Okay, here we go. Boom. Sade. Righteous are you, O God. Your laws are right. The statutes you have laid down are righteous. They are fully trustworthy. My zeal wears me out. For my enemies ignore your words. Your promises have been thoroughly tested, and your servant loves them. Though I am lowly and despised, I do not forget your precepts. Your righteousness is everlasting, and your law is true. Trouble and distress have come upon me, but your commands are my delight. Your statutes are forever right. Give me understanding that I may live. Good stuff. Good, good, good. All right, let me move the blue paper. There we go. And let's see here. Let's do this first. Today is the 16th, right? All day. Okay, good. All right. January 16th, a young man on a cold Sunday in 1873, a dignified woman and her portly companion trudged across Clark Street Bridge in Chicago. College Administrator Emma Dreyer and Evangelist D.L. Moody were discussing a Christian school for Chicago. Dreyer insisted that such a school be co-educational, but Moody disagreed. Ms. Dreyer decided to raise the money herself, and in 1882, her institute opened with 50 students. Moody, watching from afar, was impressed and agreed to lend his support if Chicagoans could raise $250 I will tell you what I have on my heart. I would like to see $250,000 raised at once. $250,000 for Chicago is not anything. Take $50,000 and put up a building that will house 75 or 100 people where they can eat and sleep. Take $200,000 and invest it at 5% and that gives you $10,000 a year to run this work. Then take men that have the gifts and train them for this work of reaching the people. Men, and he finally agreed, women. that happened and Emma Dreyer, who had kept the vision before Moody for years and provided educational and organizational expertise to the school's beginnings, resigned to make room for his leadership. Land and buildings were acquired and on January 16, 1890, Moody Bible Institute was dedicated. Two years later, William Evans became MBI's first graduate. Evans, a New York journalist, had first heard Moody in New York City preaching from Luke 5. Moody had challenged young people to give themselves for Christian service. Suddenly, the evangelist had looked down at Evans and said, young man, I mean you. After Moody found Evans and continued, young man, somehow or other, God told me he meant you. Have you never been called to give your life to the service of Jesus Christ? When Evans mentioned his comfortable salary, Moody retorted, pack up your trunk and go to my school in Chicago, never mind about money. Evans went, and he became the first of thousands who for over a century have spanned the globe for Christ from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago. Timothy my child, Christ Jesus is kind and you must let Him make you strong. You have often heard me teach, now I want you to tell these same things to followers who can be trusted to tell others. 2 Timothy 2, was it two or one? One and two or two, one and two, one and two. Okay, let's see here. And speaking of 2 Timothy, it looks like we're in 2 Timothy. Yes, we do. Let's see, we'll get rid of that. that. Heavenly Father, how good it is to be in your presence. Thank you for the surety we have in Christ and thank you for what he did for us that we could never do for ourselves. And Lord, there's a lot of trouble and trial in this world right now. There's a real apostasy going on in the Vatican. It's getting worse by the day and we just pray that you would lead somebody there to lead those people to Jesus. And we have lots of trouble in churches all over. There's all kinds of... bad teachings being taught. There's people that just have wicked agendas to draw people away from you. So we would pray that there would be people that would step in, like these back at the time of Moody Bible Institute's beginning, that would be willing to preach and teach what is proper. And speaking of that, Lord, we certainly pray for this class, that things would be handled properly. And if there's something that is not, we pray that you would alert us to it so that we would not teach anything incorrectly. Lord, we thank you for the chance to come into your presence and to do this and we just exalt you for who you are and we praise you in Jesus' beautiful name. Amen. All right, good deal. So here we go. Do you want to review? That was a good question that they had. What do we do with the books and stuff like that for anybody who might not What are you talking about? Well, you have a New King James Version. I have an NIV. Yeah, we always have two Bible versions going. That way we can compare because his is based on the Alexandrian text and this is based on the Byzantine. So there's two different traditions. There are differences. You'll see in a properly footnoted Bible to say this verse is not included in this text, or this verse is, you know, different in this text, etc. And there's not a lot of them, but there are some differences, and the majority of them can be chalked up very quickly to scribal errors, and you can even see how they made those errors. It's not difficult when you understand the different types of errors that come into translations because of scribes. People see all kinds of demons under rocks because of that kind of thing, like God is incompetent, but the fact is that God has let us translate His Word. and you know I can do a translation of we'll just say one chapter of the book of Malachi and I will see after translating we'll say one chapter I'll go and I'll see where I've skipped exactly the way I'm talking about now something because of a similarity in another verse and that's why I review the whole thing when I get done is to make sure that hasn't happened and then I listen to a old rabbi that did the Hebrew New Testament, he spoke it out, and so I follow along with what he says to make sure I still haven't missed anything. But it's very easy to find out how most of these errors came in, and it's our job, not because there's a demon under a rock that's, you know, the Bible, you know, can't be what's the word, can't be trusted. Rather, our job is to find out what the differences are. And anyway, for right now, what we do is he reads his text, which is the NIV. This is New King James Version, or like I say, different source text, so sometimes you will see differences. And that's why we do that. And then Anyway, let's see here. We're in 2 Timothy 1, 9, but you start wherever you want. I'm just going to go to paragraph, which would be 8. So do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me, his prisoner. But join me in suffering for the gospel, for by the power of God, 9, who has saved us and called us to a holy life, not because of anything we have done, but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before and beginning, the beginning of time. Okay, so that's kind of close. It's just translational differences. Who has saved us and called us with the holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose. And grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began. So there you go. Let's see here. That's verse 9, and we're just talking about differences a second ago. In verse 111, there's going to be one word that is missing from your text. It will be up there in a couple verses. So anyway, that's just why we do that, so we can kind of get an idea of what's going on in different texts. But let's see here. We have, you know, Sergio and Rhoda are traveling, so we should keep them in prayer. Jose is up in, they're all up in Washington, D.C., and they're getting a lot of people together for the inauguration, and they're going to be handing out 8,000 tracks, plus probably several hundred more they grabbed from here before they left. So that's their job for the next few days, and it's cold, it's miserable, it's snowing, and the kind of thing that I'm glad I'm sitting in Sarasota, Florida with. Anyway. It's cold here. It is. It's cold here. There's no doubt about it. But it's not snowing and going to be 20 some degrees or something. Let's hear the words. This is verse 1-9 commentary. The words now describe the gospel according to the power of God, okay, of the previous verse. These words describe that. It is through this gospel message that God, Paul says, has saved us, meaning all who have believed the message of salvation, Romans 10, 9, and 10. Let me take you there and we'll just read it. We could just as easily quote it off our head, but we'll read it just to make sure we don't skip a word or something, Romans 10, 9, and 10. And actually, we'll go on down to verse 13 as well. Let's see here, the gospel, that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture says, whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon his name. Verse 13, for whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. So there you go, that's the gospel from Romans. He rewords it a little differently in 1 Corinthians 15, which is more specifically the gospel itself. What it says there is, For I delivered you the first of all, which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. So that's the Gospel. Christ did the work for us. All we need to do is believe. And, you know, people get all bent out of shape where it says when you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart you will be... They say, well, that's a work. Paul wrote it. I didn't write it. Okay, take that however you want, but anybody that would say, I, you know, I want to be saved by Jesus and isn't willing to say, I believe Jesus is Lord, There's a problem there already. Anyway, so here we go. He has saved us, okay? Paul writes the words as an accomplished action has saved us. Done deal. And this is the theme of salvation in the Bible. You're going to find it all the way through, and yes, I understand there are verses that are hard for people to get. They're taken out of the context, or somebody has trained it into them that those verses tell you you can lose your salvation, but the Bible does not teach that. It doesn't teach it from Scripture itself in context, nor does it teach it implicitly, like