Wayne called me there, Wayne
Steve. He's been sick, him and his wife both, and asked me to
do this. I'm not a preacher. I've never
done anything like this before, but hopefully God will give me
the words to not say anything dumb or that's not correct. It's
such an awesome responsibility to do this. I feel very privileged
to have this opportunity. It gives me a whole new appreciation
of what Wayne or any preacher does. to prepare messages on
a weekly basis. So it's definitely a lot of work. Jesus often taught with parables. A parable is just basically a
story where you can lay two stories side by side when you want to
compare them. I've kind of fixed up a parable
of my own that I'm going to try to teach from. What I'm going
to do there is This is about a father and son
who's getting ready for Thanksgiving. And when you get ready for Thanksgiving,
you've got to plan ahead. And one of the things you do
is start making a menu on things you need to go to the grocery
store to get. So the father sits down and starts planning his
menu. And he starts writing things down, like turkey, and potatoes,
and green beans, and different things that he's going to need
to prepare dinner. So when he gets done with things,
he's made all his choices. And so he gives the grocery list
to his son and has his son go to the grocery store for him.
So his son goes to the grocery store. starts in there and he's
surrounded by thousands of items. It's a whole world of groceries
and stuff like that. But he's got a list and he's
only concerned with picking up the items that are on the list.
So he starts going through and picking up the turkey and the
potatoes and green beans and stuff like that. He may see other
things, but he's there to get all of the items on his list.
That's all. When he gets done with that,
he has to go to the register and pay for them. He goes and
pays for the groceries. At that point, the items become
his own and he takes them home. That's where I'm starting from. Turn to Ephesians. the first
chapter of Ephesians. I want to make some comparisons
with that to what God has done for us. One of the first things
I want to look at Visions is one of my favorite books of the
Bible, and I want to go back to that shopping list. The Father
has picked a shopping list, and it's very similar to what our
Heavenly Father has done. He has gone through and made
up a list, or of names, basically. And if you look at verse 5, having
predestined us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to
Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the
praise of the glory of His grace, that wherewithin He hath made
us acceptable in the Beloved." When you look at that, He has
picked us before the foundation of the world. I think I should
have started on verse 4, because it talks about, according as
He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. It's
just like When you go to the grocery store, you make your
list. Well, our Heavenly Father made His list of His children,
and those are the children that He wants to make holy. We are
unholy in our own right, but He will make us holy. I'm going
through my notes here, so bear with me. God chose us before
the foundation of the world, so he'd done that before any
of us were even born, before any of us could do anything to
gain merit with Christ or with God. But it was his decision. We don't have any way of making
that decision ourselves. He saves us. We may think that
we can do things to gain favor with God, but that's not the
way it works. It is his will. And that's referenced too in
verse 9 of the same book there. Having made known unto us the
mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he
hath purposed in himself. It is his will, it is not man's
will. I sometimes get asked if I believe
in free will. And I tell him, yes. Now, before
you think I've gone off the deep end and become a free will person,
the free will that the world thinks of is the free will that
man has. Well, man doesn't have free will,
but God does. And what kind of God would we
have if he didn't have free will? And what kind of God would it
be that if man had free will, Would that put man on the same
footing as God himself? That's not the God of the Bible.
The God of the Bible has free will, but man does not. going back to the grocery store,
the son picks up only the items that are on his list. Those are
the things that were given to him by his father. And it's much the same way that
Jesus goes through. He is looking for the people
that were given to him by his father, the people that will
be, that are the children of God. So he is not concerned with
the whole world as such, but he is concerned with the people
that are his chosen children. He knows his sheep and his sheep
come to him. One thing that a lot of people
believe is that God loves the whole world. A lot of times they
will reference John 3.16. Let's turn to John 3.16. They
kind of take the first portion of that and run with it. It says,
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.
