Ascension Presbyterian Lord's Day Worship

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are your works. All the earth shall worship you and sing praises to you.
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They shall sing praises to your name. Oh bless our God, you peoples, and make the voice of his praise be heard, who keeps our soul among the living and does not allow our feet to be moved.
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I will bring into your house, I will go into your house with burnt offerings.
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I will pay you my vows, which my lips have uttered and my mouth has spoken when
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I was in trouble. Blessed be God, who has not turned away my prayer, nor his mercy from me.
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Let us worship God. Let us pray. Oh Lord, you are the king, eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise
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God. You are the blessed and only sovereign, the king of kings and Lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no name has seen or can see.
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To you be honor and eternal dominion. We bless the
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God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
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We praise the glory of your grace that chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
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We thank you that in love you predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.
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We rejoice that we have been sealed in Christ with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance.
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We worship and endure you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Open the eyes of our hearts that we may know the hope of your calling, the riches of the glory of your inheritance, and the surpassing greatness of your power toward us in Jesus Christ.
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All of this you have brought about in Christ when you raised him from the dead and seated him at your right hand in the heavenly places.
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Receive our worship and our praise to the glory of your grace, and we ask this in Christ's name, amen.
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Please kneel as you are able for our corporate confession of sin.
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Let us join together in confessing our sins. Almighty and most merciful
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Father, we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
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We have offended against your holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no help in us.
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O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare those, O God, who confess their faults.
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Restore those who are penitent. According to your promises, declare it unto mankind in Christ Jesus our
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Lord. Grant that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life to the glory of his holy name.
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Amen. Please stand and hear this words of comfort in our assurance of pardon.
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Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that that the times of refreshing may come from the presence of the
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Lord. My brothers and sisters in Christ, rejoice! Your sins are forgiven in Christ.
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Amen. Please take up the Trinity hymnal and turn to hymn 281,
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Know That My Redeemer Lives. Glory, Alleluia. Hymn 281.
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Amen. Please take up the insert for our Psalm of the Week, which we just practiced,
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Psalm 68. Please remain standing and open your
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Bibles to Revelation chapter 22 for our weekly reading from God's Word.
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Revelation 22. Revelation 22.
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And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the
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Lamb. In the middle of its street and on either side of the river was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month.
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The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the
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Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him. They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads.
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There shall be no night there. They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.
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Then he said to me, These words are faithful and true. And the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to show his servants the things which must shortly take place.
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Behold, I am coming quickly. Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book. Now I, John, saw and heard these things.
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And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel who showed me these things. Then he said to me,
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See that thou do not do that, for I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren the prophets, and of those who keep the words of this book.
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Worship God. And he said to me, Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand.
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He who is unjust, let him be unjust still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him be righteous still.
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He who is holy, let him be holy still. And behold, I'm coming quickly, and my reward is with me, to give to everyone according to his work.
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I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Blessed are those who do his commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city.
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But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie.
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I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the root of the offspring of David, the bright and morning star.
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And the spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him who hears say, Come. And let him who thirsts,
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Come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely. For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book.
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If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy,
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God shall take away his part from the book of life, from the Holy City, and from the things which are written in this book.
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He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming quickly. Amen. Even so,
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Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
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This is the Word of the Lord. Let's continue our worship by confessing our ancient
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Christian faith in the singing of the Apostles Creed. Please take up the
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Trinity hymnal once more and turn to him 689. Be still my soul.
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Hymn 689. Please now make preparations for the prayers of the people.
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And Jesus said, After this manner, therefore pray ye. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
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Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
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And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the
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Amen. Pray that we may glorify God in all that we do as we live and work in the creation that displays his powers.
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And be pleased to dispose all things to his own glory. Pray that Satan's kingdom may be destroyed and that the kingdom of grace may be advanced.
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Ourselves and others brought into it and kept in it. And the kingdom of glory hastened.
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Pray that God, for Christ's sake, would freely pardon all our sins.
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And we are encouraged to ask this because by his grace we are able from the heart to forgive others.
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Pray that God would either keep us from being tempted to sin or support and deliver us when we are tempted.
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Our Father, taking encouragement and prayer from you alone, in our prayers we praise you ascribing kingdom, power, and glory to you.
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And to testify of our desire and assurance to be heard, we say together, Amen.
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Please stand and take up the insert once again to our Psalm of the month. Psalm 17.
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Lord, I am thine, but thou wilt prove. Psalm 17.
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Amen. I ask you to remain standing in honor of the reading of God's word.