through a philosophical argument or a logical argument. In other words, God's decrees are eternal. When He said that He is going to save you because of the shed blood of Christ, and you call on Him according to the Word, that is an eternal decree. The thing that will be up for question is what rewards you will receive when you stand before Him. But the fact that you will stand before Him as a saved believer is not in question. So let's see here. No question in his mind of the certainty of the action, just as Christ called out, it is finished, so it is in the believer. Christ did the work. He fulfilled the work by dying on the cross, and in his dying, work is done. When you believe in that, you now enter, as Paul says, in Christ. You are now in a completely different realm, a different aspect of what God is doing. And there's nothing in the Bible that tells you how you become un-in Christ. It's not stated. And even if you could, which people argue, There's nothing in the Bible to tell you how you would be re-saved once you supposedly lost your salvation. The Bible doesn't address that because it's not necessary. Anyway, it says it's finished in the believer with this understanding. He then says, "...and called us with a holy calling." Though the two thoughts occur simultaneously, they are two separate things. God has saved us through Christ's work and has called us through the work of the Holy Spirit. Okay? They're two separate things, even though they happen at the same time. The calling is both for salvation and it is of salvation. For salvation and of salvation. We are called through hearing the word which leads to salvation, and we are called into holiness because of the salvation that is obtained. And you can see that, for example, where Paul says, where is it that he says, those who believe are justified, those who are justified are sanctified, those who are sanctified are glorified. Okay, those are all different things that he has said about that. That's Romans 8, I believe. I could be wrong, 7. Anyway, he says, one, they're a done deal, and two, they're different aspects of the same thing that God has done, okay? And then sanctification, people talk about two types of sanctification. One is immediate sanctification, which would be kind of what he's talking about here, holiness. And then there is what's called progressive sanctification. And progressive sanctification is up to you. What are you going to do with your walk in Christ? Are you going to learn the Bible? Are you going to fellowship with other believers and stay close to the Lord? Or are you going to just walk away from the Lord and just go do your own thing for the rest of your life, as in the person in 2 Peter chapter 1? Peter still says he's saved in verse 9. He's just forgotten that he is saved. Then that's kind of a waste of, you know, your life in Christ when you stand before him and you've got nothing to offer him except the fact that you believed at one time. But that would be progressive sanctification. I am not wholly in and of myself, obviously. If anybody feels they are, they, you know, they are positionally in Christ, but we all are growing at a different rate. There are no two people on this planet that have been saved over the past 2,000 years that are on the same level of sanctification, because we're all individuals. We're all doing our own thing. We all fall backward at times. We all say something stupid at times. We all do something we shouldn't have done at times. There are Christians that have actually killed people and spend the rest of their life in prison, you know, murder. They, well, could be whatever. But there are Christians that, you know, made the mistake of walking away from their wife, and these things happen. And then there are people that have lived obediently to the Lord, but they're all on a different level. They're all Yeah, I guess murder would be right, because killing would be, you know, kind of an accident. That's talking from a biblical perspective. But, you know, from a biblical perspective, we want to use the word murder. When we say, I killed somebody, I'm in jail for it, that's kind of understood. But the word in Hebrew is ratzach, and it signifies unintended killing. It doesn't matter if it's intentional or unintentional. The same word covers both. And then what you have to do is you have to determine through a process that's given in the law as to what was it intentional, was it unintentional. If it's intentional, then of course you take the person and he is to be taken away and executed. Okay, but if it was unintentional, then they have you know, a process for that, including living in a separate city until the death of the high priest and all that kind of stuff. It's a complicated process. But yeah, technically, murder is the word you would want to use like in the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not murder. Because if you say kill, it kind of sets up a contradiction in the Bible because God told Israel, go and kill the Amalekites, go kill these people. And so if you're using the same word, which it's not in the Hebrew, there's a problem with that. So that's a good point, but here in English it doesn't really matter. If we say, I killed somebody, I'm in prison, everybody knows that you murdered that person. So anyway, you've got Sanctification happens immediately. You are sanctified, okay? The moment you believe in Jesus, you are set apart. Sanctification sets you apart. You're holy to the Lord, and that's what holy means. Holy doesn't mean you're sitting there shining and beaming and stuff the way that we kind of present it in English. It simply means set apart, okay? And holiness, being holy, can be in different aspects. It doesn't have to mean you're holy in the sense of with the Lord. You know, somebody that's set apart for something over here, you could say, well, he's holy. He's set apart for it. We wouldn't use that term because we think of holiness with God, but that's all it means. It's just an idea that you are set apart for something. So, sanctification is what happens immediately by the Spirit. You are now set apart. You are sanctified to God through Jesus Christ, and that's where the term, in Christ, comes from. Okay, you are now in Christ, whereas as I said, progressive sanctification is something that is what you're doing in your life to become more you know, Christ-like. Okay, so those are two different types, but the sanctification of the Holy Spirit is an immediate thing, but it's a little different than salvation. You're saved, but you are also sanctified. So you want to kind of get those boxes right, but the calling is both for salvation and it is of salvation. This process is Paul's words with a holy calling. The thought here speaks of our being separated from sin by the work of the Spirit. And then there's different separations from sin, because we still sin in the sense that we do things that we shouldn't do. But, in Christ we are not imputed sin. That's 2 Corinthians 5.19. If we were imputed sin, then we would lose our salvation. That's very clear. But we're not imputed sin. The wages of sin is death. I'll take you there and I'll read you that so you can see that. I've got to go in there. No, no, no. That was the problem. I drank water, and I never should do that. Yeah, it waters bad for your throat when you're trying to speak. Now all things are of God who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ. That's another word that we use, reconciliation. Okay, all these words have meaning and they all fit into the exact same process of salvation, but there's different aspects of it. Anyway, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. We are separated from God because of sin. That's what happened with Adam. He fell and then death spread to all men because all sinned. But saying that means that it's speaking of a different type of death. It's not speaking of physical death. It's speaking of, what do you call it, spiritual death. You are now disconnected from God because of sin. Christ came to do away with law. Okay, the term would be anomos in Greek. A is the negative particle, no, and then nomos is law. No law. We are not under law. And that's very important because if we are under law of any type, if there's any law that we are under, then we have the potential to lose our salvation, and the Bible does not teach that. It teaches that we are in Christ and we are not under law. Paul says it explicitly in Romans, you are not under law but you are under grace. Thank you. So we're under grace and not under law. the wages of sin is death. We don't have sin because we are not imputed sin even when we do wrong. So people need to understand the differences because yes, we can do wrong. Yes, we can make God unhappy with the things that we do. but we are not being imputed the wrongness for those things when we are in Christ. That's the important thing to remember with that. If we were, there would be no salvation, and it would be immediate because we all sin all the time in one way or another. Okay, so this is the great thing about what Jesus did is he has taken us away from the law economy. That includes the law of Adam. If you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on that day you shall surely die. He died spiritually, the spiritual connection was gone. Christ is the one that reconnects us to God. So even the law which Adam died under, we are not under anymore. We are in Christ, not in Adam. He discusses that in 2 Corinthians 15. You've got the earthly man, you've got the heavenly man, okay? You've got these different things going on. So all of this is happening right at the time that we are saved. It's with a holy calling. The thought here speaks of, as I said, being separated from sin by the work of the Spirit. The believer is brought into a new state before God because of the calling. Okay, we are in that state when we are in Christ Jesus. However, Paul continues with, not according to works. That means that he repeats this everywhere. It's just one of those things. You were saved by grace, not