The book of Ephesians, the wonderful book of Ephesians. It is fantastic. Guess where we are? We're in Ephesians 2 and 8, which I've quoted so many times. And we could spend a week on this. It is just wonderful. 2 and 8. Let me read this to you in the Amplified Bible. I can just quote it as far as that goes. We'll see what the Amplified Bible says. And we'll go back into Romans also. There are so many places here. Are you going to read from the... Yeah, the Amplified Bible. And then we'll be right back in verse number 8. I'm going to go ahead and start all the way back to verse number 1 and bring it up to there. I'll get these pages to cooperate here. And you He made alive when you were spiritually dead and separated from Him because of your transgressions and sins, in which you once walked You are following the ways of this world influenced by this present age according to the prince and power of the air, of course that is Satan, and the spirit who is now energizing and working in the disobedient unbelievers and unpersuaded who fight against the purposes of God. Among those unbelievers we all once lived in the passion of our flesh, our behavior governed by sinful indulging desires of human nature without the Holy Spirit and the impulses of the sinful mind, we were by nature children under the sentence of God's wrath, just like the rest of mankind. But God, being very rich, so very rich and overflowing in mercy because of His great and wonderful love with which He loved us, even when we're spiritually dead and separated from Him because of our sins, He made us spiritually alive together with Christ, for by grace, His undeserved favor and mercy, you have been saved from God's judgment. And we can go back to Romans 6 and Romans 8 there. And He raised us up together with Him when we believed and seated us with Him in heavenly places because we are in Christ Jesus. And He did this so that in the ages to come that He might clearly show an immeasurable and unsurpassed riches of His grace and His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus by providing our redemption. There is no other name under heaven and earth whereby men may be saved or get to heaven or go to Valhalla or whatever you might call except through Jesus Christ's blood. For it is by grace, God's remarkable compassion and favor drawing you to Christ, that you have been saved, actually delivered from the judgment and given eternal life through faith. And this salvation is not out of yourselves and not to your own effort. And actually, faith isn't something that you muster up. And the faith promises that all of the different things that we have in the world today, these programs and things, They all talk about you have to muster up faith. Faith is given to you. It is something that is a gift of God. Faith, hope, and love. And this salvation is not of yourselves, not through your own effort, but it is an undeserved, gracious gift of God, not as a result of your own works nor your attempts to keep the law, so that no one will be able to boast or take credit in any way for his own salvation. Much of the world today, the religious world, we look here behind us and we see God's church history, the whole of church history. And we look at that and most, 90% of religions in the world today believe you have to work your way to heaven. But the Bible teaches you it is by grace you're going to heaven, you'll never go. not as a result of your own works nor your own attempts to keep the Law, so that no one will be able to boast or take credit in any way for his salvation. For we are his workmanship, his own master work, a work of art created in Christ Jesus, reborn from above, spiritually transformed, renewed, and ready to be used. for good works which God prepared for us beforehand, taking paths which He set, so that we would walk in them, living the good life which is prearranged and made ready for us. Romans 1 and 20. Let's look at some things here. For in grace you are having been saved through faith. That faith didn't come from you. Our world today, If you look out there, look in the Muslim world. Now, the first thing that a Muslim is going to tell you is they fast for the whole month of Ramadan. They're going to tell you, we fast for a whole month. And then they think that you're going to think in your head that they go without eating for a whole month. For the religion, this is what they want you to believe. But that's not what happens. They just change their eating hours. They don't eat in the daytime. Now, I don't know what they're going to do up there in Alaska in the summertime and all of that. In the long days or in different places where the days are longer than the nights. But they, of course, they won't eat. They get up in the morning and they're not going to eat until 6 o'clock in the evening. Now a lot of times, Marilyn, you go without eating a lot of times all day long, and I know you have, especially when I'm not here. You get up and you, 6, 7, 8 o'clock at night is your breakfast time. Well, you find out that the Muslims are eating more food in the month of fasting than they do any other month. But they have these big banquets after 6 p.m. in the evening. And so it doesn't count. They can eat all they want to eat. They'll