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And I'm going to be reading from James chapter five. And I'm going to read the whole chapter.
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This is God's holy and infallible word. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you.
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Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth eaten.
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Your gold and silver are corroded and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire.
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You have heaped up treasure in the last days. Indeed, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out.
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And the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. You have lived on the earth and pleasure and luxury.
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You have fattened your hearts as in a day of slaughter. You have condemned. You have murdered the just.
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He does not resist you. Therefore, be patient, brethren, until the coming of the
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Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain.
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You also be patient. Establish your hearts for the coming of the
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Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned.
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Behold, the judge is standing at the door. My brethren, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the
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Lord as an example of suffering and patience. Indeed, we count them blessed to endure.
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You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord, that the
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Lord is very compassionate and merciful. But above all, my brethren, do not swear either by heaven or by earth worth any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no, no, lest you fall into judgment.
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Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful?
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Let him sing psalms. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
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Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick and the
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Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
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Confess your trespasses one to another and pray for one another that you may be healed.
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The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain.
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And it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth produced its fruit.
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Pay special attention now to our text for today, verses 19 and 20. Brethren, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
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Please pray with me. Oh, Lord, we cry out to you with shouts of thanksgiving that you have saved us, that you have brought us into your kingdom and you have united yourself to us.
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Oh, Lord, I pray that in the power of your spirit, you would pierce our hearts and areas that we need to be confronted.
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But I also pray, oh, Lord, that you would comfort those who are afflicted, that they would see in you,
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Christ, that you are there all in all. Your yes, their yes and amen.
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We ask this in Jesus name. Please be seated. It's always a bittersweet occasion for me when
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I come to the end of a book. I hope it's true for you that we've been studying for some time.
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I look back and it looks as though in August of last year, we started the study of the book of James, which wouldn't seem to take that long.
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But with the calendar and other other things that are happening, it's taken us since August of last year for this fairly short book.
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I'm very thankful for the fruit it has produced in my own life, and I hope it is bearing some fruit in yours as well.
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Let's consider the last two verses of James chapter five. The title of the message today is
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Turn the sinner from the error of his way. And I would like that to be your point of outline.
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All of what I'm going to say revolves around that statement, but I want to put it in an imperative tense.
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You are responsible to turn the sinner from the error of his way.
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You are. You are responsible to turn the sinner amongst the brethren from the error of his way.
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James here at first glance ends his letter abruptly. There is no greetings and commendations at the end of the letter like we see often from Paul.
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And the thing I like about James, he seems to be a no -nonsense man. There's great things in closings and greetings and commendations.
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And at first glance, it seems that it just kind of ends here. But upon a closer examination, we see that it is a fitting end to the end of this important part of the canon of Scripture.
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James's aim has been to ensure that his hearers have a genuine saving faith in Christ marked by the fruits of obedience.
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His warnings teach us that it is possible to have a hollow profession of faith in Christ and even in some cases to regress back to Judaism for some of his hearers without Christ.
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And here, for those identified with Christ in his church, to use that old word of the fundamentalist to backslide in the faith, the severest form of which would be apostasy, a full -blown damning denial of Christ.
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It's important, I believe, for us to maintain the range or spectrum of this wandering from the truth from small things and maybe more secondary matters leading all the way to apostasy.
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I believe the principles here outlined apply to all of these. The severest, of course, is most concerning and should be our attention should be drawn to the idea that no one in our family and in this church would apostasize and leave the faith.
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We have a responsibility to rescue our erring brethren who fall away from the faith and fall into sin.
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We have to, we must, both corporately and individually, go the way of our master
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Christ and with great diligence seek to bring back the wayward one into the fold or even to bring the empty professor to Christ that he may commune with Christ in sincere faith, having received the gift of the new birth, being enlivened by the life -giving power of the
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Holy Spirit. Well, let's consider it now. I didn't count, but James says brethren, the
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Greek word adelphoi, many times. And this warm, engaging manner of James helps us receive the terseness of some of his message.
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This is a message given in love. These disciplinary blows are blows of a loving father correcting his children.
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We should never be concerned that that James is trying to push people out of the church.
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In fact, he's trying to keep them in. He's trying to encourage them and bolster their faith that they might remain true to Christ and to the people of God.
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Something else that's interesting as we look at verse 19, it says, if anyone.
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Now, that's a nebulous word to me. It seems very vague. Look back at verse 13.
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There is some specificity given to the term anyone in the section we preached on last week.
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It says, is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. So identifying individuals who are suffering, individuals, anyone cheerful, let him sing songs.