through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. Okay. Works are excluded because if they were not excluded, if you did something to earn your salvation, as Paul says, you would have something to boast before God. There is no boasting before God on behalf of what you have done, okay? As a matter of fact, Paul says in Galatians 6 that I'm not boasting anything but the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is the culmination of Jesus Christ's work. It's done. So it is not of works. And if people could grasp this in these churches around the world that are constantly putting people back under the law, a law that was fulfilled by Christ, and it doesn't matter what the precept is. Like I say, I've talked to people where the church doesn't teach any law except you can't eat pork. They pick that one thing and they say, you know, we can't eat pork. That's works. That is saying that you must do something in order to maintain, get or maintain your salvation. And it's not works. Some people will say, well, you need to tithe to your church. Tithing is a precept under the law. Okay. They're shoving you back under for one precept or another in churches all over the world. Some of them say you have to observe the feasts of the Lord. Okay. But they usually will say, you know, you need to serve observe the feasts of Israel. And the reason why is because that takes the you know, the weight off of the Lord and puts it on Israel, and you were spiritual Israel, so now you should be doing these things. And I had a conversation with somebody that said, you know, it says that you shall observe these feasts forever, okay? And then he says there's no time in the New Testament where that is nullified. It never says in the New Testament you don't have to observe the feasts. One, that is law, and when he says forever, he says olam. The word means to the vanishing point. The vanishing point is the cross of Jesus Christ. The law is done, okay? And so that precept, which was of the law, is done, but secondly, every one of them is specifically said to be fulfilled in Christ in the New Testament. So you don't have to say, oh, you don't need to observe these faiths because they're fulfilled. Christ is our Passover lamb. Christ is our unleavened bread. He is these things. And because He is, that is done. But we were never under the Law of Moses anyway. No Gentile was ever put under the Law of Moses. Only Israel was under the Law of Moses. And if people could get this, they would understand what Paul is saying here. But these blinders come down, like, I've got to do this, or I've got to do this, or somebody puts you into some false teaching to get you to take your eyes off of Jesus. And that takes you right back to the feasts of the Lord. It's right there in Leviticus 23, verse 1. These are my feasts. They're not feasts of Israel. Israel observed the feasts until the Lord fulfilled them. he fulfilled that. That's the point, but they will always put off these, they'll equivocate. There's a guy that did a series of the Feasts of the Lord, and he started out saying these are the Feasts of the Lord, and by the time he got into teaching the faith, he's saying the Feasts of Israel. He equivocated on the purpose of the feast, because that allows him to say, see, and you get into a false teaching. They're not Jewish feasts. They're not feasts of Israel. They are feasts of the Lord. So, anyway, the law is over, okay? Paul is giving us all of this information in just a couple of words in one verse, okay? The entire process of salvation, of sanctification, of reconciliation, of justification, all of it is of God. All of it. None of it has anything to do with us except us believing. I receive what Jesus Christ has done. He is Lord. I submit myself to him. Okay, that's not a work. All that is is faith. Okay, that is what the ancients were credited for. Hebrews 11, you know, again and again, by faith this guy did this. By faith this lady did this. Faith. That's the only thing we can give God that he Needs. Wants. Wants maybe is the word that he requires, I guess, that a person will be a person of faith. That's the only thing we can do. I mean, you know, anyway, so all works of man are excluded in the process. All works. There's no work that you need to do except believe. In other words, one does not become holy by becoming a monk, okay, which is what, now, He is holy in the sense separate. He has separated himself from society. But their idea is that by becoming a monk and sequestering themselves away in a cubicle somewhere and praying all day or, you know, tending the vineyards and making strange beers that they can sell in the UK, those things don't make a person holy or separate to God. Okay? It doesn't do anything. All you're doing is you're not out evangelizing people and living in the world that God gave us to live in. Okay? Anyway, so a monk, he separates himself from the world around him. That's not becoming holy in the sense of a relationship with God. Nor does one become holy by scourging himself in a public demonstration of repentance. Okay, we see this in South American countries. You see it in the Philippines especially. It's real big there, especially at Easter time. They get these flagellates and they just keep banging themselves until they're just pulp bleeding all over the place and they think that God is happy with that. Yeah, this is going to make God happy for another year. I'm just going to bleed all over the place and people are going to see me in public and they're going to think I'm a real holy guy. It doesn't do anything except give you a bad back where you can't sleep well for a couple months probably. but it doesn't do anything because that's not what God is looking for. He's not looking for that type of behavior in his people. Nor does one become holy by being ordained as a pastor, preacher, or priest, okay? I've just read in Ministry Watch within the past hour of all kinds of people that have done all kinds of bad things, okay? And they come in every day, these all around the country, Lead pastor, you know, caught with pornography. Lead pastor, you know, caught with young girls. It goes on and on. That doesn't make you holy. Just because you get a piece of paper that says, I am now a pastor, then you should live up to the job. It doesn't make you holy. It's something that you should now say, I am putting myself in a position where I need to act in accordance with the job that has been conferred upon me. But you're not made holy by being ordained as a pastor, preacher, priest, okay? That's not the case, but that's what they act like, especially in the churches that have priests. They walk around with those sticks, with the cross on top of it, and the big poofy hats, and the flowing robes, and everybody thinks they must be men of God. Okay, I know somebody in my family that thinks that way, that because these people are in the position, they are great men of God. Most of those people are perverts. You know, the church that I used to attend, which out on C.S. McKee when I was a kid, They're all homosexuals and lesbians. All of them. It's just unbelievable. But people look at them and they think, they're holy. Look it, they've got little gowns on and they're saying things in front of me that are supposed to bless me. That's not what makes you holy. The Holy Spirit is what sets you apart as holy. Now it's your job to live for that state of holiness that God has conferred upon you. Anyway, There's nothing we can do to merit this process except believe in the work of Jesus Christ, as belief is not considered a work, which is Romans 3. Let me take you there. Romans Oh, let's see here, Romans 12. Go back a little bit, Charlie. Romans 3, and we want to go to, is this 3? I always get the wrong one because the numbers go over on that page. Okay, and then it says here, where is boasting then? This is verse 27. It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. You stand before the Lord, you've got no boasting because you were saved by faith, meaning he did everything and all you did was believe. So there is no boasting before the Lord. Zero. Zippo. Okay? So, therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from deeds of the law. okay and then he goes in and talks about circumcision and all that kind of stuff and uh but you are justified by faith. That is it. By faith in what Jesus Christ has done, God has said, I have offered this to you to reconcile yourself to me. And that's not as easy as you would think, especially in the world when people reject it, they dismiss it, they laugh at it, they make memes about it on social media and tell you, you know, how dumb Christians are. It's really not that easy, you know, to accept that. And then you throw in all of the things that the Bible teaches, if you take them in their proper context, like evolution as opposed to creation, then you say, I accept the fact that Jesus came and died for me, but I just can't really believe in creation, you know, that's the kind of thing. Listen, that was me. I struggled with that. Creation was the hard one for me because you're raised in evolutionary doctrine in schools and you respect your teachers and they sound like they're authoritative and so you listen to them and you say, I agree with that. But Jesus speaks of creation. He speaks of Noah, a real person that actually was in a flood. He speaks of all of these things. Okay, as do the Apostles. Jesus speaks of Cain. If there was a Cain, then there was an Adam and an Eve that had a Cain. Cain didn't just pop into existence. He was a person that came from another person, and he did not come from Goo. He came from Adam. So, Are you going to believe Jesus? Okay, I believe in Jesus. I hear the gospel. That's all that's required for salvation. If believing in creation was required for salvation, a lot less people would be saved and a lot of people in the church would not be saved. Okay, but there's a point where you have to say, he saved me. I trust that Shouldn't I trust everything else he says as well, right? I mean he said that we were created He said that he spoke it into existence and