Apologia Academy w/ John Samson - Reformed Theology

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In our time together, we're going to look at the subject of reformed soteriology.

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This big word, soteriology, comes from the Greek word sotere, which means salvation.

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And we're going to look at the scriptures and go through many things together. And I'm excited, very excited about this course, this class.

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I wish we could talk for 40 hours about it because there's so much to cover, and yet it's inexhaustible.

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And so in the time we have, I believe we want to make every moment count. So if you have a

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Bible, maybe grab a pen and a notepad as we go to the scriptures, looking at the big picture of salvation.

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What is salvation? How does God accomplish it? How is a person saved?

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What does it mean to be saved? And for that, we need to talk about the gospel. Let me just start with a quote from Tim Keller at this point.

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He said, I wholeheartedly agree.

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To get the gospel is to understand God's method of saving, but also how he achieves change in our lives.

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When I'm not experiencing freedom in some area, then there's something of the gospel

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I'm not applying. And so over and over again, we need to be brought back to the gospel. Romans 1 tells us the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.

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And rather than seeing the gospel as a foundation, and then you build on it like a building, oftentimes when people are looking at new houses and houses are being constructed, they take folk over to have a look.

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But no one really spends a whole lot of time looking at the foundation, because once it's achieved, it's really built on very quickly and out of view, out of sight, out of mind.

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That should not be the case with the gospel. And so in many places, the gospel is talked about, but it's talked about in a way that would be conducive to that foundation illustration.

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You've got it, now move on. I don't believe that. I believe it's much more like the gospel should be the hub of the wheel, and everything else in the

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Christian life comes out of it. And so the gospel needs to be applied to our home life, our business life, our married life, our family life.

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What is it of the gospel we need to apply if we're going to see change in our lives? Rather than seeing the gospel as something we learn early in the

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Christian faith, it should be center stage all the time. And that's what we see in the

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New Testament. When the apostle Paul is wanting to see change in the lives of the people he's writing to, he brings them back always to the gospel.

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What we see from the scripture very, very clearly is the gospel is Jesus Christ, his person and his work, who he is and what he has done.

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We also see that salvation is achieved by God. It's a

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Trinitarian salvation. And what I mean by that is the Trinity, God, the

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit achieves salvation. The Father elects a people for himself.

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The Son goes to earth, becomes man, lives a sinless life, dies an atoning death, is raised from the dead.

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He dies for those elect people. And the Holy Spirit applies the salvation achieved by the

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Son to those same people so that we have the Father and the

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Son and the Spirit working in harmony, all with different roles in achieving salvation.

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So it's by the Trinity to bring us to the Trinity, if you can see it in that sense.

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I want to start off, though, with an illustration I heard many years ago by a man called Ray Comfort.

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And he gave this illustration, which I think is so helpful to us. Imagine that it's 9 -11, in fact, 9 -10, 2001, the day before the two towers are coming down, and you've got an assignment from God.

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You've been mandated this amazing opportunity to talk to everybody in a certain room on the 50th floor of one of those buildings.

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And you know that everybody that you are about to speak to as a preacher is going to be dead 24 hours from now.

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It's a somber thought. It's a horrible thought. But that is your assignment. Let's go there in our imagination for a moment.

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Think about what you would say, knowing that the people that you're looking in the eye will not be here alive 24 hours from the time you're speaking to them.

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Would it affect the way you talk? Would it affect what you would talk about? I think the answer is absolutely, yes, it would.

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And 85 to 95 to even 99 % of sermons that people hear every day in the churches would be thrown out because they're no longer applicable.

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Imagine going to those people and talk about seven ways to have a happier life or a purposeful life, or to talk about how to have a happy vacation with your family and throw in Jesus at the end.

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That's so much of what people hear when they come to a church service. They want something practical. They want something relevant.

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And they think they're getting that when they hear those kind of a message. Those kind of messages soothe the ears of the people because it seems practical.

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But if someone can live through that message and apply it and still not know their desperate need of what we call salvation, you have failed.

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Imagine going to that office and talking about anything other than the most important thing, which is salvation.

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I want to say before those people who God is, what the gospel is, how to be saved.

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And I want to make it absolutely clear. And I want to speak about it in a passion that tells them absolutely how important this is.

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And by the way, your assignment is made a little bit harder because although you know they're going to be dead in 24 hours, you're not allowed to say that.

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You're not allowed to say, I know that. You have to simply preach the everlasting gospel.

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And that's the point. An angel in the book of Revelation is given the task of heralding the everlasting gospel.

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And the implication of all of that is that there is only one everlasting gospel, an eternal gospel.

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And if you and I are teaching and preaching and sharing something that has to change in that scenario, it tells us we weren't sharing, preaching the real deal, the real thing.

