All right, now if you'll look,
turn again in the book of 1 Peter chapter one. The message we began last week
turned into a two-part message. The subject being the goal or
the end or the outcome of your faith. the salvation of your
souls. Now God is to be praised in all
circumstances. It is written in everything,
give thanks. And in the scriptures, you'll
notice that the word thanks and praise are used almost interchangeably. To praise God is to be thankful. And to be thankful is to praise
him. In everything, give thanks. In all circumstances, we have
reason to give thanks to God. Now, I do not know all the details
of the lives of the individuals that make up this congregation,
but I know this. Every believer undergoes trouble.
Every believer came into this world with what Paul calls his
own little load of faults. faults of the way we think, our
temperament. When man fell, everything about
him was broken. And we come into this world turned
a certain way, and it makes us susceptible to certain temptations. It brings upon us trials that
maybe others don't experience, and yet others will have trials
that we don't experience. But all believers undergo trial. And yet in all their trials,
they have reason to give thanks. And I'll say this, I have found
it in my own experience that the best thing to do when you're
in trial and undergoing some kind of suffering, the best thing
to do is start giving thanks. Because it is, what Henry used
to say, it's amazing how small a cloud can block out the sun.
And a trial that may seem to us to be a very large thing indeed,
once we begin to give thanks for all that God is doing for
us and in us in the midst of the trial, we realize that that
which has caught our attention really isn't quite as big as
we thought it was. But we praise God in all circumstances
for at all times we have something to praise Him for. Most of all,
we always owe a debt of praise to God for His work of salvation.
It's a work of regeneration. He has begotten us again unto
a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He has This work of salvation
is a work of hope involving things that we do not yet see or possess. Now, you can be thankful for
this. I say you, we, all of us can be thankful for this, that
the Lord God in showing us the gospel has taught us not to look
to ourselves. Do you know how many people this
morning are sitting in church and the preacher's preaching
to them the kind of message that makes them look at themselves
to examine themselves whether or not they're really a believer?
And when I say really a believer, Paul does say examine yourself
to see if you be of the faith, but they'll have them looking
at their conduct saying, well, I remember a friend of mine,
I only heard him preach once and that was plenty. And he made
this statement. If you can't see yourself growing,
you're not saved. Well, then I've never met a saved
man in my life. And I'm certainly not one. They'll have them looking to
the attitudes and the frames of mind and how much they pray.
And they're always asking themselves, have I done enough? Have I done
the things which would prove that I belong to God? And yet one of the things the
scriptures tell us is that everything that God has given us is a hope,
meaning it's a thing we don't yet possess. And if we try to
look for it now, and despair if we can't find it in ourselves.
We're missing the whole point. It's a hope, something yet to
come. Yes, some things have been received
and we'll note that in a few minutes, but most of what God
does for us in salvation is an inheritance kept in heaven, guarded
in heaven. outside the reach of anything
that could spoil it. God's salvation is a work founded
upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ and everything that his
resurrection implies. We know that if he raised from
the dead, that means he died. Well why did he die? He died
because the wages of sin is death and the sin of God's people was
laid upon him and he paid the wages that go with that sin. And his resurrection from the
dead declares that God saw his sacrifice, was satisfied with
it, and therefore the sins that he bore were put away, and therefore
Christ is no longer bearing sin, so he called him out of the grave,
because the grave is not a place for the righteous. And the book of Romans tells
us that by the resurrection from the dead, he was declared to
be the son of God with power. And his resurrection was simply
his first step on the way back to his throne. And the resurrection
gives us hope because it tells us that right now, the one in
whom our hope rests is seated at the right hand of his father,
the right hand of God. Even as a man, he is seated at
the right hand of God, possessing all the favor of God. And from
that favor he receives, that grace, and that favor and grace
mean the same thing. We receive from that abundance
grace upon grace. And he who undertook our salvation
has not only paid the price for our sin to take care of our legal
remedies, he now has all authority in heaven and earth and rules
heaven and earth to bring to pass our salvation. Now, some
like to say, well, I hope someday to be saved. And by hope, they
just mean kind of a wish. But that's not the sense of the
word in the Greek language, or even that's not what the word
meant in the English language. You go back a couple of centuries.
