Greetings, friends, and welcome
to another broadcast of the Old School Primitive Baptist with
Elder Don Martin, Sr. Stay tuned for another gospel
message of God's free and sovereign grace. In 1 Corinthians chapter
1, we begin reading there, chapter 1, verse 1, Paul, called to be
an apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God, and Sosethnes,
our brother, unto the church of God which is accurate to them
that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. Now, I want to do a little expository
preaching, if God permits, and what I mean by that is you take
a portion of Scripture and you take and you, in an expositional
way, you read it and you give comment on it as you go through
the text. Now, that is a contextual, expositional
means of preaching. And then there is a subjective
means of preaching where a preacher would take a subject whether
it be on the subject of doctrine, or on the person of Christ, or
the deity of God, or the church, or whatever it be. And he takes
it, as God gave him a mind, and set together scriptures to try
to minister in a subjectal fashion. But I want to take, in an expositional,
contextual way, what Paul says here in the first epistle to
the church of Corinth. He says, to the church of Corinth,
to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, call them to be
saints. Now, there's one thing that needs
to be cleared up amongst some folks that have a mindset that
have come out of Catholicism. Now, you'd be surprised how many
folks were raised as Roman Catholics or Catholics as they were young,
and in time have come out of it and have been convinced that
their home should be among evangelical, Baptist, people because of what
they preach and the truth that they have been led to believe.
But this business of taking and setting folks up as saints in
that religious order and recognizing them as somebody spatial and
above the nominal believer in Jesus Christ is a tradition back around three or four hundred
A.D. And they began to take and canonize
individuals that were special in their service to God and they
set them on a higher plateau and made them saints in their
traditional religion. Well, the Bible says here that
Paul, as he writes to the church at Corinth, he says, to those
that are sanctified in Christ, now the word sanctified means
set apart. That's what it means when it's
translated in the original Greek. It means to be set apart. So
you that are believers in Christ Jesus, you have been set apart
by God to Christ and we have been bought with a price, the
precious blood of Christ. We are His. He is ours as well. But the Bible says that those
that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. We have been called to be saints. We are the saints of God. Everyone
that has been given a hope in Jesus Christ and has been brought
to a personal experience and relationship in believing on
Jesus Christ as one Savior and the Redeemer of one's soul, which we have here, that believe
in Christ, come together. We are saints gathered together. the church, the local body of
believers. We are the church, part of the
church. Now if we all, and you've heard
me say, if we all physically got up and walked outside the
door, stood out yonder by that oak tree, and this place was
empty of people that believed on Christ, there is no church
here. There is merely a building here. A building where the church meets. And they don't meet until they
come in the door and gather. And so the gathering of God's
people is a unique thing in itself because we must believe that
God gathers his church. You're here this morning because
God has gathered you here. He's caused you to have a desire
to be here. And no matter how and what your
intent was in coming here, God has brought you here for a divine
purpose and reason. For we as old Baptists believe
in God's absolute, determined, decreed, predestined purposes
in all things. And that we ain't going anywhere
that God ain't determined us to go. And so we're here this
morning by the appointed, designated time that God has allocated us
to be here. Now the Bible goes on to say,
Paul writes, he says, to those who are called to be saints,
with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ
our Lord, both theirs and ours. Grace be unto you and peace from
God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank God always
on your behalf for the grace of God which is given you by
Jesus Christ. Do you notice that the verses
here in the first three verses that I have read that God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ are synonymously mentioned every
time? For it says here that It says,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours, and
it says, and the grace of God and peace from God our Father
and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Wherever Paul had mentioned and
preached about Christ, the Father was always included in the content
of it in one way or another because they're inseparable. We know
that the manifestation of the Father is in and through the
person of the Son, Jesus Christ, who took upon himself a body
like unto ours, yet tempted in every way, but without sin, the
Bible says. Now, Paul goes on to say, he
says, I thank my God always on your behalf for the grace of
God which is given you by Jesus Christ. So the grace of which
we have obtained, which is the unmerited favor of God. Now,
you hear most religions in the name of Christianity talk about
grace. But few mention what really grace
is about. Grace is about unmerited favor. Now what does that mean? For
something to be unmerited, It means that it is not earned. It is not deserved. You can't
do anything to obtain it by your own merits or your own deeds,
obligations. That's what's so beautiful about
amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like
me. Listen to this, amazing unmerited
favor that saved a wretch like me. That's what it is, unmerited
favor. We don't deserve it. We haven't
earned it. We can't do anything to keep it. It is by the grace
of God that we have a relationship with Him. It's by His loving
kindness and mercy, which is everlasting mercy to those of
the elect family of God. He goes on to say in verse 5,
that in everything ye are enriched by him in all utterance and in
all knowledge, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you,
so that ye come behind in no gift. waiting for the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall also confirm you unto the
end, that ye may be blameless in that day of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Now what is this day of our Lord
Jesus Christ? That is a day of which God alone
has determined that His Son, Jesus, is coming back to this
time world and earth and take and gather His church together
and take them to immortal glory. That is going to be the day of
the Lord, and the Bible says that God shall confirm you. That word confirm means to make
you firm, steadfast, and make you persevere. We believe, as
old Baptists, taught doctrine of the perseverance
of the saints of God. Now what that means is we believe
that the whom them that God has sought out and saves in this
time world by his loving kindness and his grace, that they shall
persevere. In other words, they shall continue
on along the Christian walk and they shall not fall away. For the Bible says that all that
the Father had given me shall come to me, and I shall in no
wise lose none. You can't get lost once you have
been saved by the mercy, the grace, and the love and kindness
of Jesus Christ. You can't lose it. And we've
got some folks that teach you can. You can be saved today.
