Thank you for sending in so many
different questions. We're going to try and get through
as many as we can. We enjoy these times together
at Ligonier Conferences, and it shows us that you're really
learning, and you're paying attention and eager. Are you eager, Dr. Lawson? I
live ready. I was born ready. Oh, powerful red tie. Turn out the lights and look
at it. LARSON So we're going to try and get through as many
as we can here, and not everybody has to respond to every question,
but we're going to start out with a big picture question. What do you think is the greatest
challenge facing the church today? LAWSON I don't know that we can
say there's just one, but there'd be a cluster. and I'm sure the
other two men will add to the cluster. I just see the church
just caving into the world and capitulating to the world and
trying to, at times, become like the world in order to reach the
world and have lost sight of the fact that church really should
not be as much like the world, it should be as much like heaven
as possible, another world. And so, there's other things
I know the men will add to that, but I see that as a glaring a
slippery slope that the church is on right now of just caving
in to the world in what we teach, how we teach, how we worship,
how we carry out ministry. We have yielded the high ground
and we're on a slippery slope, generally speaking. LAWSON Berk,
what would you add to that? Well, I completely agree with
you, Steve. I think you're exactly right.
never have we been in a time where the world is more churchy
and the church is more worldly. And I think that for many years
churches understood and they acknowledged that they were to
be countercultural. And then for, I think, maybe
two, three decades with certain movements, certain churches kind
of leading the charge in those movements, seeker-sensitive,
attractional, and so on, they pretended They pretended to espouse
a countercultural position in the church. But what's happened,
I think, in the last…we've talked about this so much over the years.
I think what's happened in recent years, and it's happened rapidly, because of certain leaders in
the church and churches following their example, it has become
more easy for churches to be more okay with not being countercultural. It's almost as if some of these
leaders within the church have paved the way for those pastors,
those elders, those churches to say, we don't have to pretend
anymore. And so, they were sort of hiding under the guise, the
lip service of being different, and we're different from the
world, and we're countercultural. We're going to preach the gospel
and the Word of God. It doesn't matter what the world
thinks or says, but now it's become easier for them to no
longer have the pretense. Does that make sense? You know, I think this is a question
that has a different answer at different age groups. There are
things that pull it together. The culture question is a huge
question and the hostility we face. I just spoke with a person
a couple of days ago, 33 years with the company, and he shared,
and rather highly positioned, and he shared that he is viewed
as immoral because he will not champion the LGBTQ cause. So, not only does he have to
tolerate it, but he needs to champion it. And by not doing
that, he's the immoral one. And I think that that generation,
whether it's the boomers or the great generation, they've got
a biblical literacy to help them to respond to these cultural
challenges. I think what we've got to recognize
is that the up-and-coming generations are facing really hard questions,
questions I never faced growing up, theological, cultural questions. And I think the challenge for
us is to help them become more biblically literate and recognize
that they don't have to cave in. They don't have to go along
with culture. The Bible has answers for these
questions. And they can have a confidence
in Scripture, but we have to teach it to them. They have to
know it to know that the answers are to be found there. So, I
think the culture question is huge, but I think it impacts
the generations differently. And I think it helps us to think
about our task in equipping them to be able to be Christians in
this moment and be faithful disciples. I think real quickly, Chris,
before we move to the subject, something that we were discussing
over dinner, Steve, is this, there's a new
religion. It's a very old religion, but
the world has become very religious, if you've not noticed this in
recent years. I mean, it always has been. But
there is now a more united religion that the world has, and it's
infiltrated the church, and much of the church has sort of bought
into it, as you were getting at. But the problem is with this
new kind of world religion that has infiltrated the church is
that the world has convinced the church that it must embrace
the entirety of this new religion. And they can't just embrace one
aspect of the religion. They have to embrace the entirety
of it. And now, this new religion is
multifaceted, very complex, and it's constantly changing. And
that's where a lot of pastors and churches are getting trapped.
Because at first they thought, okay, so I just need to be accepting
of this aspect of social justice. If I just accept that, then they'll
accept me. And they realize, no, no, you actually have to
embrace the whole mantra, the entire theology and philosophy
of social justice in the way they define it, whoever they
is, and that's constantly changing too. And then once they accept
that, they say, well, that's not enough. And as their churches
change, as people leave their churches, as other people come
to their churches who are attracted to this new mindset, then they
come to realize, well, okay, I have to embrace critical race
theory. and critical theory in general,
and I have to embrace all of that. And then it's to the constantly
changing and constantly being reshaped sort of new wokeism
religion, and then they just keep adding to it. And I just
heard recently about what I thought was a faithful pastor now having
to embrace the whole defund the police nonsense. because that's
a part of the same religion. And if you don't, by every aspect
of it, embrace it, well then you're the immoral one. You're
the outcast. And that's kind of the way it
works, and it's actually the way cults work. Burke and I were talking at dinner
about this, and with Reformed theology, it's a comprehensive
body of truth and knowledge that's all wired together. And so, we
were saying, you tell me what you believe over here, let's
say in theology proper, I'll tell you exactly what you believe
over here about soteriology ecclesiology, etc., because the Bible is tightly
woven together. No truth stands independent of
another truth. Truth is like links in a chain,
and they all just hold together. And it's the same way with what
Burke is talking about with this worldview, this secular worldview
that's just been thrust upon us like a tsunami over the last
two to three years especially. It's all tightly woven together
as well. and you pull a thread over here
and it crinkles over here, you've got to buy into the whole system
because no one of these spokes in the wheel stands alone. It's
all tied into the hub. which is what we would call walking
according to the world, to buying into the world's ideology, to
use the word you used earlier, buying into the world's values
and perspectives and philosophy. It's all woven together. It'll
just have different labels on the bottles of poison, but it's
the same poison. on the inside. So… The Bible teaches us why racism
is a sin of Satan. It teaches us why white supremacy
or whatever other supremacy is out there is absolutely insane.
The Bible is the one that teaches us about true justice ecclesially,
familially, socially. The Bible is what teaches us
these right ways of looking at these things through right theology
with right ends because the goal is the glory of God. How do we speak to the need of
church members returning to the church in this COVID culture? I have no opinions on anything. I have no opinions on vaccines.
I have no opinions on masks. I have no opinions on COVID whatsoever. So, Steve, you can answer. I have lots of opinions on it. So, Chris, what is the question?
I don't know that I understand the question. LARSON How do we
speak to the need for church members to return to church in
this post-COVID culture? So after the advent of… LAWSON
Get back in the game. Yeah, just get back in the game.