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Is anyone sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
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Lord. But here, the anyone is, again, a specific person.
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And this is a person who is wandering from the truth.
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Now, this idea of wandering means to go astray, to get off course, to deviate from the correct path.
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I'm going to say here we need to stay on the old paths.
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If Jeremiah would say that in his day, how much more so in our day?
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There is a well -worn, righteous way and it's Christ and it's his church and it's his word.
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We cannot go to the right or to the left. We go on the beaten down,
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God carved path of righteousness, of faith in Christ. We need to stick to the old paths.
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Here, someone in the number, someone part of the body, this anonymous person, if anyone among you wanders from the correct path, if you roam into error, if you've been misled, if you've been deceived, if you're going astray, the people of God must respond.
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The basis of my message today is on someone, the end of verse 19.
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Today, someone is going to wash the dishes after fellowship meal.
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It's probably not going to be me. And I'm saying that for all of you. Most of you won't be doing that. Someone prepared the bulletins.
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Someone prepared to preach a message. Someone rehearsed the hymns and the psalms that we're going to sing today.
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There's this someone out there who's anonymous. If anyone strays, we might say, well, the elders of the church are charged with bringing back the erring brethren.
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I would agree with you. But the language of James tells us that this someone is you, not just the elders of the church.
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And this is the fundamental idea I want us to get across. We are content for someone else to get into the dirty business of life with our fellow
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Christians. We would prefer in most cases for ourselves not to get muddied up in that work.
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Someone else will do it. You are the someone. So if someone in our church starts to stray from the well -worn beaten path of righteousness by faith in Christ and adherence to the word of God, it is incumbent upon every member of Christ's church to grab him by the lapels or the scruff of his neck and bring him back.
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Rarely does this happen. I came under great conviction. People have left the church that I have pastored both in recent years and years past, and I did not chase them and pursue them as forcefully as I ought.
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And I found that the congregation was very willing and happy for them to just go.
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Whether it be for doctrinal differences, personality differences, whatever, it's so easy for us to break fellowship with others.
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It doesn't seem that this is the way it ought to be. Do we really love each other?
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Do we really desire to bear each other's burdens? Do we really want to see every man grow up to full maturity in Christ?
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Is that something we long for and desire? If it is, we have to turn them back.
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If it isn't, we have to repent. Everyone here today, I urge you to repent of your lack of love for one another.
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We just don't really want to be bothered. Someone else will bring back the erring brother.
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Someone else will meet the need of the widow and the orphan. Today, I'm here to tell you that the someone is you.
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In context of this section, we learned that the
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Christian church is a fellowship of love and concern.
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If I see you, I'm no doctor, but if I see you with skin turning yellow,
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I need to say something to you and say, brother, I think your liver might be failing because you're jaundiced.
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So, too, when we see a Christian brother deviate from the truth and what's wedded to that is godliness.
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And Paul says to his letter to Timothy, there is a truth that accords with godliness.
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And this is what James has been preaching to believe on the Lord. Jesus Christ has wide reaching implications.
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Do you notice if someone is wandering? It could be theological. But it could be practical, it could be their practice, and those go together.
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If there is a want in practice, there's certainly a want of doctrine. If there's a want in the doctrine, there's going to be a corresponding want in the practice.
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Cult leaders are very easy to spot. It seems that so often the cult leader, when he bursts onto the scene, he gains a following, starts teaching some maybe novel views of Bible.
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And invariably, he decides that he needs to have more wives and girlfriends. All the cult leaders seem to do these things.
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The doctrine is completely disconnected from a righteous practice. They are shown to be false because their real aim is to acquire more wives or more girlfriends or more money or whatever it is.
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Doctrine and practice, according to James, and I believe this is a testimony of the whole scripture, are so intertwined, so interwoven, they could never be pulled apart.
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We like to pound our chests at our reformed bona fides.
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But if we don't have the accompanying righteousness that comes with these doctrines, we have to be humble and confess that there is deficiency in doctrine.
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If we can sit on the porch and talk theological, a big game, but we don't live it.
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Our message has very little credibility. Well, I think what we can do to illustrate this is to consider
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James and some of the things he has brought to our attention to see the ways in which we can wander.
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I believe that James closes his epistle, encouraging us to do what he has already done in the book.
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He calls us to do the very thing that he has written about here.
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I see a close connection between the internal evidence, the admonitions and what
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James tells us to do today. Here's a representative sample of what
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James has addressed. You can look by this. I'm not going to go verse by verse. I will turn back to James chapter one.
