My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 1)

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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My Pathway to Calvinism (Part 2)

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the word of God and the doctrines of grace.

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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who is no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Today, we're going to be doing something a little bit different on the program and it's going to take us in a new format.

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The first thing you'll probably notice is that I'm not doing a video like I would normally do.

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Beginning in August, and today is August 3rd, 2020.

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Beginning in August, I'm no longer going to be doing videos but I'm going to make this an audio podcast.

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It'll make it a little easier to produce since I'm producing this daily.

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And also, it's gonna give me an opportunity to do some things that I have not done before, such as on some of the future programs, I'm going to be interacting with some sermons and messages from other pastors regarding the subjects of theology, particularly Reformed theology.

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And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today is if you're listening to this and you've been a longtime listener to the program, we've been going on now for several months, ever since the beginning of the coronavirus, then I wanna kind of talk about one of the things that I've decided to change.

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I had a long time to think about this.

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I've talked to my wife about it.

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And one of the things that I wanna change is what I had been doing is taking us through the daily Bible reading that we have at Sovereign Grace Family Church.

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And while that's great and I've enjoyed doing those daily Bible studies, I wanna refocus this program more on the subject of Reformed theology and issues that we face as Calvinists since, well, the program is called Coffee with a Calvinist.

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And I want to do something that was done for me.

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Early on in my time of becoming a Calvinist, I was very influenced and helped by a program called The Dividing Line.

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And that is a program that is put out by Dr.

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James White.

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Now, those who know me know that Dr.

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White was one of the primary influences on me as a theologian and a teacher, and I consider him to be a friend.

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I'm very thankful for the time that he has invested in teaching and the amount that I have learned from him, both from his books and from his debates.

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I've attended several of his debates.

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I've been very grateful for Dr.

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White in my life.

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And when I first was introduced to Reformed theology, I began to listen to The Dividing Line.

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It was a program that was put out by Dr.

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White and it's still going on today.

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So I wanna make sure that this is clear.

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I would still encourage you today to listen to The Dividing Line.

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That program is, I believe he does it on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it's available on YouTube.

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It's available on Sermon Audio and you can go to AOMIN.org and you can find out how to listen to The Dividing Line.

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That's A-O-M-I-N.org.

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So The Dividing Line is a wonderful program.

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It was a wonderful program, it still is.

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But one of the things that was always helpful for me was when I would have a difficult passage or when I would have a difficult issue, I would be able to go and listen to The Dividing Line and oftentimes Dr.

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White would address those issues.

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And so it was, The Dividing Line dealt with several different subjects.

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It dealt with how to address Mormonism, how to address Jehovah Witnesses, how to address Catholics, Roman Catholics, how to, but the thing that was really the big help for me was that it focused a lot on Reformed theology.

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It focused a lot on defending Calvinism.

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And so what I wanna do with my little daily program is I wanna continue teaching the scripture and I wanna continue to focus on giving you an opportunity to study the word daily.

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But what I'm gonna do, especially in August, and it's gonna be, the trial run's gonna be through August.

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We're gonna see how this goes.

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I'm gonna be doing it in audio format, not in video like I had been doing before.

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And I'm gonna focus on scriptures that are difficult.

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I'm gonna focus on questions that people have about Reformed theology.

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I'm still gonna keep the daily program to about a 10 to 12 minute lesson.

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And one of the things that I'm gonna try to do is focus on particular issues.

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So this is where you can really come in and be a part of the program.

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If you have a scripture or you have a theological question, if you could send those to me and you can do that through our Facebook page, you can do that through the comment section on YouTube, or you can just simply send me an email and I will make sure that my email is in the description on this program so that you're able to send me a message.

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And I would like to be able to interact with you as a listener.

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And I think that that's one of the best ways for me to know what you need, obviously, if you're having theological questions or issues, is for you to send me those questions and allow me to have the opportunity to address those questions on the program.

