I invite you this morning to
turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 1. I'm thankful that your pastor invited
me, that God's providence made it
possible, and that you have made some effort to come here this
morning and gather together to hear me. I'm thankful for that. And I'm thankful that this is
where I want to be. Do you ever think about that?
I'm thankful that this is where I want to be. Gathered here today with God's
people to hear about His Son, hopefully being able to worship
Him who is worthy of all worship. In times past I have, as perhaps
some of you have, gathered together with this world in their ignorant
superstitious forms of worship and in a pretense pretended to
worship a God I didn't know. I've been there. And I've done
that. The woman at the well did that,
and she didn't realize it. The Lord was talking to her,
and in the conversation she said, well, we worship God in these
mountains, and you worship God in Jerusalem. He said, you don't
know what you worship. You worship you know not what.
And that's where I was at. And I always just assumed that
I was too ignorant to understand what they were saying. It was
just over my head, and eventually I would understand it if I kept
listening. But I kept listening, and it really didn't make sense.
If you followed any of it out for any distance, it just fell
off the end of the world. It just didn't make sense. Didn't make sense at all. In one form or another, we'd
gather together and we'd celebrate our free will, we thought we
had. Glad God allowed me to make this
decision, you know, my will is free. And we'd glory in our decisions
and then we'd brag a little bit if we'd done any, what we thought
was good works. We'd sing about heaven as if
we were already there and had the deed for it in our hand.
Didn't understand what heaven was, what might take place in
heaven if we did go there. Heaven was just whatever it meant
to you. You know, that was heaven. If
it was to see your loved ones, then that's what heaven was.
If it was to live forever, then that's what heaven was. Heaven
had nothing to do with the glory of God. It had nothing to do
with the glory of His Son or the salvation of His elect or
the wonders of His grace. It just had to do with whatever
appealed to us. And so we gather together and
we do those things. But God in His great mercy and
grace saw fit to intervene in my life. Otherwise, I'd still
be there. I'd still be playing my guitar
and still be singing church to church and still be giving out
a false witness about God. Telling folks how much God had
done for me when He hadn't done anything. God in His mercy and grace saw
fit to intervene. If you read carefully Ephesians
chapter 2, that's exactly what Paul reminds these Gentiles of.
You, Hathy Quicken, who were dead in trespasses and sins,
wherein in time past you walked according to the course of this
world. You walked the same path that the whole world walks, in
one form or another. That's the path we were on. That's
the direction we were going. You walked according to the course
of this world, and you walked according to the Prince of the
power of the air. The spirit that now worketh in
the children of disobedience. And in time past, we did everything
we did according to the lust of the flesh, fulfilling the
desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the
children of wrath, just like everybody else. But God. Ain't you thankful? I love when
he puts that B-U-T in there. But God. Who is rich in mercy,
and for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were
dead in trespasses and sin. You think about that. Even when
we were dead in trespasses and sin. He loved us and He chose
us and He put us in His Son and He buried us in His Son. and
He raised us from the dead in His Son, and He elevated us. When He stepped on that cloud
and ascended up to glory, I ascended up with Him, and now I'm sitting,
sitting with Him in glory. God saw fit to intervene in my
life. He saw fit to put a stop to it. Enough, He said, enough! And he sent me a preacher, and
that man was chosen of God and taught of God, Brother Mahan.
And he told me the truth. He told me the truth. He sent
me a man who cared not about the applause of this world. He
could care less about it, whether they were happy to hear him or
not. He didn't care about this world.
He cared about lost sinners. He cared about the glory of God
and He told me the truth. That man was a servant of God.
He was taught of God and sinned of God with the gospel of God. His preaching was accompanied
by the Holy Spirit of God and it was effectual not just in
my heart but in the hearts of hundreds. And his preaching did what God
said it would do. It did what God said it would
do. That's one of the things I used to wonder about in religion.
All these people were talking about these things. I hadn't
experienced any of them things. That man's preaching didn't do
to me what they said it did to them. The Holy Spirit of God enlightened
me through this man's preaching. He enlightened me. He showed
me things I'd never seen. He told me things I'd never heard.
And I saw them in the Word of God. I saw them as God used these
men to write these things. And I'll tell you something.
The worship and superstitious beliefs of this world make me
nauseous. I used to pretend to joy in them.