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When is a brother going wayward? When is the sheep flipped over on his back and cast down?
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He needs somebody to come along and flip him right side up. I don't know if you know that, that idea of being cast down.
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The sheep can't flip back over on their own, particularly if they're full of a full bodied wool.
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It says in verse two of chapter one, my brethren count it all joy when you fall into various trials.
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One of the first tests of the Christians genuine faith is how do they respond to trials?
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If I squeeze you and you wander from the truth, your faith is not very strong.
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If the trials come and you don't see the benefit of these trials in the life of a
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Christian to make them more like Christ, to grow in holiness. If that doesn't ever cross your mind, you may be a wanderer.
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It says in that section, knowing that this testing of your faith produces patience and patience must have its perfect work.
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That you may be perfect and complete. Lacking nothing. The great aim of James, genuine faith, growing up to full maturity.
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If your faith when tested wanes, if you're not growing up to full maturity, we have to acknowledge you're in a wandering state.
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You might be full of error. You might have lost your first love.
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You may not have a genuine saving faith at all. Churches like ours hate for that to be a possibility for me to say.
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So we should never say that to a covenant church should ever say those words. The scripture says there's apostasy.
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That apostasy only happens to people who are inside the church. This is not for unbelievers who are on the outside.
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This is a reality. There could be someone here whom we sit with, who we love and who we we think has a great theology and they're very solid.
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They may not know Christ. You never think that could be a possibility, but it's the testimony of scripture.
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We put ourselves to the test. Do we respond properly at every trial?
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No. Do we do we strive to count it all joy? Yes. That's a good sign of a genuine faith in Christ.
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Our text says if anyone wanders from the truth, the second thing that James talks about really in some detail is the believer in relationship to truth.
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Look at verse five. It says, if any of you lacks wisdom, that is the right application of knowledge, if you lack it, in this glorious economy of God, my lack in every sense is supplied by God.
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My want of righteousness is supplied in Christ. My want of an ability to atone for my sin is supplied in Christ.
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If I do not have wisdom, I cry out to God and the promise is he will give me wisdom.
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The believer has a close connection to the truth.
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Christ is the way, the truth and the life. The believer must love the truth.
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We heard that this morning in our lesson on the canon of scripture. And the
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Christian, when he lacks a full apprehension of the truth, he seeks wisdom.
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He employs the means of grace. He reads his Bible. He approaches the elders. He gets counsel from other wise
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Christians. And God, in his mercy, gives and grants this to his people.
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What a great God to do this. But there's a way that we ask.
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There's a way that we endure trials. We have to do it in faith. Without doubting, do we believe that God is a rewarder of those who come to him?
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We have to come to him without doubting. For he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven.
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And tossed by the wind. But not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the
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Lord. He is a double minded man. He's entertaining two truths.
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There's only one. He's entertaining two ideas. He's divided.
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He's unstable in all his ways. The Christian runs to the ark, which is
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Christ. And he runs and he shuts himself in with his wife and his children and never to depart.
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He puts pitch on the bare wood of the outside of that ark that it might float in this water, the storm tossed sea, and he will never crack that door open until the
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Lord puts him on dry land. The unstable man drops, the wandering man drops a dinghy, a little boat and says,
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I'm going to venture to shore myself. I'm going to take a different way, a different approach.
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And soon he finds himself drifting out to sea and it's storm tossing and leading to his own destruction.
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Are you and your family, are you and your wife and your children? Are you shut up in the ark of Christ?
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If you are, don't poke your head out of the porthole. Wait until he delivers you to heaven.
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Don't ever compromise to the right or to the left. Stay on the path. Stay in the ark.
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Stay united to Christ. If you don't, the dangers that destroy the unbelieving world can crash upon you.
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Isn't it wonderful how Christ draws us to his own bosom and clings to us and holds on to us and preserves us that we might not go the way of the wicked?
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In verse six, are you employing all the means? Are you moored, anchored to Christ and his word?
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Are you anchored in the truth? Are you united vitally to the pillar and ground, the buttress of the truth, the church?
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If you're not, you're going to be tossed by all the waves.
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If you're in trouble, run for help. In our text, what's interesting, the sick one, he approaches the elders of the church.
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Let's go back to chapter five again. But that's not what happens here.
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We sometimes wait for an invitation to speak into another brother's life, and we're hoping that he'll ask us for some help.
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It seems very proactive, and that is not what we do today. We are a reactive people in the church today.