Get back in church. I don't think there's anything
complicated about it. I'm not nodding. I'm not shaking my head. Don't forget, I know you're preaching
every Lord's Day, but my day job is as a pastor, and I'm trying
to keep that job, so I have no comments on any of this. I'm being a bit facetious. I
think we do need to be I think we need to be very thoughtful,
and I think we need to be very careful. I think we need to be
very gentle, and I think that at least in my context, and this
is not This is not a reprimand to anyone,
but I will say this. I've been very grateful over
the past year and a half or so to have a group of men and a
plurality of elders, and I know you believe in the plurality
of elders as well. We're all Presbyterian in that sense. To have an entire body of elders.
that speaks with one voice. And I'm grateful that God has
given us at our church very wise and godly elders. LAWSON Now,
you're in a very good place, and God's wisdom is for there
to be a plurality of elders and for those men to stand as one
as they provide leadership for the church. Can you address the doctrine
of faith alone in the light of James 2 verse 24? You see that
a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Yeah,
this is a perennial question, and it pits James against Paul,
and it pits the non-Reformed understanding of faith alone
versus, you know, the Reformed understanding. So what Calvin
deals with this, there's a long history of dealing with this,
and I think Calvin just puts it out there in a very helpful
kind of way. We're talking about our justification before God. So as Paul is talking about justification,
he's talking about our standing before God. And in our standing
before God, it is justification by faith alone. But in terms
of our, as we're talking about even in our church relationships
and our relationships in the body of Christ, What is not visible
to the body of Christ is our faith. But what is visible to
the body of Christ is the effect of that faith, the fruits of
that faith, which would be our works. So James is after that
justification, if you will, or that evidence or that manifestation
of our right standing with God before others. which is manifested
in a life saved by faith is then transformed and lives for God.
But we can make no move to somehow connecting that to our justification
and our standing before God. We have to be very careful. not
to say justification by faith and then smuggle works in the
back door. And so I think we need to look at what Paul is
doing and what James is doing and they perfectly harmonize
there. Yeah, just to add one thing to that, Stephen, as well
said, when Paul looks at justification, he's looking at Genesis 15 verse
6, Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
It's just faith alone. When James addresses it in James
2, 14 to 26, James is not addressing James 15 verse 6. He is addressing many years later
Genesis 22 with Abraham offering Isaac. And Genesis 22 is simply the
evidence of the reality of the faith that was exercised, saving
faith, justifying faith, that was exercised in Genesis 15. So, they're coming at it from
two totally different perspectives. Paul is at the point of what
we would say today, conversion, where Abraham believed God and
was reckoned to him as righteousness. James is not looking at it, he's
looking at the fruit of that. And to put it another way, Abraham
is looking at the root, James is looking at the fruit, and
the two are inseparably bound together, heads and tails of
the same coin, yet there is a cause and effect. The cause is Genesis
15, the effect is Genesis 22. and Abraham giving evidence of
his faith by going to Mount Moriah to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. PARSONS Just to say a quick word
on this, just in addition, because everything my brothers have said,
of course, I agree with entirely, but this is sort of a secondary
point that I think is important. Sometimes you've heard the language
of final justification. Have any of you heard of that
language, that phraseology? It's based on, you know, a number
of texts that are poorly interpreted in my opinion, and most notably
Romans chapter 2 and verse 13, where some have taught that we
have a justification now, that we are justified now. but that
we have to in one sense sort of prove, demonstrate that justification
to the end that we are looking forward to with assurance and
hope to a final justification on the day of judgment. And I
think that's from a very wrong and poor interpretation of Romans
2.13. We need to understand that we
are justified once and for all. that that justification is a
one-time act that God has declared us righteous because of the righteousness
of Jesus Christ, and it's by faith and faith alone. We do
not have to wait a final justification on judgment day. We are justified
once and for all one time by faith and faith alone. There's
a lot more we could say about that, but I think it's a very
important point when we're on the subject of justification.
Alright, one more thing then to say about that. If you're
not justified now in this life, you will never be justified on
the last day. You will be condemned on the
last day if you are not justified in this lifetime. So, what those
who misinterpret Romans 2 verse 13, They forget the analogia
Scriptura. They forget the whole body of
the entire Bible to be brought to bear. They're trying to interpret
the rest of the Bible in light of one verse. We never interpret
that way. We interpret one verse in light
of the entire rest of the Bible. And the whole rest of the Bible
speaks crystal clear that justification is inseparably connected to sanctification. and everyone who is justified
immediately begins the journey of progressive sanctification.
Some will progress faster, others slower, depending upon many factors. But nevertheless, everyone who
is justified is being sanctified, and there are no exceptions to
that and will ultimately be glorified. So, you've got to see the entire
systematic theology. You've got to see the whole counsel
of God to even address that issue of final justification. That's
nonsense. Again, if you're not justified
now, you will be condemned on the last day. Is repentance an aspect of faith
or a good work? There's this wonderful little
book by Thomas Watson who did The Body of Divinity, but he
has this little book on repentance that's much lesser known. And
it says, first line is, if ever a soul is to get to heaven, the
two wings that get him there are repentance and faith. And,
you know, this is one of those things where when you have a
talk, you have a finite time. You'd love to address all of
the theological ramifications of your talk, but there's a clock. ticking down right in front of
you. I just ignore the clock usually. I've seen that before. Every Sunday. That's why you
need to use notes. Shall I? You just can't circle
the airport and never land. I've heard of some preachers that
even when they use notes they go a little long. Yeah, I wonder
who that would be. He wears red ties. They're gonna want to go to bed
at some point tonight. I think we have drifted. If I remember the question right,
is it repentance as an aspect? Yeah, I think what we need to
see is faith is the trusting in, repentance is the turning
from. And so as you come to God, we are all oriented away from
God. We are seeking not God. And so a conversion is a 180.
And as we are turning towards God in faith, we are turning
from ultimately the self and from sin. And that's repentance. So if ever a soul is to get to
heaven, the two wings of faith and repentance will get that
soul to heaven. LAWSON Yeah, and to even merge
that together, all faith is a repentant faith, and all repentance is
really a believing repentance. I mean, they really are merged
together. And you put it so well, and it's true, the faith is the
turning to, and repentance is the turning away from, and you
can't have one without the other. I mean, it's a package deal.
And so, even in the Bible, if you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
and Acts, the emphasis is on repentance. If you read John,
the gospel of John, and the epistles, the emphasis is upon faith, but
it's not one without the other. Again, it's the whole Bible.