I could sing and smile, sometimes even cry thinking about all these
experiences and feelings and things that I felt. What happened? Well, I'll tell
you what happened. God found me a stranger. That's
what I was, a stranger. a Gentile dog, and he made me
an heir of his mercy and grace. He gave me who had no hope, no
hope, a good hope through grace. That's what God did for me, and
that's what Peter's writing about here in this first chapter. He's
writing to strangers. The strangers. And that's my
message to you this morning. Hope for the hopeless. That's
my experience. They tell me history is his story. That's what it is. His story.
And all those who come to know his story come to know their
own. They come to know their own.
And there's hope. for the hopeless. My text here
in 1 Peter 1 verse 13 says, Wherefore, gird up the loins of your mind,
and be sober, that is, be alert, and hope to the end for the grace
that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Now the whole first part of this
chapter is being summed up in the second half of it. In the
second half of it, he talks about this hope and he talks about
being born of God. He goes on in chapter 2 to tell
them, if so be you tasted that the Lord is gracious. And he
goes on to tell them that God called them out of darkness into
His marvelous light. And those who were not a people,
He made a people. He made the people of God. Now
I want to go through here this morning and give you just a few
things to think about that I think will be sufficient to raise up
our hearts and minds to worship our Redeemer. And the first thing
I've already mentioned to you is the fact that He's writing
to strangers. Strangers. And I thought, well,
you know, Peter was primarily a preacher or an apostle to the
Jews. And he mostly stayed right there
in Jerusalem and preached to those Jews who were there. And
occasionally he would go out to these other churches and preach
like he did down to the church at Galatia. And I thought, well, these are
just people he hadn't met, and that's why he called them strangers. And I never sought that out any
further than that. But did you know that the Jewish
understanding or use of the word stranger was specific. It had to do with Gentiles. They were the strangers. Anybody
that was a Jew was not a stranger. They were circumcised. They were
under the covenant. They were Jews. They were the
children of God. They were the elect of God. But
when somebody else came in, like the Gentiles, they were called
strangers. Strangers. And over and over
and over that word, if you have a concordance at home, look up
that word stranger and go back and look at the provision that
God made for strangers in His law. And even to us, He tells
us, be careful how you entertain who? Strangers. Because some
have entertained angels unaware. They appear to strangers. Strangers. Strangers, it's a word often
used by the Jews to describe anybody who was not a Jew. Paul
wrote to the church at Ephesus and he told them to remember
where God found them. He said, you remember who you
are and where God found you. He said, at that time, at that
time, you were without Christ. Oh, now wait a minute. Wait a
minute. We celebrated, we mentioned,
and they preached and used the word Jesus Christ. Yeah, but
they didn't have a clue who he was, did they? Mexico's full
of men down there called Jesus, after Jesus. Jesus is everywhere. Paul warned
his people, you beware because they're going to come preaching
another Jesus. Another Jesus, not the one of
Scripture, not the Christ. And Christ is the office to which
Jesus was born and appointed. He's the Christ. All the promises
of God are tied up in Christ, in the Christ. He just over and
over talks about this coming Messiah, this coming Redeemer.
He's the Christ. He's the promised one. All the
hope, all the covenants, everything, it's all pinned to Him. He's
coming. He's coming. And that Jewish
Sanhedrin, their whole job was to look for the Christ. And they
came out and were just really upset at Jesus. And they said,
if thou be the Christ, tell us plainly. He said, I told you,
plainly. But you believe not, because
you're not my sheep. As I said unto you, my sheep
hear my voice. Strangers. He said you were without
Christ. You had no promise of Him. All
the promises of God, of the Christ, had to do with Israel. Gentiles had no tie-in except
they'd be circumcised. They had no tie-in whatsoever
with that promise. At that time you were without
Christ. You weren't looking to Him. You had no promise of Him.
You had no hope in Him. Because you were aliens from
the commonwealth of Israel. We're talking about strangers.
People who didn't know any difference. People who were raised worshipping
idols. No ties to God or His promises. No ties to His election. And they were strangers from
the covenants of promise. I went to church all my life
and nobody ever told me that our God was a covenant God. and
that His salvation is all together tied up in a covenant. Everything
He does for us is by way of covenant. We're His covenant people. David's last words. This is the
sweet psalmist of Israel. This is the writer of the Psalms.
The man after God's own heart. And these are his last words.
Although it be not so with my house, yet God hath made with
me an everlasting covenant. Ordered in all things and sure,
and this is all my salvation and all my desire, whether He
makes it to grow or not. You think about that covenant,
covenant, covenant. That's all you read in here.