A hope was a confident expectation. It's what you believe will come
to pass. And it indicates what you're looking for and what you're
straining for. Paul says, I pray, I press on
that I may lay hold of that for which I was laid hold of. God
laid hold of Paul, didn't he? And if you've been saved, that
means God laid hold of you. And he laid hold of you for a
reason. And the reason he laid a hold of you is to save you.
And Paul says, when he delivered me from darkness, opened my eyes
to understand the truth, he set before me that hope. And from
that point on, I've been pressing on, forgetting those things which
are behind. They don't mean anything anymore.
Not my former life. Yes, I lived, he says, a sinful
life. I lived a hateful life. I was
a blasphemer. I was all those things. But you
know something? It doesn't matter anymore. I'm not looking back
there. I am looking forward to what
lies ahead. And like a runner in a race,
I am determined that nothing that gets in my way will prevent
me from achieving or reaching, achieve is not a good word there,
reaching that goal. And if God has laid hold of you,
the same attitude is in your heart. Now it might not always
be speaking so loudly as you'd like it to be, but I know this.
There's not a real believer in this world that would take anything
or all things in exchange for Christ. Yes, we stumble and fall. We
get distracted. We get hindered. Because we,
Paul says, I've got this flesh, this body of death, and it hinders
me. But God works in us to will and
to do of his good pleasure, and therefore, even though we stumble
and fall and then begin to wonder if we know God at all, nonetheless,
we keep on going. Because Christ is on the throne. And while we have this faith
and live in this life, we are tested. Tested to purify our
faith and prove it. Because we are not merely spirit,
we are also flesh. The flesh is continually putting
in our minds fleshly ideas of salvation. I know that the religion
that I was raised in is still my natural way of thinking. You might call it my default.
You know, you go back to default. In fact, just before we got started
this morning, I went back there and picked up the notes for the
message and started to pray. And I almost said, give me one
more chance. And I said, no, don't give me
another chance. I'll just mess that one up like I've messed
all the other ones up before. Lord, do for me what I cannot
do. Don't give me another chance
to preach the gospel. Preach the gospel through me. But nonetheless, all this stuff
rattles around in our mind, and yet God will never allow it to
totally take control of our way of thinking. And He comes, and
by trials, He begins to purge us of those false refuges. We think we're doing pretty good,
we think that we're growing, we think we're proving that we're
somebody, you know, and then He just lets us fall face forward.
And he said, do you really think you're something? Do you think
you've been standing on your own? Here, try it. And we fall
flat on our face. What does it do? Well, it probably
makes us feel miserable at first, but what it does is teach us,
don't trust yourself. Now, we never learn that lesson
once for all. Wish I could, but I don't. And so that's one of
those lessons that gets taught over and over again. But each
time it's taught to us, we learn it a little bit more. It purifies
our faith. It proves it. Now, some people
think that you prove faith by a person coming under a trial
and he doesn't fall. Well, that's no proof of faith. That could be proof of presumption. The scriptures say the righteous
falls seven times. And in using that word seven,
you see, if he falls completely, he makes an utter mess of things. He falls frequently, he falls
completely, but he rises up. Why? Because the God who began
a good work in us will continue it to the day of Christ. And
God sends trials our way, and we think we didn't do well under
it, and maybe we didn't. But that's not the point. The
point is, regardless of whether we whined too much under the
trial, regardless of whether we allowed the trial to distract
us from Christ, in the end, we came out believing Christ. The article in the bulletin today
based on that scripture in Matthew where the Lord says, many shall
say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not do this, that,
and the other? Those people had a faith. They
believed that Christ was going to receive them into his everlasting
kingdom. And they were surprised that
it didn't come to pass. And I'll bet you their faith
was never put to the test. He let them live their lives
doing great and wondrous things. And therefore, they never had
their faith put to the test. So much of what we think is faith
is really nothing more than good feelings. So God takes away our
good feelings to see if we really have faith. Faith is proven when
it continues in the face of the absence of
proof. I know that sounds contradictory,
but the things that people look for as proof of faith, faith
is proven when all those things are taken away. When I no longer
feel saved. When I hear the gospel and I'm
not moved by it, that happens. when whatever happens, and in the end, we still believe. And people may have looked at
us and said, oh boy, I don't know about so-and-so. Well, that's
true. We don't know. So we need to
quit speculating. Well, so-and-so did this. Well,
hang tight. Maybe the trial's not over. You
know, if you come up to a tree in the dead of winter You might
look at it and say, that tree's dead. There's not a leaf on it. Well, of course there's not a
leaf on it. It's winter. There's no fruit on it. It's winter. Wait until spring. You don't
know whether that tree's alive until then. God knows, but we
don't. That's why I don't ever write
anybody off. You know, I know that there are some preachers
that almost, well, I've done it before. I know some of the
motive can be behind it. It makes us pretty powerful if
we think we can, you know, say, well, so-and-so must not believe
the gospel. Look what they did. Well, then I did what they did.