It's very well said. I struggled with this many years
ago, 25 years ago. It was a very, very
significant issue. And as Steve said, this is not
as simple as we're giving answers to it today. This is a lot of
complexities to this. And I appreciate the question
because you can tell that the questioner has thought about
this as well. It is important that we distinguish
between an act and works. The word work or works in the
New Testament is language that the Apostle Paul uses and others
use in reference to things that we do in order to earn our salvation. things that we do that sort of
either initiate with us, begin with us, things that we do to
earn our salvation. That language of work or works
is different than something we do. We do repent. We do believe, but we have to
understand why we believe and why we repent. It's Romans 2.4,
I believe, that Paul says, don't you know that it's the kindness
of God that's meant to lead you to repentance? So, do we repent? Yes. Is it something we do? Is
it an act? Yes. Is it a work? Technically,
no. It is something that God, by
His kindness, leads us to just as He grants us the gift of faith
according to Ephesians 2, 8 through 10. The entirety of the believer's
conversion and coming to the Lord, of course, is all of grace. And repentance is a sovereign
gift that God gives as well. He gives both saving faith and
repentance. That's why God is the author
of our salvation. He provides everything. All we
provide is, as you said, the sin that we hold in our hands
that was laid upon Christ. LARSON Is it the Scriptures that
change us as we read and ponder the Scripture, or is it the Spirit
who changes us as we read and ponder the Scripture? It's the
Holy Spirit working through the Scripture, and the Holy Spirit
is the author and the Scripture is the instrument of our sanctification. So, it's not an either-or, it's
a both-and, and the Spirit is working through the book that
He authored and inspired, And so, again, it's distinguishing,
and R.C. always said a theologian has
to make careful distinctions. You have to slice things very
thinly and separate out. And so, the Holy Spirit is the
author of our sanctification, capital A, and the Scripture
is the instrument that the Spirit uses to bring about our sanctification. John 17, verse 17, sanctify them
in the truth. Your Word is truth. So, that's what the Spirit is
using in our life. NICHOLS Just to carry on that,
Steve, Calvin's favorite title of the Holy Spirit was Magister
Veritatis, the Teacher of Truth. And he gets that from the John
14 to 16 complex that then culminates in 17. But it's the spirit, the
great teacher, through the word, the spirit with the word. And
I think that's really important because the charismatic side
of the equation too often emphasizes the spirit in an extremely dynamic
way apart from the word. And we need to realize as reformed
people, that we need to not just emphasize the word, but the spirit
with the word. And so I think that's a very
important emphasis that's part of our heritage. LAWSON To add
to that, no one will ever be saved apart from the Spirit working
through the Word. And no one will ever be sanctified
apart from the Spirit working through the Word. And wherever
God is at work in the world in a saving, sanctifying way, it
is the Spirit of God working through the written Word of God. I think too many Presbyterian
and Reformed churches and Reformed Baptist churches have forgotten
the Holy Spirit. I mean, I've sat through worship
services where I've barely ever heard, if at all, any mention
of the Holy Spirit in the prayer, in the sermon. R.C. said we've become Unitarian
in our preaching and Unitarian in our worship service at times,
just forgetting the triunity of God. We should be talking
about the Holy Spirit in our churches more than they ever
dream of talking about Him in the Pentecostal and Charismatic
churches. Sure. Correctly. Absolutely. And rightly,
exactly. I mean, the Holy Spirit should
be in our message about the gospel. He should be in our prayers.
He should be in our singing. One of the reasons I love singing
the doxology every Sunday is that we are singing about the
Holy Spirit and the Sanctus on many Sundays at our church. We
are people of the Spirit. We, as Reformed, understand the
role of the Holy Spirit better than most other traditions. And
we are to be a people that really recapture and reclaim the personal
work of the Holy Spirit in all aspects of what we believe. Yeah,
I think it was Thomas Watson who said the Holy Spirit is like
the spectacles that we put on in order to read the Word of
God with understanding. And without those spectacles,
without the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Scripture
would not be clear to us. The Spirit makes it clear by
working through the mind of Christ in us. Several members of my church
hold to the continuation of the signed gifts of tongues, prophecy,
and healing. How would you lovingly persuade
them of the orthodox position that the signed gifts were no
longer given after the canon of Scripture was completed?"
LAWSON Well, I would start with Ephesians 2 verse 20 that Christ
and the apostles are the foundation of the church. And those sign
gifts were uniquely given to the apostles as a confirmation
of their apostleship as well as a means by which direct revelation
would be given to them, to the church, until such time as the
canon of Scripture was completed. But when you build a building,
how many times do you lay the foundation? You only lay it once. You don't lay a foundation on
the roof. You don't lay a foundation on the second floor, the third
floor, the fifth floor, and all the way up to the twenty-first
floor. A foundation is only laid once. And God gave, Ephesians
2.20, God gave revelation to Christ and to the apostles such
that for the rest of the building of the church through the centuries,
it's all built upon this one foundation. Ephesians 3, 5 would
also supplement with the same. And many other passages and arguments,
theological arguments can be brought to bear on this, and
I'm sure the other men want… Steve, you're getting ready to
say something. LAWSON Well, I would just have them sit down and work
with… Hebrews 2.3, because I think it's some reflection on exactly
what you're talking about within Scripture itself. So you got
to sort of follow the pronouns here, but the author says, how
shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was
declared, this is the gospel, it was declared at first by the
Lord and was attested to us by those who heard. So there are
three groups here. There's the Lord, there's those
who heard the Lord, which would be the apostles, and there's
the us, the group taught by the apostles. It was attested to
us by those who heard while God also bore witness by signs and
wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit
distributed according to his will. And so, those gifts were
an attestation of that ministry of those who heard directly from
Christ. And the author of Hebrews is
putting himself outside of that group. And so, already within
the canon of the New Testament, there is a reflection of a movement
beyond the apostles. And I think it's an important
verse to consider, and I put it in front of them. be Bereans
and see what the Word teaches. LAWSON Yeah. Also, there's no
mention of these miraculous sign gifts in the New Testament past
the year 56 or 57 A.D. with the book of 1 Corinthians.