His blood is the blood of the everlasting covenant. Nobody
even mentioned that to me. Our God is a covenant God. He
made provision for me through a covenant, and He appointed
His Son as surety over that covenant. There was nothing for the stranger,
nothing in his religion but ignorant imaginations. He was deceived. And he had deceived assumptions
and superstitious feelings and all these kinds of things, but
he had no Christ. He had no hope. He had to have
visual aids to enable him to worship. He had to have them
crosses. He had to have them candles. He had to have the echo
in the room. He had to have all of those things
to raise his feelings up and make him believe that he was
worshiping God. Candlelight to set the mood.
And then Paul says, you had no hope. That's where God found
you. You didn't have any hope. You
thought you had hope. But your hope was a hope, a hope,
a hope. I hope it don't rain tomorrow. No basis for your hope. That's
what he's telling you. You had no hope. Oh, listen. Without God. Without God. without any understanding
of who He is. Paul said, how are you going
to call on Him in whom you have not believed? And how are you
going to believe in Him of whom you have not heard? It's an impossibility. You was without God, and on top
of that, in the world. What world? This present evil
world. But God made provision for the
stranger. Did you know of the most holy
of the feast, the Passover? If you read the giving of that
law, it makes provision for the stranger. He said if they'll
do this, then they can partake of the feast. One law for the
stranger, and one law for the home born. I don't know what else to tell
folks. Men and women are sinners. You have to stop there. They
don't know that. They know that they haven't always
done right. They know that they've made some
mistakes. They know that they've come to a fork in the road and
took the wrong fork. People know that. They have a
conscience. They understand that. They know
that. But they don't know they're sinners.
They don't know they're born in sin. They don't know that
they're living out their days under the curse of God. We're
by nature the children of wrath, even as others. They don't know
that. Religion don't tell them that.
They tell them what they could be because they see in them some
kind of potential. If there was any potential in
man or in the world or in any group of men, it would have been
no use for Christ to become a man, to take to Himself our flesh
and bones, to come here as our representative and substitute.
There would have been no reason for it if there was any potential
in man. The disciples brought the rich
young ruler. That was the best candidate they
could find. They were still thinking the
way they used to think, you know. And they brought this man and
they knew he was good and honorable and respectable and successful. And they brought him to Christ
and he went away with his tail tucked between his legs. And
they looked at each other and they said, who then can be saved? And our Lord knew their thoughts.
And he looked at him and he said, with man, it's what? Not likely? It's impossible. It's impossible. Men don't know
this. They don't know they're strangers. They've been told
from the time they were this big, all you got to do is choose
Him. All you have to do is accept Him as your personal Savior.
All you have to do is walk down that aisle and pray the sinner's
prayer and walk down the Roman road and on and on and on it
goes. Be catechized and be baptized
as a baby and dedicated and rededicated and all this kind of nonsense. They don't know they're strangers.
They don't know they're sinners. God found me and made me to know
my sin. That's what I was, a sinner.
And the more I knew about it, the less possibility I could
see of God ever having mercy on me. Why would He have mercy
on me? I've done nothing all my life
but transgress His law. I didn't love Him. I didn't love
my neighbors. I loved myself. I didn't love
my parents the way He commands us to. There's no potential in
man. Christ was made of a woman. Listen
to this. Made under the law. Made a servant
to the law. Why? To redeem them that were
under the law. Why? Why would He redeem them? That they might receive the adoption.
What adoption? Having predestinated us unto
the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself according to
the good pleasure of His will. Paul said if righteousness comes
by the law, Christ is dead and buried. Everything Christ did
was in vain if man has any potential in him to do anything. You take the first step and he'll
take the rest. You can't take the first step. I lived right beside a cemetery
when I pastored down in Bowell years ago. None of them ever
took the first step. They just laid right there where
they were put. And neither will man. God has to not only take
the first step, but He has to keep on walking. Walking. As you have received Christ Jesus,
the Lord so walk ye in Him. How'd you receive? As all. All. He's my life, He's my righteousness,
He's my atonement, He's everything. Then walk that way. Because you
can't walk any other way. His death was not the death of
a martyr, but the death of a substitute. His coming into the world was
a coming divinely appointed. And He came as our representative.