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There's very little proactivity happening. The action is tied to the someone, you, who turns him back.
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The wandering one doesn't understand that he's deviated fully from the path.
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He's blinded to the truth. So it's incumbent upon the church and individuals and corporately, but back to you again to turn him back.
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Are you willing to be this kind of Christian in the church? If so, you are a rare and precious jewel.
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There aren't many of you. Very few people do this.
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The believer has a singleness of mind. The believer can't wander from the truth.
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And if he begins to entertain ideas, he has to have a great capacity to see the error for what it is.
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If some novel doctrine comes into your life, and you start to embrace it, you better put it to the test of Scripture, and the holy men of old who have gone before us.
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If there's some newfangled practice that is now allowable in your faith, which wasn't a hundred years ago, and you think, oh that would never happen.
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It's happening in the sexual ethic of the church today. Fornication, cohabitation, all of the homosexuality, all of that in some ways is infiltrated the larger and broader church.
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And over time, that which is evil and wicked and repugnant to our holy God will be accepted by the church.
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We can't be those kinds of people that we would be wandering from the truth.
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We need to be those who turn them back. It continues in chapter one, again a kind of a litmus test of the genuineness of our faith.
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The believer and his relations to others. It says in verse nine, let the lowly brother glory in his exaltation, but the rich in his humiliation.
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Are you a respecter of persons? Do you show special honor to some in the church and not to others?
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Do you value the rich and the successful above the more humble and ordinary?
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This kind of thinking is from the world. It's from the flesh. It's from the devil.
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It's inconsistent with the Christian life. The rich man without Christ fades away in his pursuits.
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And we buried our friend Margaret Dupre recently. Her husband was the first elder of the church here.
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And the casket wasn't open. She probably had a dress on. She carried nothing with her into the grave.
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It's important for us to remember that, isn't it? We are so driven by the material that we forget some of the weightier things of the spiritual.
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We try to store up ourselves treasures here when really our treasure is in heaven.
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The wayward wandering man starts to get lost in this. He starts to value earthly, sensual, common, vulgar things over the true treasures, which are found in Christ, which should be added or not merely spiritual.
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They are also material. The Christian must honor man because he's created in the image of God.
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He cannot show partiality knowing that every believer is beloved of God and redeemed in Christ.
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There's another test. I'm just going to go through the ones in chapter one for the interest of time.
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It's the believer in relation to temptation. James 1 verse 12.
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Blessed is the man who endures temptation. When the trials come, we said that that that squeezing and that pressure is going to reveal genuine
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Christian character or some deficiency or even unbelief. But what about temptation?
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The Christian recognizes temptation for what it is as a lie.
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He's not following into every temptation that comes to him.
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He's able to see it for what it is. The believer understands that God cannot be tempted with evil, nor does he tempt any man.
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But temptation occurs when a man and sin happens when a man is drawn away by his own desires.
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The wandering brother, the wayward saint, is falling into temptation, is not winning the battle of temptation.
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He's succumbing to his circumstances. He's failing to take responsibility for it.
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When I talk to someone, when they begin to blame their environment in their circumstances for their sin,
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I know they're in trouble. Because they're not owning it, not taking responsibility for it.
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You may remember we talked about that when we were preaching through this section. And then snowball effect happens when lust is conceived, brings forth sin and sin when it is finished, brings forth death.
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We want to capture our brethren when lust begins to be revealed.
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We want to run over to them when they're entering into the area of sin.
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We want to spring into action when these early stages, because later on, like a disease in the body, when it is given full vent, it could be too late.
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It could bring forth death, death in a spiritual apostasy.
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Brethren, the wayward drifter, the wanderer of the faith has no idea the danger he is in.
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That's why you who are spiritual have to restore him and reach out. He says, do not be deceived.
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Very heart of what is talked about here, you can see how James has really done a very good job.
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You remember when we first started, we asked the question, is this just like the Proverbs? In actuality, there's great continuity in the book of James.
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Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.
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Everything that is good for the believer is resides on the ark of Christ. It comes from his hand.
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It comes down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning the drifter as variation.
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He walks in the shadows. He turns away from the truth of Christ and his gospel.
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There's another important thing and countless times I've seen this in the life of the church.
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Verse 21, one of the first things that happens in the life of a believer going downhill is a loss of love for the word of God.
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And he stops reading it. He stops listening attentively to the message on Sunday.
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He has no interest in it. Monday through Saturday. This is a dangerous place to be.
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If you have not taken up scripture this week. And read it devotionally. You could be in great danger.