I mean, once you get past that to the later general epistles
and even Paul's later epistles, there's no mention of these gifts,
and it gives an indication of them beginning to pass off the
scene. And just to clarify, what I was
trying to say earlier is when you lay the foundation once,
that's when those signed gifts were given. But as each subsequent
floor is built up from this foundation, those gifts were a part of the
foundation. They're not in an ongoing manner,
and it also speaks to the sufficiency of Scripture and the sufficiency
of the Holy Spirit. that if it's new, it's not true. There is no new revelation to
be given. We have the faith once for all
given to the saints, and if we needed more information to be
given in a private revelation type of thing, then that is really
an attack on the sufficiency of Scripture. because we have
everything that we need to live the Christian life already put
in the Bible. That's why we're big on the Bible. Yeah, this is such an important
topic because I think that this whole mindset is actually, it
has been infiltrating even solid Presbyterian Reformed churches
in recent years, where you'll have elders and pastors being
ordained into the ministry holding a difference with our confessional
standards, or some people refer to it as an exception. Technically,
we ask for a difference to be held and the presbytery or the
governing body grants that difference as an exception, as an allowable
exception. It is not an allowable exception
in my mind with our confessional standards to be cautiously, as
it's often said, cautiously non-cessationistic. That is to say, they believe
that there is still the possibility of these signed gifts being demonstrated. The problem with that, and if
you're facing that at all, it is exactly what these gentlemen
have said. The problem is, is that they think that they are
elevating the signed gifts when in fact they are devaluing the
Word of God. The reason signed gifts exist
in history is because throughout all of history at various redemptive
periods, at those various redemptive epochs, God gave His truth to
be proclaimed to His people through the prophets, through judges,
through the apostles. And to attest to the veracity
or the truthfulness of God's Word through His prophets and
apostles, God testified to their words, their truth, because it's
the Word that is supreme, not the signs and wonders. It's the
Word, the truth that is ultimate. The signs and wonders are secondary.
The signs and wonders are servants to the Word of God proclaimed.
So, to to desire those or to want to see those exhibited. is not a greater experience,
it's a lesser experience. You're going back to the foundation. You're going back to the servant
rather than to the ultimate authority, the Word of God, which all those
signs and wonders were to attest to. That's why they faded away
of themselves as they needed to as the apostolic era came
to an end. So to want them and to desire
them is devaluing the Word of God. LAWSON It's really to go
back to the nursery. It's to go back to the infancy
stage of the church, rather than for the church to mature and
to act like an adult and speak like an adult, like 1 Corinthians
13 says. When I was a child, I spoke like
a child. Well, that's speaking in tongues.
That is prophecies and that kind of thing. That is immature talk. But Paul says, but now we are
to speak as a man, as an adult, and that is to preach the Word
of God, which contains the full counsel of God. To go back to
the sign gifts is really to go, again, back to nursery, the nursery
room, just to go back to the infancy days of the church when
God…it was a very limited means of communication, where now we
have it in objective, written Scripture. that can be studied,
can be parsed, can be exegeted, can be compared. And so, we have
a far, far superior means of revelation in the written Word
of God rather than the dad-dad-mom-mom baby talk of the first century. LARSON Just one more quick point
here, because this is so important in the church today. We're fighting
this and dealing with it still, quite frankly, surprisingly,
but sadly. Do you remember when Jesus…there's
a commendation of those who believed because they saw all these signs
and wonders, but He said, "'Blessed are those who do not see and
believe.'" We are more blessed than the first century Christians.
because we believe without having to see signs and wonders. So, I think this expands beyond
cessationism because I think this touches the issue of just
experience. So, we're talking about signs
and wonders versus the Word. But when you were talking about
Christ and going back to Thomas, I was thinking of Peter, and
he's remembering the transfiguration. And then he says, but we have
the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to
take heed. And I think, what experience
compares with Peter's experiences as a disciple? heard the voice
of God say, this is my beloved Son, and Peter says, that's nothing
compared to having the written Scripture. So, why would we want
some sort of direct experience when we have the gift of God's
Word to us? So, this follows up nicely. How
and when was the canon of Scripture established and by who? So, let's make distinctions. Recognition, establishment. Those
are two different categories, and they distinguish Protestants
from Catholics when it comes to this question. The church
recognizes that which is canonical. The church does not establish
the canon. So when we're talking about the
canon in church history, let's make that distinction. A book
is canonical because it is recognized in the church. for the church's
sake, it is canonical because it is the Word of God and declared
to be the Word of God. When you look at this process
in the New Testament, it's a little bit confusing, and I think there's
two myths out there. One is that as soon as John finished
writing Revelation, whichever the last book of the Bible was
of the New Testament, that as soon as that was finished, a
nicely bound black leather Reformation study Bible dropped right down
out of heaven into every church member's lap. In English. In English. So that's a myth. It didn't happen that way. But
on the other hand, I hear people talk about this and they get
the impression that it was all bets are off and we don't know
what books are canonical and it's three centuries before we
land on this. The truth is that we have the
New Testament reflecting on the canon itself. So Peter references
Paul's epistles as Scripture, as a contemporary writer to Paul. So, the New Testament is already
reflecting on itself as canonical, as Scripture. When we're talking
about…and we need to recognize that in the church. So, in the
church, we have the Gospels, we have the letters of Paul.
That is a huge part of the New Testament, and there is consensus
on that early. I mean, There's consensus on
this in the church and in the bishop's letters. Now, it is
later that we have the canonical list of the 27 books because
there were a few that were challenging, and there were a few that were
on the list that were later recognized to not be there due to our canonical
books. But they're sort of on the margins. So be careful of
falling into this trap of thinking, well, it just plopped down. The
church knew it's 66 books, had a 66-book Bible at 90, 80, And also, it's all bets are off,
and who knows, and it's up for grabs until the 300s. The truth
is more complex than that. But as we look at this, we're
again, let's make the distinction between establishing and recognizing
the canon. And the early 27 list was Athanasius's
paschal letter, so we're in the 300s. We do have lists prior
to that that are mostly the 27 books of the New Testament, but
our good friend Athanasius, who helps us with the Nicene Creed,
helps us with the canon list as well. Yeah, and just to add
to that, the Council of Carthage in 397 actually officially, as
far as a council coming together more than just a letter, here's
that list of the books that they came to agree to, which is the
27 books of our New Testament. In the Reformation Study Bible? Thank you? No, really. Thank you, gentlemen.