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Very, very important. I really took heart what was said in that illustration because the gospel is eternal.

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And we need to ask, is the one we're proclaiming eternal? Or would we have to alter it if we knew people were going to be dead in 24 hours?

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Then we need to start off in talking about salvation with who God is. The Bible speaks about God right at the beginning.

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It doesn't start with man. It starts with God and all that he is doing.

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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. You'd think, wouldn't you, if God was speaking to us, he'd start with us and lead us eventually to the knowledge of God.

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But he doesn't. He starts with the knowledge of God and then in light of who God is, he then later on speaks about creating man.

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And man is to be known in terms of his relationship with God. And when we talk about the

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Bible, when we talk about God, we need to understand his God is who he is. And we have no right to make up our own, whether it's made with wood or stone or with some kind of metal or with the thoughts of our hearts and minds.

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Both cases, in both cases, we're dealing with something called idolatry. Making a

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God we like, either forming it in terms of a physical thing or else forming it in the mind.

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And many people start off with a God they like. They prefer that.

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The problem is that's not the God you and I have to deal with in reality. The only God there is, is the only

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God there is. And he has revealed himself and he's revealed himself as this high, eternal, holy, majestic, immutable, which means unchanging.

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He's omniscient. That means he's all -knowing. He's this magisterial character who's always been there.

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And he is all of his attributes in the sense that he's sovereign. And he is lord.

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And he is master. And he is shepherd. And yes, we love the shepherding aspect of God.

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But we need to start with realizing he's also this holy God. And to take that out of the equation is to build in our minds a false

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God. And if you start with a false God, you end up with a false gospel. If you have a

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God who's only love, and I've met many people who would start there and say, my God is a

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God of love. When we talk about God's holiness and his anger against sin, they say in their objection, but my

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God is a God of love. And my response is this. I'm sure he is.

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Would you like to know the true one? Because the true God is a God of love and a

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God of holiness and a God who is good. And the worst news for man is the fact that God is good.

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Why is that bad news? It's horrendous news because he's good in all his attributes.

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He's good at justice. Think about that for a moment. He's good at justice.

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If you have a judge in a court and you go and hear the proceedings and they find a criminal guilty of murder, and the right sentence would be at least 20 years in prison.

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But he says, you know what? Today's my birthday. I'm feeling good about myself. And I'm sure you're very sorry for the people that you killed.

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And I'm sure it's been a grueling process to work through the criminal system already.

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I'm sure you don't want to do it again, right? Just go off and don't do it again. What would you say?

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You would say, that's not a good judge. That's not someone we need in our courts. And you would probably, if you're like me, do what you can to have him removed from the bench so that he does not officiate as a judge anymore.

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So when we say that God is good, we're saying that he's a good judge. The great news is he's also a great savior.

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But we have to start with all that God is. If you can picture in your mind going to a restaurant and seeing a buffet, there are no police usually around the buffet tables making sure you put everything on your plate.

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You can walk in and say, you know what? I'm only going to have chicken. I'm going to leave the steak. I'm maybe having some eggs, but I'm going to leave the carrots.

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I don't really like carrots. And you put on your plate what you want to put on your plate. And there's no one saying, hey, hey, we noticed you didn't take the carrots.

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What's with that? I wanted to say this. God is not a buffet line of options where you and I can decide,

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I prefer this characteristic of God to that one. And so I'm going to focus on the love of God and the mercy of God and the

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God who lives for my benefit. The problem is that's not the

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God who is in existence, nor has he revealed himself that way. So God is not a buffet line of options.

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And he says, I am all my attributes. He is love.

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He is justice. He is holy. He has to punish sin or else he's not good as a judge.

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And yet he's also a savior. And all of that needs to be in the mix.

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All of God's revelation, the same God who has revealed himself in a passage like Isaiah 6, which speaks of his great holiness, is also the

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God who so loved the world that he gave his one and only son. And to embrace an idea of God that only allows for one attribute rather than the other is to build your thinking on a false concept of God.

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So our task as Christians is to understand God as he's revealed himself and to proclaim him as he really is and to proclaim the gospel as it really is.

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And I believe it's impossible to have one without the other. Like us to turn in our

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Bibles to Romans chapter 5, where we have a revelation of both the love of God and then another thing of God, his anger, his wrath.

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Romans 5 verse 6, for while we were still weak, at the right time

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Christ died for the ungodly. I love that because there weren't any godly people for him to be dying for.

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So he died for the ungodly, those who were unqualified. And admit it. Verse 7, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.

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But God shows his love for us. Notice that speaking of the love of God. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners,

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Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him, that's by Christ, from the wrath of God.