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It may be a symptom of your wandering away from the church. You say, I could never do it.
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It would never happen to me. It's happened to better people than us. Smarter people.
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A period of declension. Husbands, if you're not leading your wives and your children.
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Wives, if you're not submitting to your husband's children, if you are not obeying your parents.
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Spiritual declension is descending upon your home. Ordinary means.
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Clear principles of scripture must be adhered to. If not, danger lurks on every corner.
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The believer loves the word of God. Do you really love the word? Do you want to draw every bit of marrow from the bones of it?
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Do you want to be nourished hereby? Do you love it so much that you make it the meditation of your life day and night?
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We all could say there's room for growth and improvement here. But if this is no interest to you.
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You might be a wandering one. You might be a wayward sinner.
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You may be on the path to destruction. You may be on the verge of leaving the church.
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So you and I have to be those who love the word, cherish the word.
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Come to it when our devotional life and sermons, however, where it's given to us with a sense of expectancy.
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God is speaking to us through his word. He has preserved it in the power of his spirit.
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He has given it to us for our edification, for our growth and godliness that we might know right from wrong.
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If we're not in the word, we might become those who wander.
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Take heed to yourself and to your doctrine. It's introduced in this section.
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Something very powerful related to this is the idea of one who is a doer of the word.
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You see, this truth is according to godliness.
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This is at the heart of James's message, isn't it? If I say
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I love the word of God, I'm a scholar of the word of God. I'm parsing out
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Greek verbs, but I'm not a doer of the work. If I'm not taking the truth and acting upon it, how good is my orthodoxy?
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I don't have it. The virtue of the Christian life says
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I must act upon the truth. Not only do I need to hear it and read it and I need to labor to understand it and to meditate upon it,
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I now have to take what I learned and I have to put it into practice. I have to turn from every known sin and I have to put on the righteousness of Christ.
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I have to do whatever is required in this book. Mark, as you were teaching
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Sunday school today, I was thinking that we have a good doctrine of Scripture in the
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Reformed world. We say we believe every word, but do we really want to act upon it?
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To take it wherever it takes us? To go wherever it goes? To be restrained and pulled away from wherever it forbids?
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We love it conceptually. We love it theologically. We love to assent to lofty things, but do we want it to be the pattern of our lives?
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So James is encouraging us to do. Otherwise, we're like those who look at ourselves in the mirror and forget.
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What kind of man we are. We forget that the wanderer forgets he's a sinner.
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And forgets that there's salvation in Christ. The righteous man looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it.
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He's not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work.
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This one will be blessed, it says in our Bibles, in what he does.
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Turn your attention to verse 27, chapter 1.
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James wants us to have a pure and undefiled religion. That's to visit orphans and widows in their trouble.
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I'm going to evoke the anyone and the someone again. Who's going to visit the widows and orphans?
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Will the elders and the deacons? Seems like it's the responsibility of the covenant people of God to look after the covenant people of God.
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Someone else is not going to do it. I'll tell you this right now. Longwood's not been reached for Christ.
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Who's going to do it? Someone will do it. Maybe the Armenians will do it, and then they'll read a
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Doug Wilson book, and then they'll not prefer the Winter Springs CREC church, and maybe they'll come to ours.
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Who's going to reach Longwood for Christ? Someone has to do it.
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You are the someone. In this whole of the modern world, someone else will do it.
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Someone else's money will pay for it. I'll rob someone else's bank account so I can get gifts from the government.
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We're the ones who have to look after the widows and the orphans. You do, not the church in a nebulous way.
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You, as the people of God, have to visit orphans and widows. Remember, that idea of visiting is not just dropping by and saying hello, and I hope things go well for you.
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Here's a little soup, and I'll see you on the way, and I'll be praying for you. To visit them means to get down in the struggle with them, and to help them, to take on responsibility for the orphans and the widows.
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What has to be most convicting of this verse is to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
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The three historic, the mantra of enemies is the world, the flesh, and the devil.
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And we know that the battle rages within us, that we're fighting and waging a war against sin.
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If you're not fighting this battle of sin within, you're losing the battle. You say,
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I'm not going to be tainted by the world and her ways. You already have. You don't even know all of the worldliness that has entered into your thinking and your practice.
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Things that the saints 200 years ago would never do, you do without ever thinking. The church has been muddied up from the world.
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And if that process is not shortened, nipped, put to death, and mortified, it leads to a wandering, and even worse, it leads to apostasy.
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It leads to death. James wants us to have a real, genuine faith.