Thanks to our teaching fellows for this time. Let's stand and let's sing Amazing
Grace. O come all ye faithful joyful
and triumphant O'er the land of the free and the home of the
brave The mercy seat for heav'nly creatures'
sake. Glory to God in the highest. Please be seated. I think every
Christian has their favorite verse of that hymn. Mine is the
fourth. Everybody have to go look up,
which is the fourth again? Which is that? That's for later tonight. You can look that. So on the
podium was left for me two boxes of chocolate. Do we know why this chocolate
was on the podium? In case I'm hungry, I just sit down here
and snack on this chocolate. This is special chocolate from
Ligonier, Pennsylvania, from Scamps. It's a sweet shop there
in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. So it seems like I should do a tough
trivia question like, you know, what was Dr. Sproul's favorite
football team or something like that. I don't know. I did grow up rooting for the
Steelers as a child. So, yes. In the 70s, it was easy to root
for the Steelers. The jacket and everything. I'm leaving this here. Oh, I
see. In case he gets hungry. Dr. Lawson, some chocolate for
you here. We're so thankful for Dr. Steve Lawson. He has so many
different activities that he does to serve the church in these
United States, but also around the world. He's typically living
on an airplane, save for the past year and a half, which has
curtailed a bit of his travel. But he lives in Dallas, Texas,
and is back and forth from there to Los Angeles, where he works
alongside of Dr. John MacArthur, our good friend
at Grace Community Church. Dr. Lawson is the dean of the
Doctor of Ministry program there and directs that effort at the
Master's Seminary, and is often out there preaching at Grace
Community Church as well. He has his own Bible study for
men that he streams to the world on Thursday mornings, so you
can catch that on social media. Dr. Lawson has a ministry called
One Passion, and they have a lot of different outreaches. They
have a magazine, they have a podcast, but One Passion really exists
to help sharpen the skills of pastors. Dr. Lawson has a tremendous
heart. for pastors today and helping
them to preach with precision and clarity and power, to be
able to handle the Word of God well, to be expositors of God's
Word. And Ligonier is just so pleased
to partner with Dr. Lawson as he conducts seminars
around the country in different cities, and he'll usually have
over 300 men who come together for two, two and a half, sometimes
three days. of just focused study on preaching. And he'll do these midweek sessions
and just pours himself into these men and trying to lift up the
ministry of the Word of God in the local church. Ligonier is
a local church ministry. We exist to support the local
church and the pastors in the church, and pastors really need
encouragement, particularly in these days. Go home on Sunday and tell your
pastor how thankful you are for them and for their ministry. They need this. It has been a
tough year and a half for pastors. So, Dr. Lawson, thank you for
being with us. Would you come and join us? Please
welcome him. LAWSON Thank you, Chris. Well,
thank you for that. Everyone be seated, please. Yeah, I was very conscious of
my time that I have up here, limited time, until we sang 28
verses of Amazing Grace at an incredibly
slow pace. So time is of no matter, obviously,
tonight, the way this has been going. Yeah, I've been told I
preach like I play golf, which is long, to the right, and always
near a hazard. Now, what a joy this is for us
to be together, the fellowship, the mutual encouragement, to
sit under such excellent preaching that we've had already today,
more to come tomorrow, to make new friends in the Lord. If you
come to a Ligonier conference, it's just almost automatic you're
going to be a kindred spirit with whoever else comes because
we're all here for a reason. and it's really the truth of
the Word of God and the Lordship of Christ that has drawn us together. The topic that has been assigned
to me is the necessity of grace. And so, I want you to take your
Bible and turn with me to the book of Ephesians, Ephesians
chapter 2, and this seems to be the right passage for us to
look at tonight. Ephesians chapter 2, And I want
us to look, Lord willing, at verses 1 through 10, and I want
to begin by reading this passage, and I want to set it before your
eyes and before your hearts again, and we'll spend our time working
our way through this very important passage on the necessity of grace. Beginning in verse 1, and this
is God's inspired, inerrant, infallible Word. The Apostle
Paul writes, "'And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
in which you formerly walked according to the course of this
world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the
spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among
them, we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging
the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature
children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in
mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even
when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. by grace you have been saved,
and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly
places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might
show forth the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward
us in Christ Jesus." for by grace you have been saved through faith,
and that not of yourselves." It is the gift of God, not as
a result of works, so that no man can boast. For we are His workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand
so that we would walk them. In these verses, we very clearly
see that we will never know how great God's love and God's grace
is until we know how great our sin is. In other words, we will
never fully grasp the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. until we have come to see the
bad news of our condemnation in sin. The darker the night,
the brighter the light. And the darker we see what we
once were, the more the grace of God will shine brighter than
10,000 suns in the sky above. It is seeing the darkness our
depravity that causes the brightness of the grace of God to shine
forth so brightly. We will never even begin to scratch
the surface of understanding the grace of God until we know
the depravity of our sin. And that is Paul's case that
he is making here. And I just want to lay out basically
the outline that we'll be walking through as we look at these ten
verses. In verses 1 through 3, we will
see what we were. The pit in which we in which we once lived and where
it was that the Lord found us. It's not just that He found us
at a church camp. It's not just that He found us
in a Sunday school room. It's not just that He found us
in a worship service or in your bedroom with your parents reading
Bible stories to you. No, verses 1 through 3 is the
spiritual understanding of where we were when the Lord found us. We were hopeless. We were helpless.
and we were doomed. And then in verses 4 through
6, we will see what God did. As the grace of God and the mercy
of God and the love of God did a dramatic divine intervention
in our life and literally resurrected us from the grave of sin. And
then in verses 7 through 10, third and finally, we will see
why God did it. Why did God intervene in our
lives? So let's walk through this passage
together tonight, and the grace of God is…in fact, the word grace
is mentioned in verse 5, by grace you have been saved. It's mentioned
in verse 7, the surpassing riches of His grace. It's mentioned
in verse 8, by grace you have been saved. So what is grace? I'm sure that all of us here
tonight could define what it is. It is the free gift of God
to those who are so undeserving, those who could not save themselves,
those who could not merit or earn acceptance with a holy God,
those of us who were under the wrath of God. God chose to show
mercy and to show love to those who were so unlovely. And so, let's walk through this
text together tonight. Roman number one, what we were.
We can never understand the full magnitude of God's grace until
we grasp the full depth of the sin in which we once lived. And this is across the board
true for each and every one of us. And I want to give you six
words right now that will line up and help us understand where
we were. And if you're a believer in Christ
tonight, these are your BC days, before Christ. It's true of each
and every one of us. The first word is dead. Paul
writes in verse 1, and you were dead. and your trespasses and
sins. And down through the centuries,
different Bible teachers and theologians have taken different
perspectives of where was it that God found us? And some,
like Pelagius, said, well, we were good, we were well. And then others who are like
semi-Pelagians have said, and Armenians have said, well, we
weren't good, we were just sick. with a little ability in ourselves
to grab hold of and raise ourselves up. And the only other option
is the third, which is we were dead. And when you're dead, you
have no life in you, you had no moral ability, you had no
mind that could think, you had no heart that could desire, you
had no will that could choose. You were dead. And very clearly
here in verse 1, which is kind of like a topic sentence over
a paragraph, and everything else that will follow in verses 2
and 3 really hang under this and more carefully define, we
were dead. If you're dead, you're unresponsive. If you're dead, you have no desire.