it happened Okay, at what point are you gonna say? You know, I just I struggle with that and I can't accept it Alright, and like I said, that was me It was so hard for me to get my head around the fact that there really is a six-day creation And that that's what the Bible teaches. It doesn't teach anything else Now there are teachings out there and I think I've addressed them before But there are teachings out there that there is, you know, Genesis 1-1, Genesis 1-2, there's like a billion years of evolution going on in there, and then they write an entire systematic theology about something that isn't hinted at anywhere in Scripture. And the reason why they came up with this thing that so many Christians have been duped into is because of Charles Darwin. After Darwin came out with his theory of evolution, Christians got scared. They said, well look, there's all this proof around. Darwin has shown us this proof, but he hasn't shown us anything. Okay, but so this Methodist, I think he was, minister in the UK, actually I think it was Scotland, which is the UK by the way, he sat down and he wrote an entire theology, and I'm trying to think of the name of it right now. It's right on the tip of my tongue. I'm not thinking of it, but you know, kind of goes with the gap theory. But anyway, there's this time where Satan ruled the world and then God destroyed that and he remade it again. It's all inserted, just tons of stuff inserted. The Bible doesn't teach that. It's not even close to something that you could justify from the Bible. The Bible speaks of six literal days of creation. And if you struggle with those things, I try to say this often because you never know somebody new is going to come online and watch. If you struggle with that, There are lots and lots of very, very intelligent people, doctors that have converted to creation over the years. And I'm talking doctors of archaeology, doctors of astronomy, etc. And they are on shows like Is Genesis History? And what's the other one? Is Genesis History? And I I watch them all the time. They come up and I can't think of the name of the channel. But you go to those channels and these people will give you actual, real evidence as to why six-day creation is not only possible, it's the way best answer for it. It's Genesis History and Genesis I'll remember that later too. Anyway, sorry about that. But they're very good. These people are intelligent people that have taken the world and they've looked at it from a biblical perspective and the way that they look at it is correct. There's no doubt about it when you get their thoughts. As a matter of fact, they have, I can't remember the term that they use in But when they find something that doesn't fit with the creation, I'm sorry, the evolutionary model, they bag it and they put it in there and they call it, they have a term they use. And it goes into a storeroom and it's just lost. And the reason why they do that is because it doesn't fit their model. And so they say, well, this is like an outlier. It's something that, and there are rooms and rooms and rooms and rooms filled with these things. Not just a couple, they are multitudes of them that these people take out of the archaeological community, and they put them in bags, and they put them away. And they say, this doesn't fit the model, and there's something wrong with the evidence, and therefore, and they go with that. This is very common for them to do this. So keep that in mind, is that if you are believing in something, like Jesus, having died for your sins, I would ask you to research the reliability of Jesus in other areas. Because if he's not reliable in what he says, then why would you want to follow a believer, be a believer and a follower of Jesus, if he's not telling you the truth about other things, okay? It's not going to affect your salvation. You have been saved. You believe the gospel. That's all that was required, okay? Like I said, God makes that part of it simple for us because everything else comes in and people are there with their agendas to teach you something that isn't correct. But I'm going to take you just so you can see what Paul is talking about here. I love to read this because now you want to be careful when you read the book of Acts. We all have talked about this many times. The book of Acts is descriptive. It's a descriptive account. All it does is it describes. It does not prescribe anything. There are about three things that you could say this is something we should do. Most of the things that seem like they're prescriptive in the Book of Acts are actually temporary prescriptions until the epistles were written. If you read the book of Acts in a prescriptive way, the way that almost everybody does, you are going to, it's not a question of maybe, you will have a contradiction in your theology from Paul's writings. You are going to. One of the things that people do is they say, well, you have to repent and be baptized in order to be saved, and they cite Acts 2.38. One, that's speaking to Israel. There were no Gentiles in the meeting at the time. It's speaking to Israel who had just crucified Jesus, okay? We haven't crucified Jesus. We were a part of why he was crucified, but we didn't do that. The nation of Israel did. So when Peter's speaking to these people, he's not speaking to you, and it's not a prescription. But that's where, like, the Church of Christ and many, many other churches say, well, see, you have to do these things, or you can't be saved. It's a descriptive passage. It's just telling you what happened there. Acts 8 and Acts 10 have baptism accounts, and none of the three match. Well, why would you pick Acts 2 and not pick Acts 8 or pick Acts 10? Why would you do that? Because they're completely different in what happens, the events, the way that it happens. Everything is different. The process is different. And so, for you to take one of those and say, see, this is doctrine for us, it's showing a fault right there, because you're picking one above two others, which really none of them match. But the one that is closest is Acts chapter 10. Acts chapter 10 is where Cornelius and his household heard Peter, and they were saved. This is what happens. There are some differences. It's not prescribing anything. It's simply descriptive. But listen to what it says here, okay? We're going to start at verse 34, and I'm just going to read you the end of the chapter. I know this is a little bit long, but you'll get the point, and it fits with what Paul is speaking about here. Then Peter opened his mouth and said, In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. He's speaking to Gentiles. There's Jews present as well, but Peter is thinking, my goodness, only Jews can be saved. He came for the people of Israel. I know that because he says, I was not sent to the house of Israel. That was fresh on Peter's mind, and now he's seeing that God is doing something different. Christ's ministry was to Israel, but the effects of his ministry are to the whole world. So here we go. No partiality, but in every nation, not just Israel, every nation, whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him. The word which God sent to the children of Israel, preaching peace through Jesus Christ, He is Lord of all. That word, you know, which was proclaimed throughout all Judea and began from Galilee after the baptism which John preached. how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which he did, both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. whom they killed by hanging on a tree. Him God raised up on the third day and showed him openly, not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen before by God, even to us who ate and drank with him after he arose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that it is he who was ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead. to him all the prophets witness, that through his name, whoever believes in him, he's repeating what Paul is saying to Timothy, will receive remission of sins. while Peter was still speaking, here it is, these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word. Okay, I'm not going to go any further, the baptism and all that kind of stuff. That's all you need to know. They were sitting there listening to Peter speaking. They didn't do anything. They had pork chops in their stomach from breakfast, okay, because they're Gentiles. They have not been baptized. They haven't done anything. They're sitting there listening to Peter. And God reads their hearts. Their hearts are spurred to believe. And what does He do? He pours out His Holy Spirit on them. Okay, that's the closest to the process that Paul speaks of. It's still a little bit different, but you've got those three accounts, 2, 8, and 10. None of them match, but that's the closest. They didn't do anything and they believed. And that includes, this is for people that love to shove their pet peeves into people's lives and say, see, you have to do this in order to be saved. That includes evolution and creation. I have no idea what the Romans believed about creation. They may have believed like, you know, there's some cultures that, you know, the earth sits on a turtle and all that kind of crazy stuff. Whatever. They may have thought that evolution, or I'm sorry, the world came into existence by, you know, whatever. Peter doesn't address it. He doesn't say, well, see, you have to believe the evolutionary account in order to be saved. He doesn't do that. You know, he probably, they never even heard that and they may have never heard it for the rest of their lives. They don't have the Hebrew scriptures and they don't know what it says. All they heard was the gospel. That's what saved them. Everything else that you have in your life from the time that you believe are things that you should work on in your relationship with the Lord. That's the important thing. Evolution and creation will not keep you from salvation. If it would, I wouldn't have been saved when I was saved. I would have had to eventually been really saved after I converted. That's not the way it is. You're