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Let's go back to our text in chapter 5. James says, railed against the boasting, fire -causing tongue, and it seems that we need to employ our tongues righteously to turn sinners back.
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May we never lose another person who's in our church to wandering.
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Oh Lord, I cry out to you, never let one of these precious little ones, our children, to wander and depart from the truth.
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Oh Lord, arouse our senses, open our eyes, make it clear to us the ways in which the wanderings of the world, the feeding of the flesh, and even the satanic attack of the enemy could be drawing our people away.
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Make us aware of these things that we might respond in truth.
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Covenant blessings have covenant obligations, but also covenant rewards.
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Look at verse 20, James 5, 20. The someone, no longer anonymous, it's you, when you turn that sinner back, oh, this is such a cause for rejoicing.
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Let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
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If the angels in heaven rejoice over one who repents and is brought into the family of God, how much rejoicing is there when a wayward son is restored?
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Christ has given us the ministry of reconciliation, not only for the lost, but for the wandering children of the church.
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You and I need to take that responsibility and reconcile them to God.
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I believe in election to the nth degree, and I also believe that I should labor with all of my heart to bring people either into the kingdom of God on the introductory side or to restore them back.
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That I employ the entirety of my person and my effort and my sweat and my prayers and my preaching and my teaching, my admonishing, my counseling to bring them back.
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Sometimes our Calvinism is someone else is going to do it or God will do it.
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God is most certainly the one who does it, but he, as I mentioned the last couple of weeks, he seems to prefer to use the instrumentality of his people.
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Are you a sharp tool in the hand? Of God, when you turn the area airing one back.
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His soul is saved. Sins are covered.
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Righteousness is restored. Great commentator material says truth is a living thing.
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Makes sense, doesn't it? Because the eternal truth came in the flesh.
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It's incarnate. When this truth, when this person of Christ grips our minds, it necessarily changes our lives.
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If we claim to know the truth, then the Bible would have us and require us to prove our claim not only by reciting a creed and understanding it.
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That's what we value. That's really what we prize, isn't it? Isn't that the thing that we're most esteem in the church, in the reformed church to recite a creed, to understand a doctrine, to be able to talk about it.
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But isn't James's point, the evidence has to be a way of life that matches the truth.
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Jesus and John 8 said the truth will set us free. Paul identifies two men,
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Hymenaeus and Philetus, and 2 Timothy 2, who have swerved from the truth.
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This is a reality in the church. Has this happened in denominations?
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The place where we meet thinks it's okay to have lady pastors. There's no scriptural warrant for it.
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As Mark mentioned this morning, almost anything goes doctrinally.
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They've wandered from the truth. PCA looks like they've had a great recovery.
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They were slipping into allowing homosexuality. It was close. This happens in the church.
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It happens because the someones, the yous, don't act.
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Sometimes it's intellectual. It seems to be that for Hymenaeus and Philetus, Jude confronts brethren because he sees the faith under threat by those who pervert the grace of God into licentiousness in Jude chapter 4.
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Here, James takes us not from the realm of the theoretical, but to the immensely practical.
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He brings us within the local body and urges us to watch for anyone who is losing his grip on the truth and whose way of life, the error of sin, is beginning to reveal itself.
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It seems to me that we have to know each other extremely well. We have to be willing to know one another, to make ourselves known.
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We have to be willing to have our unsavory lives exposed to one another.
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There's just not many people who want to do that. And even more so, we need courageous people who will poke and prod until they find this out that they might rescue and help the brother.
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We don't do it on the front side. I see a lot of room for us to come under conviction today.
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You and I must be the someones who venture out and grab the wayward, wandering brother.
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We must be those who have a chain tied to our ankle. Maybe we jump out of the boat to grab them off of the dinghy to bring them back into Christ.
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Maybe we have to trudge down the rocky cliffs and grab them by the scruff of their neck and pull them back.
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There's a reward for those who do this. But everyone here know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
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If anything, it's got to be the future of this church. It's got to be to put to death passivity, to hang back and wait for someone else to do something.
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Children, in your homes, you need to start doing things around your house without your mother or your father asking you.
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If you see something that's dirty, you can clean it up. And you don't even have to tell anybody to get applause that you did it.
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It's a different way of looking at the world. Anyone, someone, the person who's going to do this is you.
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Let's ask the Lord now to help us in this work. Please pray with me.
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I should point out before I pray that the fastest way to start achieving this is to make sure that you and your family, as far as it concerns you, you and your house are going to serve the
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Lord. You have to be so solid that you're not in need of rescue.