If you're dead, you have no ability. That's where we once were. I
remember the day in seminary when my entire theological framework
just came crashing down, the professor throwing one little
pebble into a large window glass, and the whole window was shattered
and came tumbling down with this one question, what can a dead
man do? And at that point, I was right
there in the middle, man's just kind of sick, and it became deathly
silent in class. And I was waiting for one of
my students, fellow students, to answer the question, what
can a dead man do? And from the back row, one student yelled
out, stink. That's all a dead man can do. And that's what we once were.
Even if you grew up in church, even if you had joined a church,
even if you were baptized, whether as an infant or an adult or whatever,
before you became a Christian, no matter who you are, where
you live geographically, you were spiritually dead. You could walk up to a corpse
and put a pin into the foot of the corpse, it's not even You
could play music for the corpse. There is no capacity to respond. You can witness to the corpse.
You could talk to the corpse. You could preach to the corpse.
There is no response whatsoever. And that's your spiritual biography.
And that is mine as well. And Paul says, and you were dead. He's referring to the elect believers. You elect believers. You were
dead in your trespasses and sin. And that little word, in, I-N,
is very important. Large doors swing on small hinges,
and that little small word is very important because it indicates
the realm and the sphere in which we once lived. We lived in a
world of sin, just like a fish lives in water Before our new
birth, we lived in a world of sin. Here, trespasses, which
is a departure from an appointed path, and sins, which is a failure
to hit the mark. Every one of us, we have all
sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So that's the first
word, dead. In fact, that's the only word
we really need. But Paul now builds his case
as a master theologian, and the second word is deviant. He says
in verse 2, in which you formerly walked according to the course
of this world. You were a dead man walking.
You were a spiritual zombie. You were a walking corpse. And
when he says, according to the course of this world, you were
on the broad path headed for destruction, even if you grew
up in Sunday school, before you were converted. And when he says
the world, he's talking about the evil world system with its
godless ideologies, and you were entrapped in the system. When
you were born into this world, you were not born into the kingdom
of God, you were born into the kingdom of this world, and you
were like a dead body floating downstream, going with the flow
of this world. And then the third word is devilish.
He says in the middle of verse 2, according to the prince of
the power of the air. We know who that is. That is
Satan, and there's only two families, only two spiritual families in
the world. There is the family of God, and
there is the family of the devil. And there's not a third or a
fourth family. And when we were born into this
world, we were born into the family of Satan. That is why
you have to be born again in order to enter into the kingdom
of heaven. And the fact that you must be
born again is an indictment of your first birth that you were
born in sin. Psalm 51, David says, in sin
did my mother conceive me. Not that the act of conception
was sinful, but that the sin nature was passed down to you
while you were in your mother's womb. You came into this world
speaking lies, Psalm 58 says. And so not only were you dead,
and not only were you walking according to the course of this
world, you were also a child of the devil. And you were in
the grip of a real devil. as He was snatching God's Word
from your heart whenever it was being sown, perhaps in church,
as He was blinding your eyes, 2 Corinthians 4, 4, so that you
could not see the truth, how it relates to you, and you were
being held captive by the devil to do His will, 2 Timothy 2,
verse 25 and 26. And then to compound it in verse
2 is the word disobedient, deviant, devilish, disobedient. Notice at the end of verse 2,
the Spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Everyone who is unconverted is
a son of disobedience. It's the mark of an unbeliever.
They live a disobedient life to Scripture. And then in verse
5, a fifth word, defiled. He says, among them, meaning
the whole lost world of sinners, he says, among them We, us who
are believers, we were just like them. We were floating down that
same stream of the world, under the control of the devil, spiritually
dead, deviating from God's Word. We were just like them. Now, we may have dressed up a
little bit nicer and been more respectable, but as God sees
it, as God looks into the heart, God sees exactly the same even
in the elect before they were converted, as in the others who
were unsaved. He says, among them, we, the
elect, all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh. Our sinful appetites were unrestrained. Strong desires overpowered us,
and flaming passions for sin and cravings for that which God
forbid. He says, indulging the desires
of the flesh and of the mind. Even our minds were incapable
of thinking correctly about who I am and my need for grace. And so, this leads to the final
word I want to give you. It's the word At the end of verse
3, he says, and were by nature. We, the elect of God, were by
nature, meaning in the very fabric of our nature, children of wrath,
and that's a euphemism, a Hebraism for children deserving wrath. We were sons of disobedience.
We were children under the wrath of God. Romans 1 verse 18 clearly
states, for the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men. And that's right where we once
were. We were no better than anyone
else in the world. We were just as doomed, just
as dead, just as deviant, just as devilish, just as disobedient. We just may have dressed up and
looked a little bit nicer on the outside, but as God looks
upon the heart, there was no difference. Dead is dead. It doesn't matter if you've been
dead for a day, for two days, for a year. Dead is dead. And so, that's where we were. That's the truth. That is the
pit from which God rescued you. That is the fire from which you
and I were snatched. It's worse than we probably thought
it to be. And our outward lifestyle may
have been somewhat more respectable than when compared to others,
but in God's eyes, as we were weighed in the balances, there
was no difference whatsoever. We were drowning in the same
ocean of sin, sinking in the same quagmire of transgressions,
buried in the same grave of sin. you were going to hell, and I
was going to hell, and we were strutting there like
a peacock on our merry little way to damnation." That's the
truth of the Bible. And when the doctor comes into
your hospital room and gives you the report, has to tell it
to you straight. You have pancreatic cancer. You've got to know how bad it
is to have any hope whatsoever of survival. And this is how
bad it was for you and for me. Now, praise the Lord, it doesn't
stop at verse 3. or we would all just be without
hope. So I want you to note, beginning
in verse 4, what God did. Because what God did is almost
unimaginable. Verse 4 begins, "'But God.'"