saved, and then from there, God is asking you, you've trusted me with this, now trust me with the rest of this. And now do the things that the Bible asks us to do. Okay, that is salvation, that is sanctification, that is justification, that is glorification, et cetera. Okay, at that time, and what does it say here? Not according to works. Okay, good. There's nothing we can do to merit the process except believe in the work of Christ. Okay, it is the free will choice of man. So much for Calvinism on that point. They teach that man does not have free will in salvation. It is free will. We believed. God didn't force us to believe. He didn't regenerate us in order to believe. You can't get that out of the account of Acts 10. They were sitting there. They heard, they believed, and they were saved. God didn't regenerate them and say, okay, now you can believe if you want, and if you do, you're going to be saved. Okay? He didn't do that. All right, so responding to the work of Christ through the holy calling of the Spirit. We're saved, we respond to the work of Christ through the calling of the Holy Spirit. We have believed the work of Christ, okay? That is our job. That is what brings us to a state of righteousness. Here's another point. We haven't talked about this in a while, but there are two types of righteousness that we could talk about. One is imputation. That means it says, I am giving you my righteousness. I am now saying that you are righteous because of what I have done." That is imputation. Paul speaks about the imputation of sin. Well, he also speaks about the imputation of righteousness. We are not imputed sin anymore in Christ. That means we're not being the state of sin and the penalty for sin is no longer being placed on us. That's imputation. Impartation is where you actually possess that trait. Okay, I am imparted Christ's righteousness. That doesn't happen to us. How do I know? Because I do bad things all the time. I think bad things all the time. I am not the person that I will be someday when I'm glorified. Impartation is something that happens to us when we are glorified. We will be imparted righteousness. Right now we are imputed righteousness. We live by faith in what He has done. He grants us His righteousness to protect us, basically, in Christ, like a bubble around us, so that we are righteous before God. Not that we are righteous in and of ourselves, but we are righteous because of Jesus. So that's just another point of what Paul is speaking about. All these different things come into play about the process of salvation. And all he's doing is he's writing a letter and reminding Timothy in a few short words of all of this doctrine, all of this theology that he needs to remember now that he is the pastor of the church at Ephesus. Okay? So that's why he's saying these things. God has done these things. It's kind of like I'm reminding you and then we'll get into some doctrine later. Okay, Timothy? Which then results in the salvation which was offered. It'll go back to there. It says, responding to the work of Christ through the calling of the Holy Spirit, which then results in salvation which was offered. It was offered on the cross to the whole world. Jesus died on the cross for every single person on this planet. It's now up to every single person on this planet to respond if they hear the message. But some people will never hear the message and that is a problem because the church is not doing its job. It's not sending out missionaries. It's not telling people things that they should be telling them. Now, the chances are that over this weekend, Jose and a bunch of other people are going to be up in the Capital Mall, and they're going to be handing out these tracks. Like I said, they probably have about 9,000 tracks, maybe we'll say 8,500 tracks. Okay, they're going to be handing these out. And my guess is, it is very probable that one or two of the people that Jose hands a track to are people that he has handed a track to in the past. And they're just going to walk by and they're going to take it. And you never know, they may have thrown away the first two or three that You know, there's that guy again. Let me see what he's got. And then finally they actually read it and think about it and are saved. Okay. Jose is doing his job. He does it all over the country and all over the world all the time. He may be the most tireless person I know. I don't know anybody that... There was a guy that was as tireless as him that I served with in Malaysia. Never slept. He never slept. He might have slept 15 minutes a day at the most. But he was tireless for other things. He wasn't a Christian. He was just, you know, tireless for his job, tireless for spending the night in the bar after he was done with his job, etc. But the guy went on and on, like the Energizer Bunny. Do you remember him, Hidiko? Yeah, what a great guy. He was so nice. But Jose is like him. He might go on an hour or two of sleep a night. But he goes, and he goes, and he goes, because he wants people to hear about Jesus. And, you know, I've had it happen to me, so I know it's kind of a degrading feeling, but people take something from you and then throw it right down on the ground in front of you. And it's like, okay, and he just keeps passing them out. And this is what he does. He wants people to hear about Jesus. But that's not going to happen if people aren't doing that, if they're not actually going out and telling people about it. So that is what results in salvation. You're not going to get saved if you don't hear the message. And that's right from Romans chapter 10. Let's go there just so you can hear that once again. It's a good reminder because we have to be reminded of these things so that we want to act. We want to get out there and say, you know, I want to be a part of what God has done, at least a little bit. Once or twice in my life I want to do something to be a part of what God has done. It says right here, how then shall they, you're speaking of the world at large, people in general, whoever, how then shall they call on Him, Jesus, in whom they have not believed? They can't do it. And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? If you don't hear the message of Jesus, you can't believe in it. Okay? And how shall they hear without a preacher? Or in the case of Jose, you know, a track hander out or an evangelist, whatever. And how shall they preach unless they are sent? It's not going to happen. There has to be people that will go and actually open their mouths and tell people about Jesus. You're probably all, my guess is that most of you, maybe not all of you, but most of you will go to a restaurant this week, okay, and you're going to sit down, you're going to have dinner, and you're going to leave. Are you going to take the time to leave a track with the person or at least say, you know, can I tell you about Jesus before you finish? If not, how do you know you're not the only person that will ever mention Jesus to that person, okay? The girls at the bank, there's a guy there now too, nice guy. He's a Christian, by the way, so that's nice. But they all know that when a new employee comes into the bank, I'm going to go out to the car, I'm going to walk back in, I'm going to say, here, please read this. Best news ever. and I hand it to them and I walk away and they all they all know I'm going to do that. Okay and I don't think any of them have responded that weren't believers. There's a couple believers in there but you know that person isn't going to know Jesus unless somebody tells them about Jesus. Okay, and that's our job. So, getting the word out is a part of the process of salvation, but it's not a work that merits your salvation. That's a work that you have done, once you were saved, to get other people saved, and that would go under rewards and losses. Okay, so... This is key, because you've been talking about the laws dead. That's what should drive everybody. Absolutely. The grace of God in Jesus Christ. That is what should drive us, not law. You know, one of the things, I don't want to get down on people too much, but you've got to be careful with the tracts that you hand out. All the tracts over here, if I order them, which, you know, some of them I've written, but if I order them, I always go through and I make absolutely sure that the word repent is not in the tract. And the reason why is because it immediately sets off a negative connotation in people's minds because the word repent in English today does not mean what it meant in Greek when the Bible was written. Okay? The word repent means, it means nothing else. It means nothing else than change your mind. That's all it means. Metanoia. change your mind. That's all it means, okay? You believed this about God. You now believe this about God. I didn't believe in God, and now I believe in God. I didn't believe that Jesus was God's son, but now I believe Jesus is God's son, meaning he is God. I was a Buddhist, now I believe in Jesus. I was a Muslim, and now I believe in Jesus. That's all that means. It doesn't mean anything else. Metanoia means change your mind. When you put repent into a tract and hand it out, you need to repent of your sins. That becomes a work. And that isn't how you're saved. You're saved by grace through faith. And then you get rid of your sins. That's the sanctification part. So make sure that your boxes are straight on that. Way too many churches teach you that you must repent of your sins and come to Jesus. That's Doctrine 101 with Ray Comfort. He tells him beautifully about Jesus and then he says, now you must repent of your sins and then you'll be saved. And the Bible doesn't teach that. It says repent. Metanoio, change your mind. will have sin in my life after coming to Jesus for X amount of time. It may be a day, it may be five months, it may never go away. I was saved by grace through faith. That sin is something that I am now, I've changed my mind about it, but it's not something that will bring me to salvation. Christ brings me to salvation. So please make sure you get that above all else right. It's not about