You can go out and do something that's sinful and wrong unless
you repent of it. And you die in that situation,
you've lost your salvation, and hell will be your eternal place.
That is a lie of the devil. For to whom God has sought to
seek and save, they are eternally, I remind you, eternally and everlastingly
kept by the grace, the love, and the mercy of God Almighty.
And so that is another good news gospel message that comes from
the Word of God towards God's people. That we are saints and
we shall be confirmed until the day of Jesus Christ. Verse 9. God is faithful, by whom ye were
called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. God is faithful. God is faithful
to do that which he's promised to do. He's promised to seek
sinners. He said, the Bible says that
Jesus said, I've come to seek and to save sinners. The Bible
says also that when the angel of God had spoken to Joseph at
the time that Mary was going to be conceived of the Holy Spirit
of God and bear forth from her womb that baby Jesus as a human-born
mortal and God take upon the flesh of men, the Bible says
that his name shall be called Jesus for he shall save his people
from their sins. Now he didn't say, the angel,
he didn't say, now his name shall be called Jesus and he's going
to try to save his people from their sins. He didn't say that.
He didn't say his name shall be called Jesus and he's going
to make an opportunity for whosoever wants to trust him to get their
self right with God and be saved, did he? He said that his name
shall be called Jesus and he shall save his people from their
sins. Now, has he ever failed at anything
he said he was going to do? No! Because the Bible says God
is immutable. In other words, he changes not.
The Bible says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and
forever. The Bible says it here. I'm reading
to you in verse 9. God is faithful. Another place, Paul writes in
one of his epistles, he says, faithful is he that has promised
that shall also do it. In other words, everything that
God has promised in and through the person of Jesus Christ to
us-ward, the saints of God, called and elect, chosen, appointed
heirs of God's grace, God is going to be faithful to do all
that he promised he was going to do. He's going to keep us,
as I said earlier. We're going to persevere. Although
we may wander around, as the songwriter put it, he said, oh,
I'm prone to wander and leave the Lord I love. Yes, at times
we are prone to wander, and we do do things that are not as
those that are holy people. We do do things that are sinful,
that we don't get by with them. Because whom the Lord loveth,
he chastens. That means that he chastens and
He will correct us. He will cause, He will reprove
us. He will instruct us in righteousness and sometimes it's kind of hard
to pay when He takes us to the woodshed in His chastising work
of grace. But He loves us and that's why
He changes us. Why do you correct or discipline
a child when they do things that are wrong or disrespectful? Why? Because you love them. You don't
want them to grow up to be ornery characters without just no respect. You don't want them to grow up
to be children that are disobedient. The Bible says that Paul writes
in another one of his epistles in Ephesians. He says to the
children, children obey your parents for this is pleasing,
this is right unto the Lord. And so therefore the children
aren't going to still pay their parents. And when they don't,
there's a price to pay. Sometimes it's by a hickory stick.
And my daddy used a nice little leather belt, about two and a
half inches wide, that I used to hear come flipping off of
his belt loops. And boy, would I take it now.
That's when the pucker syndrome set in, Brother Clyde. And buddy, when it set in, I
knew something was coming. And then he'd light the backside
of me up to where it'd glow in the dark. But I'll tell you what.
That's what God does to those children of His that don't obey
Him in time. That's right. Amen, brother.
Now in verse 10, Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and
that there be no divisions among you, but that ye be perfectly
joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. He's
saying to these brethren and sisters in the church at Corinth,
he says, look, y'all need to be speaking the same thing. Y'all
need to be coming together in union and in harmony. Paul spoke
in every one of his about 13 epistles that he wrote in the
New Testament about discord, unharmony, heresies, false doctrine,
false teachers, false prophets, and they had warned the church
about that we ought to walk in love one towards another. And that's how the Bible says,
Jesus said that they shall know you are my disciples because
ye have love one for the other. And that's how that we are identified
as God's people, because we love one another. Now a person says,
well, you know, I don't love brother so-and-so. I have an
ought against him. I say, well, you need to make
the ought straight. Because, you know, when Jesus
said this, this is serious. He says, for if ye forget not
others, then your heavenly Father shall not forget you. Now, this
is not saying that the Heavenly Father is going to change His
love towards those whom He seeks and saves. But what it does indicate
is that a person who has an ought against another one, to the point
of where they hate them, and bitterness is in their heart,
And there is no forgiveness in their heart and their mind towards
this individual. And there is a begrudging bitterness
that's welding up inside them for years. This could go on. And he said, this ought not be
named among those that be of the elect of God in the church
of Jesus Christ. For ye must forgive others of
their trespasses, even as God has