And I love what Martin Lloyd-Jones said, "'Praise God for the buts
in the Bible.'" Praise God for that negative
conjunction that turns it in the other direction. Lloyd-Jones
says these two words, but God, in a sense contains the whole
of the gospel. Here is the entire forest in
one nutshell. But God. And please note, it's
not but God and me, not but God and you, but God and us, but
God and the church, but God and this, but God and that. No, it's
but God and God alone. That's how bad it was. Only God
could have rescued us. And since being rich in mercy,
Incomprehensibly wealthy in mercy is God, possessing vast fortunes
of mercy, limitless storehouses of mercy, possessing oceans of
mercy, galaxies of mercy. Mercy is that God felt pity on those who were in such dire
need. And in Romans 9, God says, I
will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. And I will have compassion
upon whom I will have compassion. And it is the mercy of God moved
within Himself toward spiritual corpses who had no hope whatsoever
of ever resurrecting themselves out of this grave, God was moved
with mercy. And then He says, because of
His great love with which He loved us, not just love, but
incalculable love, incomprehensible love. Love that is not based
upon the merit of the one loved. It is God loving us, not because
of us, it is God loving us in spite of us. It is a love that
originates within God Himself. Who is it that God has loved?
It is those who are dead and devilish and disobedient and
defiant, that that's who God chose to love. He says even when we were dead
in our transgressions in verse 5, which reinforces, by the way,
verse 1, just so that that truth will not escape us. He repeats
it now in verse 5 that we would have that really drilled within
us that we had nothing but the stench of sin in us. And notice what God did. The
two key words, and I hope you've got enough light out there to
see in your Bible. Three times in verses 5 and 6,
He says, with Him, with Him, with Christ. We've been raised
with Christ. We have been raised with Christ, seated with
Christ, made alive with Christ in verse 5. The whole key is
with Christ. This is what God has done. God
has done it with Christ. And this is the doctrine of union
with Christ, that all grace has come into
our life through the person and work of Christ. He is the sole
mediator of saving grace. There is not one drop of grace
outside of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is only condemnation and
wrath, justly so, outside of Christ, but in Christ, because
of His sinless life and substitutionary death, we have grace. So, he says three things here
that we have been made alive with Christ, we have been raised
up with Christ, we have been seated with Christ, and all three
of those are very important. And what they do is they parallel
the resurrection of Christ, the ascension of Christ, and the
enthronement of Christ. Those three, all three of those.
That's what has happened to us. And we've done nothing. God in
Christ has done everything. So it begins in the middle of
verse 5 with this spiritual resurrection. He says, he made us alive together
with Christ. And Paul here probably is coining
a new word that has never been used in the Greek language before. It's what we call a compound
word. There are three words joined together to make one word, and
where it says, made alive together with, it's just one word in the
original Greek language. It takes five words to translate
it into English And what it is, is that as Christ was raised
out of the grave because of what He has done for us, and because
we are in Christ, we have been made alive with Christ and raised
out of the grave of sin with Christ. It's a spiritual resurrection. You were spiritually dead, and
now God in Christ has made you alive. unbelievable. And think of it this way, justification
simply changes your status. It doesn't change you, it just
changes your status. You're standing before God, no
longer condemned, now accepted by God, clothed with the righteousness
of Jesus Christ. It doesn't do anything to you
personally, it just changes your status. You got out of this line,
God has now put you in this line, and you have favor with God.
But this truth right here is really the doctrine of regeneration. It is the doctrine of the new
birth, which actually changes you from the inside out. You become a new creature in
Christ. The old things passed away. Behold,
new things have come. It is the life of God in the
soul of a man. And it is as if you have been
just in a coma. You've been dead, and in a moment,
and this takes place in the twinkling of an eye, you suddenly were
made alive. as if a lightning bolt of grace
just struck your heart coming out of heaven, and you suddenly
sat up and you were alive in Christ, and you were made alive
with Christ. Just like when Jesus stood before
the tomb of Lazarus, whose body was dead, and Jesus said, Lazarus,
come forth. And in that moment, life surged
through the corpse of His dead body. That is exactly what happened
in your life, and it happened in a moment. On the day of Pentecost,
three thousand souls were made alive in Christ. It wasn't the month of Pentecost,
it wasn't the year of Pentecost, it wasn't the decade of Pentecost,
it was the day of Pentecost. And at the end of Acts chapter
2, it says, and day by day the Lord was adding to their number
those who were being saved. Some were being made alive on
Monday, some were being made alive on Tuesday, some were being
made alive on Wednesday, but there is a point in time on the
timeline of your life when you suddenly came alive with Christ. And the life of God and the life
of Christ suddenly filled you. And he says at the end of verse
5, by grace you have been saved. It's all of God and all of grace. We have been saved from God,
by God, for God. And then in verse 6, a spiritual
ascension. This is very important. I want
you to see this. In verse 6, and raised us up
with Him. Do you see that? It's another
compound word, two Greek words merged together to form this
one word, raised up with Him. It's just one word in the original
Greek when Paul wrote this. And it is not speaking of the
resurrection of Christ, nor our spiritual resurrection. It is
referring to the ascension of Christ. After the resurrection,
the ascension, and what happened at the ascension, Christ was
lifted up out of this world in a resurrected, glorified body,
no longer in this world. now lifted up and ascended to
heaven, and now seated at the right hand of the Majesty on
high, no longer in this world, now in a resurrection body in
heaven. And what this means for you and
me is that as we have been resurrected with Christ, we, by grace, we
have been raised up in the sense of ascending with Christ. We are no longer a part of this
world. We are in the world, but we are
not of the world. And we are no longer walking
according to the course of this world because we're no longer
of this world. In fact, we are strangers and
aliens in this world. And our citizenship is in heaven.
from which we eagerly await a Savior," Philippians 3, 20 and 21. So because of Christ, we've been
made alive, and because of Christ and God's grace, we're no longer
a part of the system over which Satan presides. We now belong
to a whole different world. And that world is mentioned here,
referred to at the end of verse 6 as the heavenly places of Christ
Jesus. It's the realm of grace. It is the realm of salvation. It is the realm in which God
bestows the fullness of His mercy. earlier in chapter 1 verse 3,
Paul wrote, "'Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the
heavenly places in Christ.'" All of those blessings are in
heavenly places, referring to the kingdom of God. And so, not
only have we been made alive, we could have been made alive
and just left a part of the world system, but no, not only we've
been made alive and now we've been taken out of the world,
though we bodily live in the world, we have entered into a new realm,
the heavenly places already. And we live in the kingdom of
God. But more than that, please look
at the end of verse 6, he says, and seated us with Him. Another compound word, seated
us with, one word, and Paul just packs it all together And Jesus,
after His resurrection, after His ascension up into heaven,
He is now seated at the right hand of God the Father, the place
of highest authority in the universe, and all authority in heaven and
earth has been entrusted to Him, and He is now co-equal with the
Father in heaven, and we now are seated with Him in heavenly
places. So what does that mean? doesn't mean that we've become
little gods or that we're sovereign or anything like that. What it
means is for us to be seated with Christ at the right hand
of the Father means we now know the Father. We now have a personal
relationship with the Father that we never had before. We
now have an intimate relationship with the Father by which we can
come before the throne of grace, the Spirit of God crying out,
Abba, Father, within us, we now know God because we are now seated
with Christ right next to God. with access to know the Father. This is what God did in your
life. It was big. It couldn't have been any bigger. Never did anyone start out so
low and end up so high. You have gone from the grave
of sin to the right hand of the Father. That is amazing grace. And you don't deserve it. And
I don't deserve it. Now third and finally, why? Why
did God do it? Was it because God was lonely? He could have done a lot better
than us. Well, Paul tells us why God did
this, and there are two words that are mentioned three times.