you, okay? And that's what Paul speaks about with boasting. Well, you know, when I heard the message of Jesus, I was told to repent of my sins, and so I did. And so now I'm standing before you showing you that I did that. That's boasting. That's exactly what Paul says is excluded. Boasting is excluded. Okay? I changed my mind about God. And that's what Paul says elsewhere. He says repentance to God. All right? I've changed my mind about God. Okay? Anyway, so be careful with that. The word has changed. It's morphed, which words do all the time. And because of that, Whenever I translate that word in I'm going through Matthew right now when I translate that word it comes up. I always say No, I say reconsider reconsider because that's what it means It literally means change your mind, but reconsider is to change your mind. So that's what the word I use I don't use repent because it sets people with a false understanding today anyway Where was I? These words do not exclude free will at all. Rather, in the next clause, this will become evident. For now, God determined the means of salvation from beginning to end. Further, it is for his own reasons that he has accomplished the process. Everything about salvation is according to God's purposes. Everything. God did it all. All we have to do is believe. That is what God asks of us, is to just believe. And you see that all the way through the Bible. In the book of Jonah, it's just a couple of words, and it is so obvious. Salvation is of the Lord. everything. He just asked us to believe that premise. I love those words because that sums up the process of salvation in a nutshell. Those couple words right in Jonah. Salvation is of the Lord. Okay, salvation is of the Lord. Five words. Okay, I'll try to remember that so I don't have to count on my fingers again. I love those words because that sums up the whole process of salvation for you. Salvation is of the Lord. Okay? Paul explains it. Other people explain it. They say how it happens, the different aspects of how it happens. Salvation is of the Lord. Okay. man's desires or attempt to merit salvation are excluded. It is solely an act of grace, as he just said. Grace cannot be earned or merited. If it could be, then it wouldn't be grace. Paul explains that elsewhere as well. If so, then grace isn't grace, okay? But grace is grace. Grace is getting what you do not deserve, and it's getting without any strings attached. None. And that's why I say the word repent is just not the right word for modern English for tracts and things because people suddenly think I've got to do something. And that is one of the biggest hindrances. They get these tracts and they read them and they know that they're sinners. They know that they've got this defect in their life. They want to be freed from it and they're told that they have to free themselves from it. That's the problem with those tracts. And so what do they do? They throw it away because it's too much of a burden on them. Salvation is not a burden except for the guy that died on the cross, Jesus. That was the burden. It is the freeing of us that salvation is, okay? So from there, then the guy goes to church and he says, you know, I've got this sin in my life. We're going to pray for you. We're going to get you through this. We're going to get you someday. You're going to be so wonderfully ready. We'll ordain you if you want, but right now we'll get you through this one day at a time." And all the pressure is off of that guy's life because it wasn't about him. It wasn't about him at all. It was about God having saved him. Okay, grace, all right? To do something in order to obtain grace, like repent of your sins and change and no longer do those things, nullifies grace. It completely nullifies it. You get saved and then get rid of your sins, okay? Here's, let's see, this is, horse and this is this is the horse and this is the cart this is what we're doing all over the world we've got the wait this has got to be the cart because it's making the clacking sound what oh no that's the horses hooves okay Alright, that's ice in there. That's why I pulled that out, because it was frozen solid. Anyway, we don't do that. We get the horse to pull him along, okay? And that is what Christ did. He saved us so that we can then be drawn into a relationship with God in a more perfect manner every day as we grow in Christ, okay? Gotta get that right. It nullifies grace otherwise. It must simply be received as grace. Once again, a perfect example of this. Perfect example so that people that are stewing right now about, oh, that guy's a heretic. He's saying I don't have to repent. Once again, Acts chapter 10. What happened? Did Peter say, okay, now I know that you have been doing this stuff, Cornelius. I know that because I heard about you. And to that, he simply told them the message of Jesus. He gave them the gospel. And if you read the way that Peter worded everything. He just gave them the gospel. This man did these things. Cornelius and the people with him said, I can't believe it. I believe that. I believe it. And he was saved. He didn't have to stop doing the thing he was doing, you know. You got to stop doing that, you know. I know what you're doing. None of that. There was none of that that all comes after. That is grace. Grace is not saying, okay, I know you've done this. Get rid of that, and then Christ will save you. That's not grace. Okay, so grace is nullified by that type of thing, and we do it in pulpits and in tracts all day long and twice on Sunday in most churches of the world. Okay? That is not the way to be. Tell people about Jesus. Give them the gospel and then say, now live for Christ. After they accept Jesus, say, now live for Christ. He will be with you and he will help you through whatever baggage you have in your life. Okay? That's the way that we want to do that. I know a guy back there that understands grace very well. As a matter of fact, when he prays with people, he makes sure that that's included in every prayer that he gives. It's not by us. It's not by our works. It's by the grace of Jesus. Okay? So, yeah. Got that? It must simply be received as grace. Paul then finishes by saying that this process is one, Paul's words, which was given to us in Christ Christ Jesus before time began." Okay, this process was what? Given to us in Christ Jesus before time began. Yours says what? Before the beginning of time? It says, yeah, before the beginning of time. Okay, all right, so this one is before time began, which is kind of the same thought. These words show that according to his own purpose that he just said is not speaking of the present time but of all time. One cannot use Paul's words to say that free will is excluded. If God's plan was to save men through Christ, before man was even created, then everything about the process was decided at that time. Okay? Paul wrote it. I didn't. Everything was decided at that time. If God's decision was, I will send Jesus and all who believe will be saved is the necessary response for salvation, then that is how salvation comes about. You see that? What Calvinism teaches is faulty because they insert things into the idea of salvation that are not taught in the Bible. Okay? You don't have free will. They take verses out of context in Romans. saying, you know, what is it, there's none who does good, there's none, you know, and if you just think that through for two seconds, he's citing the Psalms, okay, and forget who he's speaking to, even though that's probably the most important part of it. Psalm 14.1 and Psalm 53.1, it says, whatever says, God does not exist. Let me read it to you. The fool! The fool says in his heart, God does not exist. There is no God, he says. Does not exist, says there is no God. Okay, so he's actually speaking. The psalmist is actually speaking about an atheist. But suppose we forgot that. We just said, okay, I'm not going to take that point from the psalm, which is the context of what Paul is saying, and I'm just going to say there's none who does good, no, not one. There's none who seeks after God. Okay. Who is writing those words? Somebody. Right? Somebody is writing those words. They would be somebody. And they are somebody that is obviously seeking after God. So it's not an all-encompassing statement the way that Calvinism makes it sound. Because if it was, that guy wouldn't be writing those words at all. They wouldn't exist because nobody. Okay? So if you just think through what is being said, you see the fallacy of things like Calvinism, where they teach things that even in the proposition itself, it's self-refuting. Okay, anyway, okay, so Paul finishes up by saying it was before time, Jesus, okay, I read that. If God's plan was to save men through Christ, before man was even created, then everything about the process was decided at that time. It was all done back then. Okay? If God's decision was that I will send Jesus and all who believe will be saved is the necessary response for salvation, then that is how salvation comes about. Okay? And when I say back then, because we're in time. We are in time right now. And so back then for us is the beginning of time when God created. Okay? But From God's perspective, it's right now because God is not limited by time. So what we say back then is only because we're living in this bubble called time. All right? God is outside of time. So when he makes a decree, as I said earlier about salvation, it's eternal. It simply is. God is seeing the same process right now with Adam as with Paul as with my wife. It's the same process. It's exactly the same thing because he is He is. We'll just say He is. And so when I say back then, I'm saying it from our perspective, as Paul does before the beginning of time. He's speaking about what God has done in the creation. But God is. Okay, so keep that in mind because that's an important point to consider. The grace is given, Paul's words, not determined. This is important to understand because if God is right now, He is, and what He thought back then before this bubble began would be determined. It wasn't determined, it