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When we talk about salvation, we're talking about a word that speaks of a rescue, of a deliverance.

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To be saved is to be delivered from a very bad consequence.

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We use that word not only in the religious world, we use it in sports. We could speak of a boxer.

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You ever heard the phrase, he was saved by the bell? What we mean by that is not that a bell rang and so he was then escorted to heaven.

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What we mean by that is the referee was about to count him out, maybe he had counted to six when he's close to coming to the number ten when he'd be counted out as a knockout defeat.

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But the bell rang and he was saved from that calamity of losing the fight by means of the bell.

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Similarly, when we talk about soccer or hockey or any of these kind of sports, we say the goalkeeper saved, made a great save.

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What did he do? Did he redeem the people on his team? No, it had nothing to do with that.

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It meant he rescued the team from going a goal down, conceding a goal.

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He made a save. And so it is to be saved is to be rescued from a calamity.

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And here's where we start when we look at the revelation of the Bible. The ultimate calamity is to be brought into an audience with God not right with him.

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There's nothing worse than that. It did not matter how many houses you owned, how much land you owned, how healthy you were, how long your life was, how purposeful you felt in life.

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All of that means nothing. The words of Jesus are, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet loses his soul?

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To lose your soul is to go into an eternity without being right with God, to be banished from the joyful presence of Christ to a lost eternity forever without any hope.

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That is the ultimate calamity and that awaits all of us because of something called sin.

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So we start there. We start with the fact that man in the garden of Eden, Genesis chapter 3, defied

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God with his actions and committed what we call cosmic treason. Let that settle for a moment.

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It's not just that he did something pretty bad. In making the decision he did, he bowed his knee to a false usurper of authority, the serpent who represents the devil himself, and became in bondage to sin, choosing to defy

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God with his actions saying, I'll do it my way. I will have my own God. I will do things my way and in violation of the lawful commandment of God, defied

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God with this thing called sin. Sin is an omission. It's also a transgression.

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An omission is failing to do the right thing. A transgression is stepping over the line and doing the wrong thing.

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The Bible also speaks of sin in terms of archery, going for the bullseye with an arrow and yet missing the mark, missing the mark completely.

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All of these illustrations concerning sin. So when we talk about sin, we talk about something that is treasonous and some people look at the book of Genesis and think of all of the reaction of God throwing the whole creation into this thing called the curse.

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What he brought upon mankind and creation as a result of Adam's sin throws people off and they say, well, that was an overreaction.

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It's an absolutely legitimate action as one who is the highest personage in the entire universe.

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It's a righteous reaction to sin. What we find out from Scripture is that the angels who sinned, once they did so, there's no way back for them.

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God never became an angel to rescue or save angels and no righteous angel in heaven is ever thinking to himself, gosh, that's bad.

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God should have done that. God should have become an angel to save angels. No, for God to do the right thing and express justice is right.

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It's like a thing that doesn't even need to be said. It's right for God to do the right thing and the right thing for God to do is to punish sin all the way in full measure.

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And so when angels sinned and chose their independence of God, God never said, oh,

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I have to do for them what I'm going to do for man and has become an angel to save angels. The angels of God do not miss a beat because no angel will ever be redeemed.

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Think about that. So when we're talking about salvation and a rescue and a redemption, we've got no right to it.

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That has to be the starting point. We do not have a right to mercy.

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Let that sink in. We have no right. Similarly, in the state of Arizona or whatever place you're listening or watching this, if the governor of a state or perhaps the president, the prime minister or the king of a country, if he has mercy on a certain individual, it doesn't mean he has to have the same kind of mercy on everyone else who's committed those same crimes.

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There are people on death row and sometimes the governor of the state will have mercy on someone and allow someone to be released who deserves death.

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But that doesn't mean he has to then go and release everyone else on death row. And so for God to save a single person is amazing.

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Absolutely amazing. We have to start there. God is under no obligation to be merciful.

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For him to be just is simply the reflection of his character. He's going to be just.

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And for him to show mercy, he has to also think about this as well.

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He has to also be just in dealing with redemption and bringing forth redemption.

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Because for God to be just, hear this, all sin, A double

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L, all sin has to be punished. So how can

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God be merciful when to be just, he has to punish sin to the full extent of what justice requires.

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Do you see that dilemma? He has to be just. Otherwise, it's a violation of his own law and the character that expressed that law.

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So what does God do? God sends his son who'll bear the punishment that others deserved, that sinners deserved.

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And he was what we would call the substitute for sinners.

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A friend of mine, Greg Francis, said it this way. God demands 100 % perfect obedience.

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And if you can't do that, you better find someone who can do it for you. That's where the gospel comes in.