have all these banquets and everything else. We're going to fast for a month and all this stuff. It's not fasting. They just don't eat in the daytime. They change their eating hours. Now it actually starts off here with this little Word, Gar. Page 75 in Analytical Greek Lectures, page 1175 in Robertson's Big Greek Grammar. For in the, now look at the word te there, that's a locative singular from the definite article, and then carita, grace is locative singular from it. For in grace. Ye exist. For in grace ye exist. That's first person plural, present indicative active. For in grace ye keep on being, ye keep on existing in grace. You exist in grace. You live in grace. You breathe in grace. Even you go to bed in grace, you wake up in grace, and you finally die in grace. For in grace ye keep on existing. So, so, minnoy. Nominee Pearl Raskin. Participle, perfect participle, passive voice. Ye are having been saved. That's a completed action, by the way. Completed action. That's a perfect tense. It's done. It's done. For in grace ye keep on existing. Continuously exist. Having been saved. It's done. It's not something in the future, it's done. People, I've heard people, and I've had friends that were Catholics and friends that were this and that and whatever, and I had one woman one time, she loved her husband very much, and she said, I hope he's in a safe place. I hope he's in a safe place. Isn't that pitiful? He died, and she hopes he's in a safe place. And they were very religious people, very religious people, but they were Catholics. I hope he's in a safe place. Back over here in Catholicism, in 700 A.D., 700 A.D., they invented the doctrine of purgatory. And so the doctrine of purgatory says that when you die that you have to go into limbo and you have to suffer in this temporary cleansing place. You'll have to suffer there until all your sins are burned away in this torment there. If you're a Muslim, every person that dies has got to go to hell to cleanse yourself. This is another type of purgatory. Another type of purgatory. And then if you go over here at the period of time and you find out when the Catholic Church invented purgatory, it's when Mohammed came on the scene. Guess what? He got his idea that you temporarily had to go to hell. The only way you can not go to hell as a Muslim is you have to die in sacrifice through blowing yourself up or dying in war for jihad. Different people in different worlds, in different parts of the world, they have different, what we might call, moral and standards. In the Bible, in the Old Testament, we see that many of the patriarchs had multiple wives. Of course, Joseph Smith, their standards of morality are different than the average person. The Muslim world, the Bible said thou shalt not lie and shalt not cheat your neighbor, thou shalt not defraud your neighbor, and thou shalt not steal from your neighbor. But in the Muslim world, Your neighbor is only another Muslim in your own faith, your own denomination of Muslims. So you can cheat, delight, steal, do anything else. You can even kill them. You can deceive them. You can perform Hidna. That is a temporary contract. They have temporary marriages. They do that too. The Muslim world, you know, they say that in the Sharia law, and I've got Sharia law right up there in my library, in Sharia law, they won't go by any other countries. In Sharia law, a Muslim can have four legal Muslim wives, and all the concubines he can afford. So, is that really moral? Is that really moral to all these different women? And if you can cheat and lie and steal to anybody else, you can go set a contract with them and if you finish this contract, it doesn't matter because they're not of your faith. These laws only apply to those of your faith. That's all. I've said before, right now, We got a lot of problems over there in Gaza. Many hostages were taken on October the 7th. Nearly all the women were raped continuously. Because, see, that's booty. According to a Muslim world, you can do that. That's what you do. Except it's not considered rape. The Catholic Church, in their morality, Here we have indulgences over here in the 600s. And this indulgence is there. The Catholic Church was drafting soldiers to go out in their campaigns to conquer religiously by the sword. And they told the soldiers, well, we don't have much to pay you, but everything you can steal out there as you're going, And by the way, all the women you can rape, that's okay too, because you're going to be forgiven. You have preliminary indulgences. Preliminary indulgences. Here's the indulgences, see? And all of these indulgences you have forgive your sins. So if you're going and raping, if you kill, if you strangle this woman, kill her husband, whatever you do, it's okay. You won't be counted against you at all. All of these, what we call abrogation of the commandments of the morality of mankind, with mankind, it's real easy if you're a Catholic and you go to war and you do all these things, I mean, all this has forgiven you. Real Christians never went to war like that, not like that. They didn't go in to kill anybody. There was a troop in Europe made up of the Muslim armies in World War II. They went in France and Italy and raped all the women in