was given. If it was determined, he would have said, like Calvinists believe, that that person will be saved, that person will not be saved, I will never save that person because I don't like him even though he doesn't exist yet. That's what Calvinism teaches. It's an incorrect idea of what God is doing. and it depends on how you perceive the creation and fall of man. Did God save man before creation? Did he save them after he created, but before sin came into the world? Did he save them after sin came into the world? Okay, at what point, and I'm talking about the logical thinking of God, at what point did that happen? Okay, if it was before Adam fell, then that means that God chose people without a Redeemer. He chose them apart from a Redeemer, and then he appointed the Redeemer to save those individual people. That's not what the Bible teaches, but that's what Calvinism teaches. It obviously was not before man fell. Logically, it was some point after man fell. Man fell, there is now a problem, and I will send my Son to resolve that problem. Any who believe in Him will be saved. And that's the order of Genesis chapter 3. The man is in innocence. The man is told not to do something, so he is under law, but he doesn't have the mental capacity, the knowledge of good and evil, to understand the ramifications for his sins. His job was to believe his Creator. He didn't. When he fell, he gained that knowledge, so we gain something at the fall, and that's explicit in the end of Genesis 3, because he says the man has become like one of us, to know good and evil. So we gained something that was necessary for the relationship. But the process in Genesis 3 is that man is in innocence, man is deceived, man falls. God promises a Redeemer, Genesis 3.15. That is the process, and that is the order in which God did that, to reveal to us how He saves people. Okay, it's important. It's really important stuff, because sitting in one church, you're going to have a different idea about what God is like, and what you are like in relation to Him. Because if you're in a Calvinist church, and God saved me, but He didn't save Him. it becomes about you. Whether they admit it or not, that is what it becomes. And it also becomes, I don't need to send people overseas, and I don't need to tell people at the Longhorn Steakhouse about Jesus, because God is going to pick them anyway. He did it before He created the world. That's the ultimate response to the doctrine of Calvinism. Even though they say that's not true and we're going to send missionaries, why would you send a missionary? If God's will in that person's life over in Zambia can't be thwarted, then he will be saved without you spending your money. No point. That is the result of Calvinist thinking. Anyway, so grace is given, it is not determined. When something is given, It is done so as an offer. Jesus Christ is an offering for sin. That's what He is. We see that in the Old Testament typology and we see it hanging on the cross in the dead body of Jesus. It is an offering that we respond to. an offer. An offer can be received or it can be declined. That's our choice. An offering is something that we choose to accept. It's not something that's forced upon you or it wouldn't be an offering. It would be a forcing. Okay, so the words, according to his own purpose, that's Paul's words, is not speaking about who would be saved, but how salvation would come about. According to his own purpose. how God determined this. Like I said, He could have said at the beginning, I am going to save people that I choose before Adam falls. And anybody that I don't choose is going to hell. That's what's known as predestination. You are predestined for whatever happens to you. You are predestined to be saved. You are predestined to be chucked into the abyss. Okay, that is God's choice. There's another form of that that's called double predestination. Predestination says that God chooses the saved, and they just kind of leave it at that. Double predestination says that God chooses the saved and actively condemns the unsaved. That means He chose these people to be destroyed, which is completely counter to Jesus' words of God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever. So double predestination is a heresy. It actually is a heresy, but Even though they deny that they teach double predestination, that's what predestination teaches. Because by choosing people apart from Him, it doesn't matter if He just skips over them or if He actively condemns them. God did not have anything to do with them, and they are going to hell. So it's the same thing. It's just them waffling on their words so they don't look so bad in the eyes of people. Okay, that's the only difference. It's just not good theology. Offer can be turned down, it can be accepted, whatever. How salvation would come about. It's the how, not the who. This is the predestination that the Bible speaks of. Okay, now, predestination is another thing, because it is a valid doctrine, but How do you perceive it? Paul says that we were predestined according to God's will and all that. So predestination is a valid doctrine, but how does it come about? That's what I've been talking about here. Is it before the fall, which is called pre-lapsinarianism. Pre, before, and then laps is the fall, and ism is the doctrine. So pre-lapsinarianism. God chooses before the fall, okay? Then you have different forms, you've got sublapsinarianism, and you've got all these different doctrines, but they all try to explain what was God thinking. Now, once again, God doesn't think like we do. There's no change in God, so God doesn't think the way we do, okay? He doesn't, there's no, if God thought, if God thought, like, it would occur in time. There would be a process of time in his decisions. God knows everything immediately and he knows everything intuitively. So there's no thought process going on in God. It is a knowledge base. What we do is we try to understand in time what God thought. or what God is, okay, in his plan of redemption. That's what we do. So we have to give temporal words to describe something that doesn't actually exist, except in the stream of time. So it's kind of important to get that right, but think of it this way. And I like to give this example because it's sitting right there in front of me. That is got metal and it's got cushions. It's got something sitting on it. It's got a back on it. That's a chair. Okay, that's what you call syllogistic thinking. This, this, therefore this. You're forming in your mind a syllogism and then you are expressing it in What something is you speak that out? Okay, and so that process took time I see this I see this I see this I see this oh, that's a chair It doesn't matter if it's that quick because we know what a chair is when we look at it immediately Somebody else may have come from the Amazon. He'd never seen a chair before and he says well What is and he has to figure it out? Okay, that's occurring in time and God doesn't have anything in time because he created time. So you're absolutely right about that. Here's the funny thing about it is that, okay, so the way I look at it is God knew. He knows everything. I don't. So my stream of time in life, I'm like, you know, I've got all this stuff in the world hitting me. This is the way life is supposed to be. And then somebody comes to me with with the gospel, and I'm like, huh. And I either accept it or not. But I didn't know what I would do until I did it. That's right. Whereas he did. He knew. He knew before it all started. That's right. But here's the other thing, too, that always gets me crazy. It's like, okay, If God was so controlling and didn't want to give us free will, why even bring sin into the picture? Absolutely. It's like his process of saving Mary as well. Same thing. Absolutely. Yeah, foreknowledge does not equate to foredetermination. Just because God knows what you're going to do does not mean that he determined what you were going to do. And that's a fallacy that Calvinism teaches. They actually teach that in studies and doctrines, and you'll see him posting that kind of stuff you know, on social media when they argue for their point of view. And it's incorrect. For knowledge does not necessarily mean for determined. Okay, I have a granddaughter. I see her walking up to the stove and there's something sitting on top of the stove and she doesn't realize that it's hot. I know it's going to happen. I know it's going to happen. I see the hand going up and I see her burn herself. She's reaching for something. Just because I knew that was going to happen does not mean that I determined that it would happen. And that's the same thing with God. God knows what we're going to do. It doesn't mean that he determines it, but he has the process so well refined. Think of it this way. It is so well refined, this process. Did Lot have to sleep with his daughters? No. The daughters made a choice, they went into their father, etc. But God knew that they would do that and that would lead to Jesus. Both daughters and Lot are ancestors of Jesus. He knew that was going to happen. God has it so completely known that was going to happen in this universe that Jesus came. despite all of the things that the Bible says happen, just person after person after person, doing this and doing that and doing this and doing that. Judas sleeps with his daughter-in-law, both of them end up in Jesus' genealogy. He knows this in advance, but he didn't determine Judah to sleep with his daughter-in-law. He knew that was going to happen, and he knew that that would be a person that would lead to Jesus. The perfect man to be born at the perfect time in human history would come exactly as he knew, and yet he didn't predetermine it. That is what's amazing about God. He is able to take all of this stuff, all of this stuff that's going on in the universe, I mean every breath that somebody makes. Judah, if he breathed one last breath he would have died here instead of there and there wouldn't have been a Jesus. But he knew all of these things and he allowed them to go in the stream