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I hope I'm laying a foundation as to why we need salvation and how gracious it is that God would save anyone.

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What we find in the book of Revelation is that the number of those who are redeemed is so vast that no one can number them.

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How gracious is that? The Bible speaks of those who are redeemed out of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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And even there, we speak of something that has yet to be fulfilled in time.

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But for God and from his perspective, it's as good as done. Christ saves people, not everybody, but he saves people out of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

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And historically, it was belief in that that caused the missionary movement of Christians around the world.

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Wow, let's go to Africa and round up his sheep. He obviously has elect sheep there because our

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Bible tells us he saves people out of every tribe. So we don't know who they are.

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They're not running around the countryside with the letter E stamped on their forehead. We'll just preach the gospel to everybody.

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But we know ahead of time that God will be saving them because the book of Revelation says he saves people out of every tribe, every tongue, every language group.

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And so understanding that when you understand that God has this amazing plan to redeem, to redeem anyone is amazing.

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And it causes the holy righteous angels to be aghast at the goodness of God.

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We on earth, because we so identify with sinners, can't understand a God who would punish someone to the full extent because we've got much more in common with an

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Adolf Hitler and a Joseph Stalin than we do the holiness of God. And we think after 8 ,000 years, isn't that enough punishment?

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Come on, let's have a little mercy now. But we don't understand the seriousness of sin, nor do we understand this, that even in eternity, no one who is unredeemed has a new heart and every beat of their heart is still in hostility towards God.

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They're still sinning. Amazing though it may be. So here's the question we need to ask.

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When we talk about a God who saves, let's think about salvation from what?

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R .C. Sproul wrote a book that was very helpful to a lot of people. It was simply called

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They're Saved From What? When you and I go to churches, oftentimes what we hear is to be saved is to be saved from a poor relationship, from having a poor self image.

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Maybe it's a lack of success. Put these eight biblical principles into operation, you can have success in life.

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Well, the book of Proverbs does talk about keys to success in life, but that's not the salvation that we're speaking of when we talk about biblical salvation.

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Poor health, lack of finances, purposelessness, life without purpose.

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All of these things are important to us, of course, but they're not the main thing we're talking about when we talk about salvation.

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To be saved is to be saved from the anger of God, the wrath of God spilled out, poured out righteously on us for our sin.

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As we look in Romans 5, see again the last verse that was quoted, says in verse 10,

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For if we were, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his

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Much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

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Wow, let's go back another verse, back to verse 9. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood.

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The blood there is speaking of the death of Christ for us. Much more shall we be saved by him from poor relationships, no, self image, no, lack of success, poor health, lack of finances, purposelessness, nope, nope, nope.

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Saved by him from what? The wrath of God. So God is a

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God of love who sends his son to rescue us, save us from the ultimate calamity, the anger of God, the wrath of God.

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So let me put it in a way I think we can grasp and really understand what salvation is all about.

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It's God saving us from God. God saving us from his own wrath.

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And it was God's idea to do that. God loved the world so that those who believe in Christ would be rescued from his wrath, not someone else's, not some angel.

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He's not going to cause an angel to express his wrath. He will have wrath himself.

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It's the righteous God expressing his violent reaction, righteous though it is, to sin.

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So Christ comes to save us from the wrath of God and it was the Father's idea to do that.

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Some people have the idea that Christ is the good guy, the Father is the bad guy, so to speak. And the

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Christ, Jesus, he can have a word with his Father and cause him to just cool it a little bit.

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But that's not it. For God to be good, he has to be just. And so the cup that Jesus had to endure was experiencing the wrath of God poured out on sin.

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How did that happen? It happened by means of something we call imputation.

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It's a big word. It means to transfer from one account to another.

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Perhaps you're aware of in banking when funds are to be taken from one account to another.

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Oftentimes we talk about a wire transfer. We could talk about an international money transfer where funds from one account, perhaps in Europe, come into your account or vice versa.

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And it is in one account and then it's transferred to another. At the cross, what was transferred was not money, but the sins of all those who would ever believe on Christ.

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How do we know that? Well, we see it in the New Testament, places like 2 Corinthians 5, 21.

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He, God made him, Jesus, who knew no sin to become sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

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We see it in Isaiah 53, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to our own way and the

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Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. If you can picture in your mind the back of Jesus and God transferring the sins of all those who would ever believe in Christ, those in the

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Old Testament, those in the New Testament, every one of God's elect people, their sins were laid on Christ.

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He died in their place. That same chapter says he was stricken for the transgression of my people.

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He endured God's wrath in their place as their substitute and what is transferred to us is the righteous life of Christ.

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So that we don't simply lose our sin as it's transferred to Christ and he suffers for us, but God causes the righteous life of Christ to be transferred to our account.