Now what am I going to say? Oh, we need never write anyone
off. It may be the time of trial and
testing. Spring might come and prove that tree was alive all
along. Now, faith looks forward. It
has a goal and a purpose, and that's salvation of the soul. And by soul, he means the entire
person. Man is body and spirit, and together
they make up a soul. That's why they say, used to
say, it's not so much part of modern English, but when the
ship goes down, so many souls were lost. You know, they meant
people. When it's written of our Lord,
he poured out his soul unto death. Well, that's meaning his entire
person, because we know his body suffered, but he also suffered
in spirit. So the entire person suffered. And therefore, when it said that,
speaks of the salvation of our soul, it's speaking of the salvation
of our entire person. Now faith looks forward to that.
It fixes our thoughts on something that's hoped for but we don't
presently possess it or experience it. Hebrews 11 tells us that
faith is the substance of things hoped for. Now our English word
substance, I think it comes from Latin words, and you can see
sub, which means under, and then stance, to stand. Faith is that
which stands under what we hope for. It's that which holds up our hope. And the Greek word means exactly
the same thing. It's the word for stand and a
prefix meaning under. And so faith and not anything
else is what provides the foundation of our hope. The unbelieving world sometimes
mocks the believer for what he believes cannot be seen or proven. But that's exactly why it's called
a matter of faith. It's the substance, that which
stands under the things we hope for. It is the evidence of things
not seen. You say to, you know, somebody
says, well, prove to me that what you believe is true. Well,
I believe it. Well, that's not proof. It is to me. You see,
faith is not just an intellectual acceptance of certain facts. Faith is actually spiritual sight. We see what others cannot see. We were blind, but now we see. And so for them, they call it
faith, or think of it, they call it blind faith. It's not blind.
It's blind so far as natural sight's concerned, but remember,
it says of Abraham, he saw him who is invisible. So that doesn't
make any sense, of course not. But we've seen him who is invisible,
haven't we? We've seen him with eyes of faith.
It's called faith because natural eyes can't see it. We who believe
do not deny the outlandish nature of our claims and the fact that
our claims cannot be proven by normal means. And we should not be made to
doubt when we are mocked. because we believe things we
cannot prove to them. We do not believe normal things,
so we should not be surprised that they cannot be proven by
normal means. Now much of what passes for religion
is quite normal. It's natural to human thinking.
And certain kinds of proof can be brought forward. But we believe
completely unnormal things. We believe in an invisible God. They say, well, prove to me your
God exists. Well, if by that you mean make him visible, well,
I can't do that. He's invisible. He's not even
part of this creation. Therefore, how in the world could
I ever demonstrate to you that the God I believe in exists? So I am not made to doubt when
someone said, oh, you silly believer. You're believing in a God that
you can't prove. Well, of course I do. I believe
in such a God. Anything I could prove, anything
I can show you and demonstrate to you is not God. Doesn't that
make sense? I mean, if he created all things,
that means he's not part of this creation. Therefore, there's
nowhere I can go in creation and say, there's my God. David
said, why should the heathen say, where is your God? Now,
you ask one of the heathen where their God is, they can show you.