of time to lead to Jesus. And we know that because it says a body you prepared for me." That body of Jesus was prepared by God through all of the history of the generations of Israel, documented so that we could know exactly who Jesus is in the minutest detail. What he went through, where he came from, I'm talking about the genealogical record. He knew that there would be a guy that would take a prostitute named Rahab, bring her into his home, and she would become in the line of Jesus. He knew that. Okay, he didn't predetermine it, but he knew that. And he understood every single thing that was going to happen to lead to this person, a body you prepared for me. It's wonderful. It's just unbelievable. Oh, boy, we're really not getting along. Sorry about that. That's all right. We got a verse done. So we will get a verse done. The grace is given, not determined. This is important to understand. I said this, I'll read it again, because when something is given, it is done as an offer. An offer can be received or it can be declined. The words, according to his own purpose, is not speaking about who, but of how. His purposes are displayed in the process of redemption. How, okay? So, who is up to you? as much as it is up to me. So, if you want to see if a person is going to be saved, then you should probably speak to them about Jesus, okay? You know, and I get very upset at the people like, you know, that have been doing the things they've been doing up in Washington for the past four years. I get very upset about that. but God can save them as well, okay, despite all of their wickedness, all of the literally demented thinking of some of these people. It's hard to imagine that humans can think the way we do. You know, I brought up the issue of abortion a week or two ago and the process of, you know, what people are thinking to come to that type of a conclusion. And and not care. But once you realize the magnitude of what abortion actually signifies, and they don't care, that's very hard to understand, but God can save them as well. And so you never know if you're going to see somebody that has that political or personal view, taking the time to tell them about Jesus is a positive. Now, you know, I've found that trying to evangelize people through posts on Facebook only makes people more angry. So, you know, you have to have a personal caring for the person to get that through. But anyway, this is the predestination that the Bible speaks of, the how, okay? It is not speaking of a selection of a certain people who will be chosen by God to be saved. Once again, that would be, you know, right back there at pre-lapsinarianism and all that. It is not speaking of a selection of certain people. Instead, it speaks of a selection of a certain people who will choose God's offer in order to be saved. That is what that is speaking of. God knows it. He knows they're going to do it. He, like I said, He knew that Judah would, his wife would die and that he would end up going down there and sleeping with his daughter-in-law who had a veil over her face. And He knew all of that stuff, okay? He knew that David was going to commit adultery with Bathsheba, and he would murder Bathsheba's husband. And yes, I say murder. He didn't actually do the act, but he was king, and so it came about at his command. And he knew that that would happen, and he knew that a child would result from that union as well. Okay? He knew all of these things. So, he didn't force David to do those things. Instead, it said that it was wickedness in the eyes of the Lord. Okay? God isn't going to force David to do something that is wicked. and yet good came out of it. So, whatever. People can believe what they want, but it is not. First, it's not biblical if you read the whole Bible and take it in its context. Second, it is not philosophically acceptable. Okay, and thirdly, it is not logical. God is not going to do something illogical to come to a good end. As a matter of fact, he can't. Okay, God cannot violate his own standards, or his own being, and he is a logical being. Everything that God does is logical. So for him to do something illogical would be contrary to his nature. That's not the God of the Bible. So you've got all of these different aspects of understanding what God is doing. Like I said, philosophical aspect, which is kind of, you have to think that through, and That makes the most sense. Philosophy can be tricky, and you know, you listen to philosophers speak, and you think, you know, what is it the guy, Descartes, I am, I believe, therefore I am, I think, thank you, I think, therefore I am. And then people will analyze that and say, man, is that profound? And then somebody will come along with something that's really, well, yeah, but no, somebody will come along and they'll say, well, that doesn't really follow through logically, and here's why. Then they get into these philosophical arguments, and some of them are pretty, How do I get out of that? Because they've thought through these type of issues. So philosophy is a little different than logic, but all true philosophy will be logical. So you just have to think it through far enough, and sometimes it's really not that easy. Anyway. Okay, we got to get on. The reason this distinction is so important to remember is because it sets the tone for everything that follows after salvation. Everything. Will one's walk with the Lord be one of gratitude? of smugness. If you believe that you were saved by grace through faith and there was nothing that you did to merit it, you will be a gracious person or a grateful person. You will be grateful. You may forget that and eventually, like I say, 2 Peter 1.9, you've walked away from the faith and he doesn't even remember that he was saved, but God does, okay? But a person that thinks that they have done something to merit salvation before God, like these people that say you have to observe the feasts of the Lord, or you have to stop eating pork. That leads to a person that is smug. And if you don't believe that, attend one of their churches and tell them you eat pork. And all of a sudden, you're an aberration, you're a pariah, and we don't have anything to do with you because you had a pork chop sandwich, right? That's crazy, but that is the attitude that you get. You get a smugness about somebody that says, I have earned this, and I'm still earning it, and God loves me because I am doing this, keeping my salvation. Okay? That's not what God wants. He wants your faith in what Jesus has done, and then to be desirous to follow Him. Will one's walk with the Lord be one of gratitude or smugness? Will one be desirous of telling others the gospel? Or will they assume that God has chosen others apart from our getting the word out? And once again, Romans 10, go to 14 through 17, which we already read. How are they going to hear if they don't have a preacher? And how is the preacher going to go unless he's sent? You got to give him money and say, okay, get on the boat and go. It's not going to happen. And Paul has already defined that in Romans. Okay? The list could go on and on and on, but it all comes back to how one views what has occurred in the salvation process. It's important. And the more you sit in a church where they are telling you that you somehow have merited God's favor or that you were favored by God before He created the world, you will be a smug person. You will have that attitude. If you don't believe it, go sit in one of those churches and listen to people. Now, that's not saying that I don't get smug about things because I'll say something and it's like, I know that you're wrong and I say smug things. And I don't mean to do that, but that doesn't mean that I feel in my heart that I've somehow earn that in front of God. That's not something that will ever happen, because I remember the day I was saved, and there is nothing but sadness in the life that I lived before I was saved. So anyway, life application, and we're right on time, too. If you have not willingly received Jesus Christ, believing in his work, you have not been saved. If you have, you are saved. Forever. It's an eternal decree of God. Salvation is of God, and therefore it is fully sufficient to save. And it is a complete and eternal salvation. That's all there is to it. It is complete and it is eternal. because God's decrees are eternal. That's how He thinks, that's how He operates, and that's what we need to remember when we consider what God has done. He has got us securely in His hands. Nobody is going to be lost that was saved. We can be sure of that. Heavenly Father, Thank you for your wonderful Word. Thank you for how meticulous Paul was in sending just a simple verse to Timothy in a short little letter that tells us so much information about what we should go back and review from the rest of your Word so that we can properly understand what Paul is saying. It's all right there in your Word. You've laid it out for us to understand. Help us to do so. Give us the desire to read your word every single day, to not neglect that important duty that is given to us, and not only a duty, but a blessing, to get into your word and to know you, the creator of the universe, through the words you have transmitted to us. Thank you. We thank you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, let me back up the camera here. this let's see here uh camera camera there we go so the whole time i'm thinking we love you guys have a great great uh weekend we'll hope to see you here sunday morning be blessed bye bye it's what now They do a lot of crazy stuff. They pray to Mary, do all that stuff like that. How does that differ from Cornelius and his people? It's like, you know, just like, do you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior? Yep, yep, yep. And just leave it at that. Leave it at that. Believe that. All that other stuff, now it's time for you to start worshiping Him because He saved you. Right. That's what's important. Because if not, they're going to be in the same smug position that the Calvinists are in. Right. Same smug position. Just talk about evangelizing to