19, when talking about people who abandon the faith, listen to what he says, he doesn't say they went out from us because they couldn't handle it, they went out from us because they were just so sinful, he says they went out from us in order to show they were never really of us.

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Here's the thing, if we live a life of sin in opposition to God, watch, it shows that our faith was never real in the first place because those who are saved by Jesus are kept by Jesus, those who are saved by Jesus are sanctified and they make it to the end because their faith is true, and so watch, the warning can go out and should go out.

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Brothers and sisters, make sure your calling and election is sure, examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith, you see here's the thing, watch, the proof that you truly have been justified and saved is not this, oh when

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I was 9 I prayed a prayer, that's not the proof that you were saved, yeah that may have happened and it really did and you were justified and it was a real thing and God did that, but the proof that it was real was not once you believed, the proof that you were truly saved is that you are believing now, you're believing, it's active, it's not at a point in time in the past as though it's done, but you are believing in Jesus, perseverance of the saints is that once God saves somebody, he makes them into the image of Christ and keeps them till the end, where are you at in that?

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Do you know him? Are you believing in Christ today? Have you repented and are you repenting and believing in Jesus?

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You see the sweetness of all of this that makes it so beautiful is that watch, it's not up to you, it's up to God, if you're like I don't know,

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I don't know, they fall on your knees and trust in Christ now, believe in Jesus now, trust in him now and if you believe in Jesus Christ, you have a perfect Savior in Jesus, he will never lose you, he will never forsake you, the question is watch, are you believing in Jesus?

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Not have you believed in him, are you trusting? Because watch, he who endures to the end will be saved, but listen, the only one who endures at all is the one who has been saved by Jesus, it's the only reason you do endure, because God lives in you, it's his work, so that is the doctrines of grace.

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We'll do the questions, we'll do the questions and answers, praise God, we'll do some questions and answers next week, we'll answer challenging questions, verses, a handful of verses that are usually used to oppose the freedom of God in salvation and the grace of God in salvation, but here's the thing, listen,

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I will have failed, I will have failed as your pastor, I will have failed if the result, well there's shared responsibility of course in this, if this took place, but if you become arrogant, if you hear the doctrines of grace and it causes you to be haughty because of what you heard, then that maybe

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I, then I bear some responsibility how I've taught it, if you hear the doctrines of grace and it doesn't make you humble, if it doesn't break you down before God and cause you to worship, then this all was for naught, it was for nothing.

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Listen, these truths are supposed to transform you and bring you to worship

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God. They should create within you an evangelistic spirit that is humble, bold, gracious, respectful, because you go into the world now recognizing that it's

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God who saves and he saves perfectly. Every time I preach the gospel, he is glorified, whether the

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God leaves them in their sin or he saves them. So you know what it does? It should calm you down.

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Doctrines of grace should rob you of haughtiness. So where are you at? You will have truly understood this when it makes you worship

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God more and it lowers the level of your chest.

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That's when you've understood. So let's pray. Father, I pray that you'd bless

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Lord what went out over these weeks. I pray that you would take these truths and make them anchors within us, shape us, transform us.

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And God, please, Father, use these truths not to make us into really, really amazing theologians, but take these truths and please use them to make us great worshipers and effective ministers.

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I pray that God, as a result of this series, that you use these truths to raise up your church, to expand the kingdom,