They could take you to their temples and they could show you
a statue or something and say, well, there he is. But the God of the Jews, or at
least the God of David, certainly not all the Jews really believed
him, but David, man after God's own heart, he believed this invisible
God. And they said, well, David, where's
your God? Well, he didn't even Take him to the temple and try
to show him the Ark of the Covenant. He said, our God is in the heavens. Meaning he's so far out there
you can't see him. And he has done whatever he pleased. We believe in an invisible God,
we believe in a God who's not part of our universe, not part
of the reality in which we exist. We believe that this out there
God became a part of this reality. As it is written, the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us. So not only do we believe in
a God who stands outside of this creation and therefore cannot
be proven, we believe that that God came into this creation,
and when he did so, he came in the form of a poor man living
in a backwater country of very little significance, coming from
a city, associated with a city, not the city of his birth, but
the city where he was brought up, Nazareth, which means despised. There's nothing that could be
seen in the Lord Jesus Christ that would move a person to say,
that's God in human flesh. Isaiah chapter 53 says, there
is no beauty, and the word means majesty, no glory, there is no
majesty that when we behold him, we should desire him, and they
didn't. He said, before Abraham was,
I am. And they said, or he said, Abraham
saw my day. He rejoiced to see my day. And
he did. And they said, wait a minute. You're not yet 50 years old.
How did Abraham see your day? Before Abraham was, I am. And
they picked up rocks to stone him, because they knew exactly
what he meant. And they said, you are a blasphemer, for you
call yourself God. And if we'd been there. Do you
know what side we'd have been on? Well, by grace, we might have
believed that Jesus is God. But if we were just our natural
selves, we'd have looked at the Pharisees and said, amen to that.
Look at him. I mean, you know, he's not even a tall man. He's not impressive even by human
standards. How then can he claim to be God? And yet you and I worship him
as God. And we believe that the death
of this man who is God has put away our sin. And Peter says
here, verse 8, though you have not
seen him, you love him. Now we don't feel comfortable
going around bragging about our love for Christ. But at the same
time, we can't deny it either, can we? If you don't love Christ,
then you're none of His. This business of salvation involves
more than simply following a pattern of saying the right words and
believing the right doctrines and making the right confessions.
It is, for lack of a, we'll keep it in human terms, it is coming
to love the Lord Jesus Christ. Now we love Him because He first
loved us, but we do love Him. Even though we've never seen
Him. They think it's crazy for someone to, you know, these mail
order brides, they used to call them that anyway, now I guess
it's on the internet, you know. guys would actually, you know,
having trouble finding a wife, well they could get a foreigner
to come and they would pledge to marry him sight unseen. And
they said, isn't that kind of, maybe you want to take a look
before you commit yourself, you know. We've never seen him and
we have committed our souls to his care and we love him. Now
that's outlandish. And it says, and even though
you do not see him now, you believe in him. That doesn't make any sense.
I've never seen him. And yet that which is most precious
to me, I have entrusted into his care. That is my everlasting
being. For all of us are going to continue
on forever, either in eternal misery or eternal blessedness.
And it's out of our hands to determine what that will be. And yet we have heard about someone
we have never seen and we heard about him and we came to love
him. And even though we've never seen him or even seen anybody
that did see him, we have committed the most precious thing we have
under his care completely. Rather than being put to shame when the intellectual
people of this world mock the outlandish nature of our faith,
I rejoice because anything that makes sense to the natural mind
is not going to be able to save us, is it? All that we hope for is summed
up in this phrase, the salvation of your souls. God saves the entire person when
he saves someone. Doesn't do the work all at once,
but when he's done, every aspect of that person will have been
saved. He says you are receiving the
goal or end or outcome of your faith, the salvation of your
souls. Now if you have that faith, which
is the gift of God, you have been brought to the realization
that you cannot manage your own affairs when it comes to eternal
life. You realized, you've been made
to realize that your efforts will never be able to convince
God to do you good. You can never do any kind of
work, not even one, which if God were to judge you on that
single work, He would be under some kind of obligation to bless
you. He is not under any obligation
to bless you by works of righteousness. He's not under any obligation
to bless you because of religious works. We just observed the Lord's
table, and our Lord commanded us to do that, and we rejoiced
to do that, and yet doing that did not put God under any kind
of constraint to do us any good. He does not do us good because
of fulfillment of moral duties, religious obligations, or even
confessions. Some people think that you read