So that, so that, so that. It's in verse 7, verse 9, verse
10. I hope you can see that. So Paul
tells us why God did not leave us in the grave of sin, which
would have been right and just, and why God raised us up and
seated us with Christ in heavenly places. Why? look at verse 7. He tells us why. So that, that
means in order that. It denotes purpose or an end
or an aim. So that in the ages to come,
meaning throughout all eternity future, world without end, He,
God the Father, might show, the idea is to showcase, like you
would put a trophy on a shelf and just showcase your trophy
so that He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness
toward us in Christ Jesus. Here's reason number one. God
did this because it magnifies His grace. If God had simply
saved good people, people who were just a little bit better
than other people, then what God did, His grace would be very
minimal. But for God to reach all the
way to the bottom of the barrel, for God to reach all the way
down to the depths of the grave, to a rotten, stinking corpse
that had the stench of hell upon and for God to raise up such
a corpse and seat that corpse next to Him with the Son in heaven,
that is mind-boggling grace. That is unimaginable grace. Listen, if you elevate man and
if you lower God, grace is just a step away, man to God. But if you have man down here
where Paul says he is in verses 1 through 3, and you have God
way up there, holy God, then the grace that it took to span
from the grave to the throne is so great that someone like
John Newton, when he wrote his hymn, it's amazing. It is bewildering. It is astonishing
grace. And that is why we'll never know
how great His grace is until we know how wicked our sin once
was. And I want to tell you, every
time you come to the Lord's table, You need to remember the prison
house in which you once lived. You need to remember the grave
from which you were dredged up and made alive by God. Then verse 8, we all know verse
8, "'For by grace you have been saved through faith and out of
yourselves,' etc. This leads us really to the next
reason. Not only does all of this that
we've been talking about in verses 1 through 6, not only does it
magnify grace, but it humbles man. We had nothing to do with
it. We're just along for the ride.
Verse 8 begins with the word for, which introduces an explanation
of the previous argument. So he's just expanding his argument.
By the way, for, F-O-R, is probably Paul's favorite word. As you
read epistles, just keep your eye out for how many verses begin
with the word for. It just introduces an explanation
of the previous sentence. for by grace," listen, electing
grace, predestinating grace, redeeming grace, reconciling
grace, forgiving grace, justifying grace, regenerating grace, sanctifying
grace, preserving grace, glorifying grace, for by grace you have
been saved. The word saved means to be rescued
from ruin. It means to be delivered from
destruction. for by grace you have been saved through faith."
That's the instrumental cause. And that, not of yourselves.
And the question is, what's not of ourselves? Well, the grace
was not of ourselves, and the faith was not of ourselves. it
is the gift of God at the end of verse 8. That refers to the
entirety of what preceded in the verse. Both the grace and
the faith is the gift of God. And if you want to be technical
about it, the antecedent is the closest to the gift of God or
the word it. It would be faith. It would be
even the faith is the gift of God before it would even be the
grace. But it's both. Now look at verse 9, not as a
result of works, so that," here's the second so that, no one may
boast. Couldn't be more obvious. If
God saved good people, then it's a joint venture, us and God.
Look what we did. But if God is raising spiritual
corpses from the grave of sin, then no man can boast. You and I have absolutely nothing
with which to boast. We were no better than anyone
else. We were just as dead as the reprobate. And now, here's
the final, so that's in verse 10, and it is, not only does
it magnify God, it humbles man, and it fulfills God's purposes. He says in verse 10, for we are
His workmanship. The word workmanship there, poema,
is an interesting word. You can almost hear poem. We
are His poema. The idea is we are His masterpiece.
We are His showpiece. with which He has crowned us
with His grace. And we are His supreme work. We are His workmanship created
in Christ Jesus, and that is the idea of the new birth, the
doctrine of regeneration. We have been made a new creature
in Christ. And now He says, Why have we
been so created? And he says, for good works. So please understand this. We
are saved by grace, through faith, in Christ, for good works. There's a purpose for which God
has saved you, and it is to put you into His employment, to be
His servant, to carry out His eternal purpose and plan so that
you can be a part of how God is working in the world. That's
why He saved you. Sure, He saved you to get you
out of hell and to get you into heaven, but that's in a sense
somewhat secondary. He has saved you to magnify His
grace. He has saved you to humble man. He has saved you so that you
can be a part of carrying out what God has predetermined from
before the foundation of the world. And so He says at the
end of verse 10, so that we may walk in them. So, that gives us this third
reason. So, what should this produce
in us? When we get up here in a little bit and you go back
to your hotel room, well, what's the point? What's the application?
What are you supposed to do with this? Well, number one, humility. How could we ever become puffed
up with ourselves knowing this? God is opposed to the proud.
He gives grace to the humble, 1 Peter 5, 5. And those who exalt themselves
will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted
What we have just looked at here, when you put your head on your
pillow tonight in your hotel room, you have every reason to
go to sleep tonight dressed in humility, lowliness of mind. The second is holiness. You once walked according to
the course of this world. You have been raised up now and
put into heavenly places. How can we ever succumb to the
lures of the world and want to go back from that pit from which
we have been raised?" And then the last would be honor, to give
God the honor, to give God the glory for what He has done in
our lives. There's no reason in us for what
God has done. It has all originated in God
Himself, because He said, I'll have mercy upon whom I will have
mercy. I will have compassion upon whom
I will have compassion. And God has done this to display what a gracious God
He is. May tonight you and I be once
again intoxicated with the grace of God, overwhelmed with His
grace. Let us close in prayer. Father, we see the necessity
of grace. Oh, do we ever see it. You have
made it loud and clear. and we must lower ourselves beneath
your mighty right hand and look up and give you the honor and
give you the glory for this so great salvation. We praise you for what you've
done in Christ, in His name, amen.