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So, because I don't have any questions today, I'm starting from scratch, as you will, with a new format.

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What I've decided to do today is I wanna talk to you about how I became a Calvinist.

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And I'm probably gonna do this over a couple of programs.

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And again, it's not all about me.

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I do wanna talk to you about God's word and show you the things in God's word and the men of God who were influential in helping me to come to the conclusions that I have in regard to the doctrines of grace.

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And for those of you who maybe be a first-time listener, maybe you just happen to come across this, maybe you don't even know what it means to be a Calvinist, hopefully over the next few days, this will help you to understand it.

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And if you're a member of our church, if you're a member of Sovereign Grace Family Church, or maybe you're a person who has just recently begun visiting with us and you don't know really who we are, maybe you're learning about what it means to be a part of our church, that's kind of what this is gonna be about.

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And maybe you have been in our church for a long time and you've heard me use words like Calvinism and Arminianism.

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Maybe you've heard me use terms like predestination and election.

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And maybe you don't really know what those things are about, or maybe you have questions about things like free will and determinism and those things.

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And so my goal in this program is going to try to be to help you become better at understanding your theology, better at understanding the doctrines of grace, better at understanding the Word of God.

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I'm still gonna remind you every day that we have a daily Bible reading.

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Today's Bible reading is Acts chapter eight.

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So read Acts chapter eight.

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I'm encouraging you.

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Please make that a part of your Bible study.

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Read the Word of God daily.

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We give you one chapter a day through the New Testament in 2020.

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And if you have questions about Acts chapter eight, still send them in.

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I would be happy to answer those questions for you.

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But let me remind you that just a few years ago, I preached a series, took me a couple of years, but I preached through the entire book of Acts.

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So you can go back to our sermon audio page and you can see on our sermon audio page where we have gone through the book of Acts.

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And so if you've got a passage in Acts that you would like to learn more about, you can go to our sermon audio page and you can learn about it there.

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All right, so let's talk about how I became a Calvinist and why I would use that term today.

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As many of you know, I've told this story before.

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I was saved when I was 19 years old.

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God saved me.

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And even though I had been in church for a long time, I had not been saved.

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Even though I was baptized as a young child, I was baptized eight years old, I wasn't saved.

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And then I was baptized again when I was 12 because I was encouraged to do so because I had quote, reached an age of accountability, end quote.

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And so by the time I was 19 years old, I had been baptized twice and I had not been saved at all.

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And God, through a series of events and people in my life and pointing me to the word of God and some people trying to point me away from the word of God, God was able to save me and he changed my heart and he gave me a new direction.

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Within two years, I felt the call to ministry and I began at that time to look for a school to attend and I ended up attending a local seminary.

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And I attended the local seminary for two reasons.

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One was because the local seminary was affordable.

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It wasn't, you know, thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars.

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It was very affordable to get to go to the local seminary.

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And it was also, it didn't require an undergraduate degree for me to attend.

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A lot of seminaries require an undergraduate degree.

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Now I did go on and get an undergraduate degree, but I did it at the same time as I was working on my degrees at the seminary.

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And it's an interesting, actually the seminary provided an undergrad.

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I did a bachelor's through the seminary, but it wasn't accredited.

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I went back and did an accredited degree when I was working on my master's just to ensure that I would have an accredited degree in case I ever needed it.

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As far as for supporting my family and things like that, I felt like it would be important to have.

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But the reason why I'm telling you all this is because when I was in seminary at Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary, my alma mater, while I was there, I was told very specifically and in no uncertain terms that Calvinism kills churches.

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We had a professor who I loved, and I still love him, though he has gone on to be with the Lord.

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We had a professor who had had some really bad experiences with Calvinism in a church that he had pastored, and he had decided that Calvinism was bad.

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And so therefore, he taught us that Calvinism was something that was wrong, that we should not be Calvinists.

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And they even did a class on Calvinism.