there. They were carrying disease into those countries. They were impregnating these women. And it was quite a story after they did prosecute some of these people after the end of World War II. Muhammad, though, in his The Life of Muhammad, The Apostle of God, by Ibn Ishaq, it tells you that some of the soldiers of Muhammad came up to him and he said, now we've captured all these women. Now, we have been raping these women. You know, you say we can do that. Yes, yes, yes, you can do that. Okay, now, if we rape these women and they get pregnant, maybe when they come to pay ransom for these women, they won't want them back if they're pregnant. What should we do? Shall we withdraw when we're having sex with these women so they won't get pregnant? Or shall we just go ahead? He said, go ahead, because if God wants you to have a baby with him, he will. If he won't, doesn't, so what? So that was his answer. This is not morality, people. And yet, they modify their morality to get themselves to heaven. Of course, if you're out fighting and murdering and conquering in the name of your religion, that's okay. Lay aside all these rules. In 1123 A.D. up here, we have celibacy established in the Catholic Church. From that period of time on, the priests could not have wives. Now in Germany, there were so many young girls and wives getting pregnant from the priest that they made the priest, the Catholic priest in Germany, this is before the Reformation by the way, they made the Catholic priest have concubines so they wouldn't pillage their families. They were getting tired of raising the priest's kids by their own wives. Now you get back to the bit, let's look at the Bible again now. What does the Bible talk about salvation? This is salvation now. For in grace ye keep on existing, you have your existence in grace, continually exist, ye are having been saved through faith, diapetios, by the agency of faith. That's a little preposition here. And, and also Because, you can, this word chi there, it's a conjunction, but it also can be a mean also, a cumulative article by the way. Also or because this knock out of you all. In 1 Corinthians, Paul's writing to the church at Corinthians and he says when that perfect thing has come, and we're talking about the Bible there, all the gifts that will all cease except for faith, hope, and love. The gift that you have of faith when you are saved, you believe by faith that you're going to be with God. So many hyper-Arminian believers, you might call them, adherents, they never know whether they're really saved or not. I remember people, some of my family, and when I was a pastor there in Bakersfield in a little church, I went out on the bus ministry, and we had quite a congregation there that we built up through the bus ministry and just to preach and go God's Word. Anyway, I trained others to go out there on the bus ministry with me. And there was one guy on the other side out there, I'd always see him out there, he was working with this Free Will Baptist Church and his name was Billy, Billy Hawkins. And he would go out there and he was such a faithful worker. When they'd go to church, their preacher, their pastor would tell them that you have no security of salvation, you come to church, you don't miss church, you do this every day of your life, you get out here and you work and you visit and you visit and you visit and visit, you do all this. If you don't do that, then you're not gonna be saved. There was never any security. My cousins left that church, they came over and And Billy came to my class, and after Billy was in my class a couple of years, he came up to me, just tears in his eyes. He said, Brother Jim, he said, today I know I am saved. If I die today, I know for sure I'm going to go to heaven. This verse right here gives you that assurance, right there. For in grace you keep on existing. You have your existence from the time you've been born again, until you die. You're going to exist in faith. And it doesn't come from you. Having been saved, a perfect tense verb there, comes from sozo, an omnipure, masculine, perfect, participle, passive voice. You didn't do it. You're having been saved by an external element. That external element is the Holy Spirit and the blood of Jesus Christ. Deah, through of, or because of faith, or by the agency of faith, and, or because this faith, this salvation, not out of you all. The faith, the salvation, did not come out of you. And then it says, uk ek, not out of you all. It is this gift, this salvation, this faith, belongs and comes from God. The gift of salvation comes from you. You can take an arrow. Marilyn, when you were young, you shot arrows. You were an archer. I've even got your bow and some of your arrows out there. And you would go shoot them. Now the Indians had a kind of a, what we might call a pictorial, physical illustration of something. And a preacher among the Indians, which was the chief of the medicine man, he'd get up And he'd take one arrow and he'd break the arrow. Because you can break it. He said, this is one man. One man can be broken. Then he'd take and he'd bind a dozen arrows together and tightly bind them together. Now he said, this can't be broken. And he'd try to come up here. People would come