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You need to be so strong and so vigorous that you're the ones doing the rescuing.
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It's a high call to personal responsibility to walk in righteousness that you might be able to help others.
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Pray with me now. Oh, Lord, we repent of our indifference, our passivity.
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Oh, Lord, we're lazy. We don't want to get involved. Lord, I pray that you would put this to death in us, that the world would see that we really are those who truly love each other.
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Oh, Lord, your word tells us that if we turn our brother from the error of his way, he'll be saved.
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Your servant Paul wrote in Galatians that if any man is overtaken in a trespass, and you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, we would consider ourselves lest we too would be tempted.
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Oh, Lord, your word says that this is what bearing one another's burdens looks like and what fulfilling the law of Christ looks like.
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Oh, Lord, we're willing to make a meal. We're willing to put up a fence.
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But oh, Lord, are we willing to really bear each other's burdens in this way? And I pray that you would reveal to us a heart that is unwilling that we might repent.
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A heart that has a flagging or a waning willingness to do this that you would bolster and strengthen and that you would pour gasoline on the fire of a heart who's willing to bear another's burden in this way, that they would be so eager to get down into the messiness and dirtiness and hardness of life with others to restore them, to build them up, to strengthen them for their good and your glory.
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Oh, Lord, make us these kinds of people, we pray in Jesus name. Let's continue our worship with the presentation of tithes and offering.
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Please stand and let's pray together. Oh, Lord, we thank you for this beautiful life that you have given to us.
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Oh, Lord, we're so ungrateful of all the good gifts you've given us. Oh, Lord, thank you for this work that causes the sweat to appear on our brows.
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It's hard, Lord, we thank you for this. We thank you for the sanctifying influence of stewardship and work and home management and all these things that get us to this point.
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We pray that you would receive these tithes and offerings and this would be used for the discipleship of the nations, the evangelism of the nations, the defense of the faith here locally and globally.
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We ask all of this in Jesus name. Amen. The singing today was really great and we've been confronted with wonderful things throughout the service.
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It's appropriate for us to respond with a doxology as the Apostle Paul often does in his preaching.
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Let us now sing the glory of patria, to the glory of God. Oh, people of God, rejoice today.
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The Lord is with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the
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Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord. It is good and right so to do. It is right and a good and joyful thing that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to you,
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O Holy Lord, Father Almighty, Everlasting God. Because you sent your beloved
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Son to redeem us from sin and death and to make us heirs in him of everlasting life, that when he shall come again in power and great triumph to judge the world, we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing.
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Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we praise and magnify your most glorious name evermore praising you and singing.
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Please be seated.
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Wonderful that you consecrate a people who is your body, who are washed in your blood, that you would consecrate and set apart for this holy use these creaturely gifts of bread and wine.
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And it's communicated to us the body and blood of Christ sacrificed.
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O Lord Jesus, we pray that the ties that bind us to you will never be broken.
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And in the eating of this bread and the drinking of the cup, we would see our vital union irrevocably to you to never be broken.
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And we will thank you, O Lord, for your promise to preserve us, not only to this point in our lives until to the day of our death.
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And O Lord, in this we rejoice. We pray that we would be nourished and strengthened and that our hearts would be made merry spiritually from the gift of bread and wine to us.
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And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Our Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread.
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Likewise, he took the cup after supper saying this cup is the new covenant in my blood, drink from it all of you.
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For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup and proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
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Therefore, we proclaim the faith. Christ has died, Christ has risen,
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Christ will come again. Amen. Let us approach the table now with both humility and expectancy.
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Let's pray together now. We do not presume to come to this your table,
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O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies.
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We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same
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Lord who always shows mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, to eat the flesh of your dear son
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Jesus Christ and to drink of his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, in us.
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Amen. Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the peace.
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The gifts of God for you, the people of God. Thanks be to the Lord. Amen. Blessings come with covenant obligations and duties.
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Let's make this commitment together in faith. Almighty and ever -living
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God, we thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious body and blood of your
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Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are the living members of the body of your
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Son and heirs of your eternal kingdom. And, O Lord, grant us this other benefit, that you will never allow us to forget these things, but having them imprinted on our hearts, may we grow and increase daily in the faith which is at work in every good deed.
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Now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our
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Lord, to him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit, in the honor and glory now and forever.
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Amen. Please stand. Let us give glory to our
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God. Praise God. ...
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benediction I've said hundreds of times, so forgive me, I'm getting older. The grace of the
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Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the