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Debating Calvinism was the book, and that was my introduction to James White.

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James White did a book on debating Calvinism with Dave Hunt, and that was the introduction that I had to James White.

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And in the class, they were trying to disprove the Calvinist position.

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And I happened to get a copy of the book, and I read it, and I was much more moved by Dr.

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White's argument than I was by Dave Hunt's argument.

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And anyone who has ever read that book, most of the people who have read it say that Dave Hunt really didn't do a good job of presenting a good argument, very disjointed in his arguments.

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And Dr.

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White, of course, is a very seasoned debater, very intelligent man, and his arguments were much more cohesive.

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But in the midst of all that, something else happened.

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I was invited to speak at a, oh, goodness, it was a youth camp that I was invited to speak at.

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While I was at the youth camp, the man who had put on the camp was a man by the name of Jim Dutton.

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He was a friend, he is still a friend.

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He was our worship leader here at our church for a while.

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But Brother Dutton was kind enough to challenge me on my presuppositions on the subject of Calvinism.

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And I don't even think he used the term Calvinism.

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He used a, well, I think he just asked me what I thought about predestination.

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And of course, I gave him the typical line of, well, God sees what I'm gonna do.

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God responds to my actions, which is the typical Arminian response, the prescient view.

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God's gonna look down the corridor of time and see what I'm gonna do.

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And I gave him that, and I remember giving him that, and he said, you know, I used to think that way too.

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But now having studied it, I see it differently.

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And I was surprised, I was really surprised to hear that Jim Dutton was a Calvinist.

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It was very surprising to me.

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But it was a challenge, and he challenged me to look at the scriptures.

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He challenged me to go to certain passages, and he didn't tell me what to think.

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He just said, I want you to go to this passage and this passage, and over the next few days, as I go through this story more, I wanna look at the passages that were very, that helped me understand that this was the truth.

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And so, like I said, though, it began with somebody asking me a simple question.

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What do you think about predestination? I said, you know, I gave him the typical prescient answer, the typical answer of God looking down the corridor of time.

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And he said, you know, I used to think that way too, but I don't anymore, and here's why.

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And he pointed me to the word of God.

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So I can honestly say that while there were a lot of people that had influence on me, it was ultimately the word of God that made me a Calvinist.

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Because, as I said, Brother Dutton just pointed me to the word, and he said, read this and think about this.

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And in the days ahead, I wanna talk about more how that evolution took place, and how the changes took place, and what happened as a result of that, and what passages were most influential on me.

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So again, I don't wanna make this podcast about me personally, but I'm using this as an avenue to teach you something important, and I hope that it's this.

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It's that we as, you know, wherever we are in our theological lives, we've gotten here through some kind of a journey, and there've been people along the way, and lessons along the way, and books along the way that have been a blessing to us.

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And I wanna, like I said, start this new format by being a little more relaxed, a little more conversational, and I wanna talk a little bit more about our theology and how it is shaped by God's word.

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So I hope today's format, this change, has been a blessing to you.

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I hope that this new opportunity for this program, changing the format of the program will be a blessing to you.

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And I pray that in the days and months to come that we'll continue to just grow together in the word of God.

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So I wanna thank you for listening today.

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I brought you as far as I wanna go today, and tomorrow we'll pick back up with what were the scriptures that Brother Jim pointed me to, and what were the scriptures that ultimately closed the case for me on the sovereignty of God in election and predestination in Calvinism.

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So again, I hope you continue to listen this week, and I hope that you join us tomorrow for the program.

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Thank you again for listening to this episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey, and I have been your Calvinist.

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May God bless you.

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Thank you for joining in for today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.

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Keep in mind, we have a new lesson available every weekday morning at 6.30 a.m.

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on YouTube and Facebook.

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If you enjoyed this lesson, please take a moment to respond by hitting the like button, leaving a comment, and subscribing to the channel.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for listening.

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May God bless you.