a scripture like, if you will confess with your mouth Jesus
to be Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him
from the dead, you will be saved. And they think, okay, if I do
that, God's obligated to save me. No, he's not. That is, he's
not obligated to you. Now, if you do that from the
heart, he will save you, but not because he was obligated
to by anything that we have done. The promises of God are not a
statement of God's obligations. They do not put God under obligation
to us. Rather, if there's any obligation,
it is simply an obligation to himself. It says that he swore
on oath to Abraham. That was the kind of promise
he made to Abraham. And he said, now, when we swear, we always
swear by something greater than ourselves. We are liars by nature,
and therefore, if we're going to tell somebody something that's
important that might move them to entrust something of importance
to what we've said, well, they want us to swear to it. That's
why when you're going to give testimony in court, you know, the traditional
ways, you put your hand on a Bible and you swear to tell the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why? Because they
know that all of us are prone to say whatever's going to work
out well for us or for the people we love. And therefore, in times
past, since most people who lived in the United States or come
from a Western European culture, they believed that the Bible
was greater than themselves, they would put that Bible out
there, and people lay their hand on that, even people that were
not believers in the sense the scriptures talk about. Still,
the dignity and the greatness of the book by which they were
swearing would put some pressure on them to tell the truth. Well,
it says of God, since there's no one greater than himself,
he swore by himself. Now, that didn't obligate God
to Abraham. That obligated God to God, to
make good on his promise. This salvation, It's something yet to come, something
yet to be fully experienced, and yet notice this, verse 9,
for you are receiving the goal in the outcome of your faith,
the salvation of your souls. He doesn't say you will receive
it. He said you are receiving it. I've been rolling that over in
my mind ever since I began preparing for this series of messages. How is it that right now we are
receiving the salvation of our souls? Well, think of it. How much has God already done in you, to you, in this work
of the salvation of your souls. First thing he did, if he's delivered
you from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of the Son he
loves, here is some salvation you have already received. You
have received the salvation of the new birth. You receive that
part of it. You've been made alive again
in the inner man, in the spirit, You've been enabled to see things
that others cannot see. You've been made to believe the
one you have not naturally seen, and yet with eyes of faith you
see him. God has worked in you a miracle
of saving grace by giving you spiritual life. You didn't ask
him to. Because you don't even understand
what spiritual life is until you have it. I mean, before you were conceived,
you didn't ask your parents to conceive you, did you? No. You
didn't exist. You can't ask to come into existence. And God created new life in you,
in me. That's a work of salvation we've
already received. Here's another thing we've already
received. the forgiveness of sins. We've experienced that. We've
experienced it at the very beginning when our eyes were open, spiritual
eyes were open, and we called upon the name of the Lord and
He delivered us and part and parcel of that deliverance was
a canceling of all our debts before Him. Now we realize that
happened when Christ died. And yet it is applied to us and
we experience it within our lives the moment God gives us faith
to believe Christ. Now, if you are a believer in
the Lord Jesus Christ, you know your sin. You know it
better than you did before. You feel it. You feel the awfulness
of it more than you did before. Know this, that not one of your
sins, not the worst one that you've ever done, which is kept
secret from everyone else, but it's up in your mind and you
know it, not even that sin does God hold against you. It has
been wiped clean. In whom we have redemption through
his blood, the forgiveness of sins. Oh, we are receiving our
salvation already. Yes, our sin will bring us down,
our heads down in grief, but it should never, should never
bring us to fear. One of the old writers said, you should fear to sin, but don't
ever fear your sins. Why? They never come in the presence
of God. They've been put away, they are
gone. and God the judge is never gonna bring them up again. You
walk in this world right now at the present time utterly free
of condemnation, utterly free of legitimate accusation. You
say, but I did those things. Not in God's reality you didn't. Say, that's too bold. Well, if
it's not true, we're all lost. If my sin ever comes into the
presence of God unjudged, he's gonna judge it. But our sin came before Him upon
the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and God judged
it there. And God is a just judge. He will
never condemn. He will never punish twice for
the same sin. And if my sin was punished in
Christ, it'll never be punished in me. If it's punished in Christ,
it is gone. My slate has been wiped clean.
And no one will ever be able to make an accusation against
me stick in the sight of God. I say that about me, it's true
of every believer here. You are without sin in the sight
of God. Your sins have been forgiven.