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And if we could look at our spiritual bank account as believers, it's amazing because you think, well, it'd be great if my debt is paid.

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I owe God 80 ,000 billion dollars in terms of sin. There it is.

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And it would be great if that's all canceled. But that would only bring you to zero. If you look in your spiritual bank account as a

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Christian, you're loaded. You have on record Christ's life in your place.

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So that when Christ came, you'll read scriptures like when he's getting baptized, he says, do this,

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John, for in this way we fulfill all righteousness. He's on a task on a mission to live the righteous life we should have lived.

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And that life is what is credited to our account at the cross.

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It's amazing. That's why they call it amazing grace. It's not just that we're at zero. Jesus actually made it clear, unless you do better than the scribes and the

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Pharisees, unless your righteousness is better than that, you shall in no way enter the kingdom of God.

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So you have to have positive righteousness. And here's the bad news. We have got nothing in the way of righteousness to offer

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God. We don't just don't have merits.

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All we have are demerits, our sins. We've never done anything in our life that was totally good for God's glory, done by faith.

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Whatever is not of faith is sin. The book of Romans says, and even if you did on a human level many good things, quote, good things, nothing has been done for God's glory exclusively.

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Even if people build hospitals, have you noticed they like to put their name on the side so that there's recognition in the community.

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Interesting. Nothing we've ever done has been good. How do we know that?

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Well, it's spelled out in the Old Testament, but confirmed in the New in places like Romans chapter 3, there are none that do good.

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And we think, come on, that's hyperbolic language. He's speaking in hyperbole. He's taking poetic words a little bit too far.

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No, he says, there are none that do good. Oh, come on, really? What about Princess Diana?

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No, not one. What about this person and that person? No, not one.

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On a human level, it's better to build a hospital than to go murder people. We understand that about civil good.

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But when we're talking about the spiritual plane, no man other than the Lord Jesus Christ ever did anything good.

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You might say, well, nobody's perfect. Yes, and that's the problem. Jesus, this wonderful savior, his words are, you must be perfect.

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Well, I'm perfect compared to Hitler. No, no, no, it's not compared to Hitler. Who wants to be the best sinner who goes to hell?

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You must be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect. That's Jesus in Matthew chapter 5, verse 48.

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Jesus says, the standard is perfection. And we think, well, he doesn't really mean that. No, yes, he does.

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He says, I haven't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. And here's the wonder of the life of Jesus.

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He lived for us as well as died for us. So both his life is important as well as his death.

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Theologians speak of the passive obedience of Christ and the active obedience of Christ.

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Don't be put off by those phrases. The passive obedience of Christ is as he was on that cross, he passively, not doing anything overt or outward, he received by imputation the sins of God's people and suffered in that place, in their place.

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He suffered passively in that sense. His active obedience speaks of his life from childhood all the way up to adulthood where he did not sin.

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He pleased his Father with his thoughts, with his words, with his actions all the time so that God bellowed out his

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Father from heaven at the baptism. This is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased.

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At the cross, he was still well pleased with him, but the sins of God's people were laid on him.

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And as 1 Peter 2 .24 says, he bore our sins in his body on the tree.

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So the cross is central. If someone's going to be saved, it's not because they climbed the mountain of God and God congratulates them at the top and says, you did it, you achieved it.

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That is what men think salvation is. We progress, we get better, and though we stumble and fall, we eventually climb the mountain.

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No, no, no. From God's perspective, he's on top of the mountain.

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We're all dead in the valley. And in Operation Salvation, he comes down, becomes a man, lives the life we should have lived, dies the death that we deserved, and then takes us up by breathing life into us and takes us on his shoulder up to the top of the mountain.

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And that's what you see in Ephesians 2. We were dead in trespasses and sins, but God in his grace, he acts, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead, he has made us alive together with Christ and has raised us up.

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Where? To where he is. Giving us salvation. 1

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Thessalonians 1, verse 9. For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true

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God and to wait for his Son from heaven whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us, or as one translation says, rescues us, as another translation says, saves us.

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And again, my ears prick up. What's he saving us from? It's exactly the same as what we read in Romans.

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Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. That's what salvation is.

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We need to start there with our thinking and think of it as a wonder of all wonders that God would go to such great lengths to save anyone.

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And if he only saved one, it would be amazing. But salvation is going to be the experience of countless people.

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Now, when we talk about reformed soteriology, as we progress in our studies together, we're going to talk about what the

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Bible has to say about salvation. Big words, reformed soteriology.

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What is all that? Soteriology is the study of sotere or soter. Sotere, the study of salvation.