And then they stop right there. God or Jesus is not here to save
the whole world. If you continue to read on, beyond
that first line, it says, that whosoever believeth in him should
not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son
into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through
him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not
condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already. So
it tells you right there, right from the start, that God isn't
here to save the whole world, but he's here to save his chosen
people. Just look at different examples
through the Bible. Pharaoh's chariots, they were
crossing the Red Sea. and then the whole sea collapsed
in on them. Those definitely were not chosen
people by any means. Same thing with the flood. The people in the ark were safe,
but the rest of the world perished. God does not necessarily love
the whole world. He loves his chosen people, the
children that he has picked himself before the foundation of the
world. Going back to the grocery list,
the son is going through picking up different things. He goes
through and maybe picks up a can of green beans and puts them
in his buggy. There are thousands of other
items there. There's a can of peas there. Well, he didn't pick the
can of peas. But that can of peas does not
have the ability to jump off the shelf into the cart. That's
kind of a parallel there with man not being able to save himself. Christ saves us, picks us, and
takes us into Him where man cannot gain favor by doing works and
doing things that he thinks are right to gain salvation because
that's just not the way it works. Like I say, you don't have the
ability to save yourself, only Christ can save us. In Ephesians, going back to Ephesians
there, in chapter 2, verse 8 and 9, it talks about this. For by
grace are ye saved through faith, and not of yourselves. It is
a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. And
grace is a gift that's given to us. We don't have any merit. We're sinners, all of us. We
don't deserve anything. But it is a free gift of grace
that saves us. And like I say, it was given
to us before the foundation of the
world. So Christ is there just for our benefit. And it's not
here for the whole world. And stepping back. back to the grocery store. When
the son has finished picking up the groceries, he has to pay
for those things. Well, Christ has to pay for our sins. Sin
has to be paid for. There's no doubt about that.
But the way Christ paid for us was through his own blood. And
if you read Ephesians 1 verse 7 in chapter 1, in whom we have
redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according
to the riches of his grace. God used his blood to wash our
sins away. And that's the only way that
our sins are washed away. And once they are washed away,
they are totally forgotten. They are as far from the east
as they are from the west. I've got a reference there. OK.
Psalms 103, verse 12. I'm kind of babbling a little
bit. In verse 12, it says, as far as the east is from the west,
as far as hath he removed our transgressions from us. When
you look at the world, you can go around the world, you start
going east, and you can go clear around the world, and you're
always going east. You're never going back west or looking back
behind you. If you look at the world and
go around the world the other direction from North Pole to
South Pole, from here in Michigan, we go north and go for a little
rise to the North Pole, then all of a sudden we're going south.
So we'd be changing direction. God does not change direction
on us. Once those sins are behind us,
they're totally forgotten, never to be seen again. And our sins
are behind us, and we should be looking forward to Christ. Going back to the grocery store
again, once the son has paid for the groceries. the groceries
are His, just like when Christ redeemed us, we are His children. And there's nothing that can
change that. We can't lose our salvation.
Once you're saved, you're always saved. How can we be plucked
out of the hands of God, or Christ, if He has saved us? We do not
have that power. Now let's change gears up a little
bit here, go to kind of a different subject. I want to go to Genesis
chapter 1. My wife and I, lovely wife, and
I have been married for 40 years. And here a few months ago was
our anniversary. We went down to Grand Rapids.
for the weekend. We went to the Meyer Gardens
and then to the John Ball Zoo. I don't know if you've ever been
there or not, but there's such a wide variety of plants and
flowers and trees and everything. It's all God's creation. and you go to the zoo and you
see all these animals from around the world and there is such a
variety of stuff. It reminds me of a line in a
movie, God loves wonders variety. There is so much around you,
all you have to do is just look around and there is God's creation. We went to a dark park up just
west of Mackinac City. And that's a park where it's
kind of isolated from city lights and highway lights and stuff
like that, where you go and look at stars. And you look up there
and see all these stars around. And that's all God's creation.
And yet, it makes you feel so small when you look at that.