Thirdly, you have experienced and are receiving the continual
persevering salvation work of God. He worked in us to will
and do of his good pleasure. What was it that we willed and
did? We willed and did believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ. They said, what work should we
do to do the works of God? And he says, this is the work
of God that you should believe on the one whom he has sent. Well, did you believe? God worked
in you to believe. You actually did believe, but
it was God that worked in you to do it. Do you still believe?
Why do you think that is? Because Paul says, in he that
began that good work in you, he's going to keep perfecting
it. He will bring it to perfection all the way to the day of Christ. I realize I'm kind of obsessed
with the passage of time. You're probably going to have
to put up with that until time's up. because it just, time fascinates
me, and the way it passes by so quickly. So I got there in
a bulletin. Today, June 21st, 2020, 33 years since the first
time I stood before you all to preach as officially the pastor
of this congregation. I know I'd preached to you beforehand,
and you'd called me, and I accepted. But that, when I got here on,
I guess, the 20th, I thought it was Friday night. She says
it was Saturday night. You know, we just barely got
in in time to fall in bed and get up the next morning and come
over here and preach. 33 years ago. Some of you believed already
when I got here. Some of you believed shortly after. Nearly
everybody that was a part of this original group had come
to believe the gospel within the first year. And here we are
now, 33 years along, and you're still believing. Why do you think
that is? I come from a religious tradition that says once saved,
always saved, as though, you know, you open the door and got
in, you know, by your own free will, and then God locked the
door behind you, and you may pound on it and want to get out,
but he's not going to let you out. They say he's a gentleman and
never force you in, but evidently he loses all of his gentlemanliness
after that and won't let you out if you want to. You still believe because God
is still working in you to will and to do of his good pleasure.
And I'll bet you if you think about it, you can go back to
many times in the past 30 some years, or however long it is
that you have believed, and you could say, if God had not held
me up at that point, I'd be gone. I know that at all times he's
held me up. But boy, right then, I can really see it. If he had not poured out extra
grace in that day, I would have quit. Every believer understands that. You are receiving right now the
salvation of your souls. And there's another aspect of
it, and we'll wrap it up with this. Verse eight, though you have
not seen him, you love him and even though you do not see him
now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible
and glorious joy. Now, let me point this out. Joy and happiness are not the
same thing. You look at the word happy and you'll see that it
comes from the same background as the word happen. Happiness
arises, it's an emotional state that arises because of things
that are happening. Joy is the fruit of the spirit
and it exists even when there's no happiness at all. It's the
joy of the Lord, it's inexpressible. I can express happiness to you.
You can probably tell when I'm happy and when I'm not. But at all times, the believer
is full of joy, even if he can't tell. But how do you know? Well, when they rebuilt the temple
after the captivity, and They're going to get all the
worship started again. They thought it was a good idea that they
get out the law and read it. And so it was read officially,
and there were many others who would relay what had been read. They didn't have microphones
to make sure it got to everybody, but they'd give them the sense,
too, of what was being said, explain it to them. And when
the people heard it, the blessings and the cursings associated with
the law, they began to weep. Because they realized what their
fathers had done and why the nation had been sent into captivity.
And then they realized also that even though God had brought them
back, they had been very slow at rebuilding the temples, starting
to worship, you know. And all they could hear in that
word being told them was the curse. All those fellows that were going
out there trying to explain the law to these people, they were
told, go out and tell them, do not weep. Do not weep? No, do not weep. For the joy
of the Lord shall be your strength. Even when your head is bowed
down with more grief than you can express. Or even when you
are in a state of mind that you are essentially without emotion,
yet that fruit of the spirit called joy is in you and it makes
you strong when everything natural about you has no strength whatsoever. That time you look upon and you
say, at that time, if God hadn't held me up, I'd have fallen.
That's true. Do you know what held you up?
The joy of the Lord. It was in you even though you
couldn't feel it. What is the joy of the Lord? The joy that
arises from the knowledge that sins are forgiven and that all
is well between you and God. Well, brothers and sisters, everything
we're looking for, it's beyond our ability to see. And yet we
press on. And we are right now, this very
moment, receiving the salvation that we long for. The blood of
Jesus Christ must be answered by the salvation of everyone
for whom it was shed. And you and I have the blessed
experience of being among those people. All praise be to God.