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I have no real desire to simply be reformed and in that sense, be a follower of men like Luther and Calvin and Spurgeon and Edwards and all of these greats in church history.

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I want to know what the Bible says. And I didn't start off reformed. I start off very much on the other side of the aisle as an

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Arminian for the first 20 years as a Christian. And I came kicking and screaming, if you like, looking at the scriptures and realizing

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I'd misinterpreted them. And that was a hard thing. And we're going to look at some of the things that I experienced as my journey continued to understand what scripture says.

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I just want to be biblical. So if your desire is to be biblical, we're going to go to the scriptures, find what we believe there.

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And if we don't, let's not believe it. Let's find what we believe in the scriptures. And if you were to ask me,

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John, how would you in just a few words sum up reformed soteriology or biblical understanding, the biblical understanding of salvation?

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It's in three words. All right. You limit me to three. Here it is. Here they are. God saves sinners.

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The more you think about that, the more profound it is. It's actually God who does it. God does it without any help.

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Without any effort on our part. With no human merit involved.

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God saves, not tries to save. Not makes man save a bull.

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Not God gets people into a position where they can save themselves if they'll do certain things.

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No, God actually, personally saves sinners.

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Who are sinners? Those who are transgressors of the law. Those that do not qualify. The Church of Jesus Christ is the only organization

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I know of whereby the members achieve membership by disqualification.

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The way you get in is to admit you don't qualify. To admit you don't get to the standard.

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Christ died for the ungodly. We've already seen that. We have to admit we're ungodly.

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Can I apply? Oh yeah, only the ungodly can apply for salvation. Do you mean the godly cannot?

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Well, it'd be great if they were, but we haven't actually found any. So if God's going to save people, he's going to only save ungodly people.

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People that are sinners who recognize their sin and their need of a savior. How do we, as we talk about the

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Lord's Supper, when we encounter the Lord's Supper in the local church, the way to qualify is to admit you're a sinner and Jesus is the savior.

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That's the starting point. Not, well, I've had a good week. Let me just boil this down to where we live.

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I once received a phone call as a pastor from someone on a Thursday night. It was a lady and the phone call went something like this.

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Pastor, I said, yes. They said, I won't be there on Sunday. I said, oh, are you out of town?

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They said, no, something happened today. I said, what was it? She said, I lost it. I said, what did you lose?

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She said, my temper. I said, oh, do you want to tell me? Well, yes, that's why

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I'm telling you. I won't be there on Sunday. I said, well, what happened? I was in a store today and they seem to be running out of milk and there was just one gallon of milk left and I put my hand on it as I opened up the refrigerator area and this lady behind me put her hand about half a second later than I did.

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On the same gallon of milk. And I said, I got there first. She said, no,

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I did. And we got into kind of a stormy time for a moment and it escalated.

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I said, it escalated. She said, I ended up hitting her. We were screaming at each other and we hit each other.

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I hit her. I just feel I'm the lowest of the low Christians. I got no business coming to church.

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I would feel such a hypocrite coming to church on Sunday. I'm gonna lay low for at least a week.

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I wonder how you'd react to that. I was silently praying under my breath,

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Lord, what can I say? And so I just asked her, well, so you're saying you can't come to church this week because you had a bad day.

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Well, yeah, it was, I've been pretty good since then, but no, I really lost it and I got no business coming to church.

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I said, so what you're telling me is the reason you can't come to church is because you don't qualify to come into the presence of God.

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She says, what are you saying? Let me ask you this. Did you qualify to come to church last

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Sunday? Cause I noticed last Sunday you were in church and you're telling me this Sunday you're not qualified to come to church.

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What's the difference? She said, I really blew it today. I said, okay, you don't understand what salvation is then because you didn't qualify the week before, you won't qualify this week and believe me, you won't qualify next week.

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If it's based on your performance, here it is, you should never come into the presence of God, ever.

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She said, I think I know where you're going. I said, well, let me just speak it all the way home. The only reason you or I or anyone as Christians can come into God's presence is on the basis of perfect righteousness achieved by someone else, the

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Lord Jesus Christ. What I would advise you is admit that you're a sinner.

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Oh, I recognize that. And then recognize the savior hood of Christ and he is your qualification this

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Sunday as last Sunday as next Sunday. He alone, Christ is your righteousness.

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You will never have a week when your performance will merit to the level of Jesus Christ.

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And that's not good enough to have a pretty good week where you read more of the

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Bible than the week before, shared the gospel with more people than you had before. That's still not good enough.

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Was every waking second done for the glory of God? No, I can say

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I've never lived an entire hour of my life for the glory of God alone. That's what I should be doing.

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That is the standard. But I need a savior and that's what salvation is.