But it's all God's creation. with all that immensity is concerned
about our salvation, and he takes care of us on an individual basis.
There are 8 billion people in this world, but he still knows
every one of us. He knows every hair on our head.
He knows every time a bird falls to the ground. It's kind of mind-boggling. We can't begin to understand
how God works or why he works as far as that goes. One thing more that God has done
is he gives mankind a lot of talents to create things and
stuff like that. We've got big skyscrapers and
we can fly around the world and we've been to the moon and back
and stuff like that. That's all has been given to
us by God. Mankind has never been able to
actually create anything. God creates life. He created
everything just by speaking a few words. no matter what or how smart mankind
thinks they are, they have never been able to actually create
life or to create anything out of nothing like God does. We can modify things, we can
build things, but we have to take something that's already
here and put it together to create something. But God doesn't need
that. Let's go to Genesis chapter 1 and start at verse 11. And this here kind of tells what
God has the ability to do. God said, let the earth bring
forth grass and herbs, yielding seed, and the fruit trees, yielding
fruit, after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth,
and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass
and herbs, and yielding seed, after his kind, and the tree
yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself after his kind, and God saw that
it was good. And the evening and the morning
were the third day. And God said, let there be lights
in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night. And let them be for signs and
for seasons and for days and years. And let them be for lights
in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.
And it was so. And God made two great lights,
the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule
the night. He made the stars also. And God
set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon
the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to
divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.
And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God
said, let the water spring forth abundantly, the moving creatures
that have life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the
open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales.
and every living creature that moveth which the waters brought
forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after
his kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them,
saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas,
and let the fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening of
the morning was the fifth day. And God said, let the earth bring
forth living creatures after his kind, cattle and creeping
things, the beast of the earth after his kind. And it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle
after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth
after his kind. And God saw that it was good.
And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness,
and let them have dominion over the fishes of the sea, over the
fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,
and over every creeping thing that creepeth up on the earth."
So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created
he him. Male and female created he them.
And God blessed them. And God said unto them, be fruitful
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have
dominion over the fishes of the sea, and over the fowls of the
air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. God
created all this within just a few days, yet mankind is not
able to create anything in itself. Evolutionists, they want you
to believe that this was all like some big accident or something.
that we crawled out of the oceans and all this living stuff around
us, all these creatures and stuff, just suddenly evolved from a
single cell out of the ocean. But where did that single cell
even come from? They can't explain that. They've got theories, and
a theory is nothing more than scientists making a guess, because
they can't actually prove it. So they call it a theory, and
it's nothing more than just a guess. There's a thing called the Big
Bang Theory. That's where they talk about how the universe started.
Well, we know how the universe started. God created it. But
they think that there was at some point something that just
exploded and just blew out all over the universe. and the earth
just happened to fall in the exact right position between
the sun and where we're not too close to the sun where we'd burn
up, or we're not too far away where we'd freeze, but holds
the earth in the exact position that we need to be. to change
the seasons and all that. Like winter right now, we've
got snow out there, but six months from now we'll be in warm weather.
But if the earth was just a few thousand miles closer to the
sun, or a few thousand miles further away from the sun, we
would either freeze to death or burn up, one of the two. This is not just some accident,
it's God's creation. It's just kind of mind-boggling.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around it a lot of times. But Genesis definitely gives
us a different story. One other thing that I hear people talking about is
that you have to let Jesus into your heart. Jesus is kind of sitting there
wringing his hands and wondering, well, is he going to let me into
his heart or not? That puts man at a point where
Do you have more power than what God does? God does not need to
let us into His heart. He is all powerful and if He
wants in, He's going to be there. It's your salvation. He's going
to save the ones that are His children that were picked before
the foundation of the world. That's not the God of the Bible.
You have to wait for Jesus to let Him into your heart. That's
just not the God of the Bible. It's just mind-boggling that
people think like that, that you're on the same level as God,
or even more powerful than God. Well, that's about all I have
for right now.