up here and try to break it. They couldn't break it. He said, that's when you stand by yourself, you can be broken. But when you are a unit, when you are a tribe, when you are a family, that unit cannot be broken. Now, that's the way the light of God is. Here we are one arrow, and God is many arrows. You put us together with Him and it can't be broken. And in other ways, Also, you take two boards together. Now, I was raised in extremely poor circumstances, and my grandfather had to go out and pick boards up on the canal bank to build a little shack that we lived in. He couldn't find enough boards that were large enough to build a door, so we only had a flat for a door. We had a dirt floor. My grandmother would go out there and take a a pan of water and threw it and sprinkled it on the floor and sweeped the floor every day. It was like, it was like concrete. We'd pack it down, we'd sweep it. She'd sweep it out, it would be kind of slick and less dusty. She'd put this water there every day. Anyway, he picked all these little boards up and he nailed them together. Boy, they'd cripple them together. And sometimes you'd see them cripple together pretty good and they'd be overlapping quite We are like a board nailed to the grace of God with glue too. Nailed together and strong. The nails on either side, nails from one side and nails to the other side and bent over. And the nails that nail us to God are the nails that was in Jesus' hands and feet on the cross of Calvary. That's it. In Philippians 2.13 and Isaiah it says, Behold, God has become my salvation. God has become my salvation. The salvation that you have is not from you. The salvation that you have is not something that you have to keep. It's not something that you can attain. It's something that is given to you. Let's read it again. For in grace ye keep on existing. having been saved because of faith, that through faith, by the agency of faith, and that this salvation and that this faith not out of you all. It belongs to God and it comes from God. It is a free gift. Beautiful. Verse number 9. Uk ek ergon hina me tis kakeiste. We're saved by grace, we're blessed by grace. Beautiful. We're saved by grace and blessed by grace and kept by grace. We're surrounded by grace, we're glued to God by grace. We're nailed to God by grace. Not adverbial delegation 294, not out of works. works there is a product of employment. It's activity, work, our activity. Not out of our activity. In order that not, now particle negation there, page 268, anyone, keys, anyone, he should boast or brag about it, he may. Third person singular, first hours, subjunctive, middle voice. You cannot glory in your salvation. It didn't come from you. I used to go to charismatic churches when I was young. That's the only place I went. It scared the daylights out of me when they'd get up and start dancing, talking in tongues, and shouting, and running around, and singing, and stomping their feet on the floor, and the house is shaking, people talking, and everybody talking at once. It really scared me. Anyway, there is no security. It is an emotional thing. An emotional thing. It's held by emotion. And sometimes how you feel today isn't really true. Sometimes you get up in the morning, you're so depressed or something, you just don't feel like doing anything, you roll over in bed and just stay there all day long. Or you get up and just wander around like a zombie or whatever you do. You don't feel good that day, mentally you don't feel good. But you're always saved, no matter what. It's not how you feel, it's what you are. It's not how you feel, it's what you are. Now Abraham and Sarah, Sarai, their names, in their names there was a word, in Hebrew. That's that letter. That letter is He. Now Abram, his name meant exalted father. But when God gave him a new name, he called him Abraham. Abraham. Exalted father of a multitude. And the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is He. But also, The five in the Bible is the number of grace. Sarai, her name was Sarai, but then it became Sarah. Her name, there was a letter added to her name, which was Hay, the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. We're saved by grace. Abraham was saved by grace. Sarah was saved by grace. She needed a lot of it, so did Abraham. You just go read about Abraham's life for a while. You'll find out that he wasn't the perfect guy, that if you would talk about perfection, same thing with Jacob. Jacob was much better, I believe. But, we're saved by grace. We're saved by grace. For in grace you exist. having been saved through faith, and this faith, this salvation, this gift, it doesn't come out of you all. It belongs to God, the free gift, not out of works in order that anyone may boast or brag about it. Our Father, we send this message out. It's a message of your love. It's a message of Your grace. And Father, please use it wherever it goes. I pray today that when people hear this message, that if they're saved, that they'll know they're saved and they're living and existing in salvation and grace. And they're having been saved. They're done. It's a done deal. not something you attain, it's something that you have already. Please forgive me where I found you. In Jesus' name I pray.