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So understanding that my only basis for coming to a service at any time is on the basis of someone else, on the basis of a substitute, on the basis of Jesus Christ.

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And if we get that, we'll understand that the Christian life coming into the kingdom, we kind of get that we're coming in because of Christ, but we tend to forget the gospel along the way.

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And so you get calls like the Thursday night call I received where people say, I am not qualified right now until my performance measures up a little more.

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Let's throw that all out and realize the standard is God's perfection. We never dilute it.

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We should not have done what we did. We should not have reacted the way we did. But the way we come into the presence of God is to say,

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I'm a sinner and I need a savior. And God says, that's how you qualify for my presence. I've made provision so that you don't have to come trembling, but boldly to the throne of grace because I would never throw

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Jesus out. I would never throw my son out and you stand in his righteousness or you don't stand at all.

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I hope you're getting that. So as we understand God saves sinners, we're understanding something very significant.

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When we talk about the way in which God saves, we see from Genesis to Revelation that God has a plan that started in eternity.

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It's not as if God was looking down the corridors of time, looking and hoping for a response from people, the right response to the call of the gospel, and then saying, oh,

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I see Herbert over there making the right response. I see that before I ever start off in time.

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Therefore, I'm going to choose him because I know he'll make the right decision. Why is that, though it's a popular belief, why is it not true?

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Because it doesn't take into account man's nature. Man's nature is to defy

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God, to be hostile to God always. The Bible calls the heart of unregenerate man, that is man outside of the new birth, as a heart of stone.

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His heart is stone towards God. And here's a clue as to where we're going in the rest of this series.

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Those with hearts of stone don't make a choice to have a heart operation. They're not interested.

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They're interested in ball games, they're interested in plays, they're interested in poetry, perhaps, they're interested in the

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Super Bowl, they're interested in making money, they're interested in good health, they're interested in a lack of punishment.

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Absolutely. They're just not interested in God as he really is. And so understanding that man's nature is not to run to God but to run from him, that was exactly what

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Adam and Eve did in the garden after they sinned. And Adam and Eve never had children until after they sinned.

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We're born with that Adamic nature that tries to run from God, and we will run from God even by means of religion.

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You ever seen someone and they, you talk to them one year and they're into Buddhism, another year they're into the

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New Age, another year they're into Scientology, and you think that guy, he's really seeking. No, he's not.

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No, he is not seeking. He is running from God in every way he possibly can.

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And when he doesn't find fulfillment somewhere, he looks to somewhere else, but he will not run to the true

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God unless God intervenes. Man is so hostile in his attitude towards God, and we're going to look at this as the teaching progresses.

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If those in hell were given the opportunity to be free from the punishment of hell, but the one thing they have to do is bow the knee to the

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Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior and Lord, and then they could be released. They would slam the doors of hell shut and say, stay away,

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I'm not interested. There's nothing in them that wants God. They want the benefits of God.

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It looks like they want the benefits of God because they want to be free from punishment. They don't like guilt.

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They don't like living with guilt. They want to be free from the punishment of hell.

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They just don't want God. And it takes a revolution. It takes a miracle of new birth for man to ever want

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God. He doesn't. By nature, he's a hostile rebel, always will be until God changes the disposition of his heart.

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So as we talk about the holiness of God as a starting point, sin as a starting point, recognizing how treasonous it is, how merciful it is for God to save one sinner, and he has to do that by still dispensing justice.

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For God to be merciful, he has to put justice on someone for the sin.

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And that's again where the cross comes in. God has to give us a new heart or else we will never enter into the kingdom of God.

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How do we do that? By faith. Where does the Bible speak of this? Jesus made it very clear in the same chapter that gives us a revelation of God's love for the world in giving his son.

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Also starts off by saying, unless a man is first born again, regenerated, born from above, literally, he cannot, not he's got an 80 % chance, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

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Why? There's nothing in him that wants to. He has to have a change of nature.

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It's a miracle. How does it happen? John goes on to say, the wind blows where it wishes.

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You hear the sound of it. Don't know where it comes from or where it goes, where it's going.

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So is everyone is born of the spirit. So in our evangelism, we don't know where and on whom the

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Holy Spirit will move. But that's the point. We don't, by our convincing power, change a heart of stone into a heart of flesh.

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God has to do it. And so the starting point in salvation is those three words I mentioned earlier. God saves sinners.

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It's God and God alone who does it. It's God who saves rather than makes savable. And he saves sinners and he does it all by himself.

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When someone hears the gospel, you and I don't see into the spiritual round to see the invisible work of the

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Holy Spirit. But should he redeem someone, what has happened is majestic as terms of, in terms of a miracle.

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God, the Holy Spirit has taken the word that someone has heard from the

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Bible, the message of Christ. And what he has done is as that word has gone forth, he took out the heart of stone, put in a heart of flesh as a master surgeon, invisible to us, so that that sinner now wants what he didn't want before.

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That's exactly what happened to me at age 14. I went to a Christian service, went to a service

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I didn't want to go to, wasn't interested, didn't like what I was hearing. But I guess somewhere during the preaching, what happened was

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I became interested in what I was not interested in before. And I wanted this Christ. Didn't want him before.

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Now I did. Now I understand from my Bible what was happening. God, the

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Holy Spirit invisibly went to work on my soul. I didn't drum up faith.

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Faith was the gift of God given to me so that I now wanted to delight in him, my life was changed, my whole direction in life was changed.

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I now wanted what I didn't want before. And that's what God gives us in what we call regeneration.

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Salvation is the big term that covers everything that God does to save. But it includes sub things like regeneration, causing the new birth.

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And here's where reformed teaching comes in, in difference to other teachings out there, especially what we would call

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Arminianism. The dividing line is something expressed in these words.

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Regeneration precedes faith. Regeneration comes before faith.

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The normal ways people normally hear about the way we respond to the gospel is that we hear the gospel, we choose to believe, and then

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God changes our hearts. The problem with that is a failure to understand man's total depravity, his absolute lack of love for Christ, the stony heart of man.

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And again, it puts people into the kingdom of God who have yet to be born again.

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They make a choice to be born again. Billy Graham wrote a book called

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How to Be Born Again. The problem with that is it can't coincide with John chapter three and Jesus' words.

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And as much as we might respect Dr. Graham, I'm going with Jesus over him. And he says, unless a man is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

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The new birth has to happen before you can enter. That which is born of the flesh is flesh.

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That which is born of the spirit is spirit. The human spirit has to be recreated or else it will only choose things that defy

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God, that are in disagreement with God, things other than God.

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So regeneration comes before faith. As we progress in our teaching, we'll talk about something called the order of salvation.

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And the two sides in this deal theologically are called Arminianism and Calvinism.

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It's unfortunate that Calvinism is named after Calvin because I think even John Calvin would wince at that because those who embrace

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Calvinism have no strong allegiance to Calvin. It's just that historically speaking, he was the first man to put things together in a theological package.

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Calvin's institutes had great influence after Martin Luther and he was systematized doctrine to the point where you were able to sum up in just a few words what would take you paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs to explain.

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If you said I'm a Calvinist, that means not I'm a follower of Calvin, but I embrace what he says in the institutes about God, about man, about election, about salvation and justification, all of those things, and you sum it up with that word

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Calvinist. Spurgeon would agree that Calvinism, to be a

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Calvinist is not what we're after. We want to just be biblical and we would also reflect on this as reformed theology.

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The teaching, the word theology is two Greek words sandwiched together, theos for God, logos for the study of or word of, and so the study of theology, the study of God coming out of the

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Reformation were the central truths as to the holiness of God, justification by grace alone, through faith alone and Christ alone.

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And we're going to talk about these things in some depth, not because we've got an allegiance to these men, but because I believe these men got hold of the principles of God from scripture.

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If we can't find it there as we said earlier, I'm not interested and I don't think any Christian should be either.

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So we're going to talk about the order of salvation. We're going to talk about the way in which God says what he does to save us, and I think more than ever before we'll be aghast at the grace of God.

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We'll think it's more gracious than we realized. For some people their understanding of grace is kind of boring, but as we study what the scripture says we'll find it to be what it truly is, amazing grace.

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Let me finish with what we started with. If you can't, if you cannot live a perfect, holy, 100 % obedient life, and if you haven't actually done that, your need is desperate.

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God demands a perfect, obedient, 100 % obedient life to qualify to be in his presence.

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If you can't do that, you better find someone who can do it for you. We call it salvation by means of the substitute.

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He is the Lamb of God who bore the wrath of God for the people of God. And again, it all brings us back to the

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Trinity. The Father electing a people for himself, the Son dying for them effectively, and the

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Holy Spirit applying that same redemption to the same people. All with different roles, all achieving the final objective salvation of God's people.

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Let's wrap it up in our time of prayer right now. Father, thank you for tonight. Thank you for your word as we have started on this journey together.

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We are just amazed again at biblical salvation. The fact that any of us will be redeemed is a marvel to us.

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And we pray, Lord, as this study continues, you'll open up your word to us, give us an excitement over it that we might thrill in the gospel of Jesus Christ as never before, heralding him as our peace, as our righteousness, our sanctification, and our redemption.

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As 1 Corinthians 1 verse 30 tells us, Lord, to you be all the glory. Take your people on this journey into your grace.