And all of our hopes are pinned to Him. We have nothing apart
from Christ. Nothing. And that's not what's
being preached today. Not at all. Being religious don't make us
a candidate for mercy, but we've been told it does. Walking down an aisle accepting
Jesus and all these things is not the equivalent of salvation. Alright, so how does a person
know that they have a part in this glorious work? Here are
these strangers and Peter is writing to them and he is going
to tell them about a good hope through grace. He is going to
tell them to gird up their minds now, understanding these things
that he just said. Now you gird up your mind and
you hope to the end for the grace that is going to come on to you
at the revelation of Jesus Christ. So how does a man know that?
How does these strangers know that they have a part? A part in this glorious work.
Well, he tells them in verse 2. Look here in 1 Peter 1 verse
2. He said, You are elect according
to the foreknowledge of God. I don't know about you, but I'm
getting tired of people telling me how they got saved. Don't
that kind of ruffles your feathers a little bit? I got saved. I
used to say that. I used to tell people that. You
can't get saved. God has to save you. He has to
save you. And He don't try to save, He
saves. Well, the Lord was working with
me, but it didn't work out. No, He wasn't working with me.
He works with you to work out. Isn't that what it says? Sure it does. Or in Philippians,
Paul said, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,
for it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to do of
his good pleasure. If he begins work, he'll finish
it. That's what he told. That's how you know if God's
working in you. But here he tells us we're let
according to the full knowledge of God. We're chosen by His grace. chosen from all eternity, chosen
in His Son, chosen for His glory. He wrote to the Ephesian church
and He said, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, now listen, who have blessed us with all spiritual
blessings in heavenly places in Christ. In Christ. He put the whole world in Christ,
no? And just in case you run that
direction, He gives the next verse, according as He hath chosen
us in Him before the foundation of the world. You cannot be blessed or even
hope to be blessed outside of Christ or apart from Christ.
There's no blessing out there. If God purposed and gave all
the blessings from the foundation of the world, if He purposed
and gave all those blessings in Christ, then why do people
talk about being blessed outside of Christ? There's no possibility of that,
since in Him is where all the blessings are. What blessings? All blessings. All blessings. But these in particular, this
kind of sums up the whole. He said, according as He hath
chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should
be holy. Now I know people interpret that word the same way they do
righteousness, but holiness and righteousness is not the same
thing. The nearest definition I could give you to holiness
And holiness for a large part is still a mystery to me, but
what I know about holiness has to do with the wholeness of God. The wholeness of God. He's chosen
us in Christ that nothing in His character should be compromised. You see what he's saying? That
you should be holy. You should be holy. You're going
to have a righteousness. And that righteousness is going
to be equal to His. You're going to have a holiness. No compromise in your salvation. None whatsoever. God doesn't
overlook sin. He punished that sin in His Son.
He's not going to accept the best you can do. He accepts a
perfect obedience in His Son. That's the only righteousness
there is. All of our righteousnesses, the
best we can do, is filthy rags. Actually, the Scripture said
man at his best takes all together vanity. We cannot be blessed or even
hope to be blessed outside of Christ or apart from Christ.
Well, how does a man get in Christ? 1 Corinthians 1.30 tells you.
But of Him are you in Christ Jesus. That's the only way you
can get in. God put you in. He chose you
in Him. He predestinated us to the adoption
of children through Him. He blessed us in Him. How do
you get in Him? God put you in Him. When did
He do that? The beginning before the beginning.
From all eternity. Of Him are you in Christ Jesus,
who of God is made unto us. Who's us? That's those that He
put in Christ. Wisdom, righteousness, sanctification,
and redemption. All in Him. All blessings. But these in particular, that
they should be holy, that they should be without blame and be
before Him being loved. That's what that verse is talking
about. Being out there, there's never a time that He views you
in Christ without full love. Even when you're dead in trespasses
and sin. But God who's rich in mercy and
for that great love wherewith he loved us. You mean he never
stopped loving us after the fall? Never. Never. Never. And he never going to. That's why he chose us and put
us in Christ. We'll always be before him in
love, having predestinated us. made us accepted in the blood,
redeemed us, put away our sins. If God had not made provision
for us in His Son, He would have wiped out all mankind when the
thought of sin arose in Adam's mind. We are elect according to the
foreknowledge of God the Father. Alright, does that mean that
God looked down through the telescope of time and saw who would and
wouldn't choose Him, who would and wouldn't accept Him and all
that? No, that's not what that means. What God foreknows, God
ordains. And I don't have time this morning.
If I did, I could show you in your concordance. You can go
back and forth between Romans 8 and 1 Peter 1, and you'll see
that word. It's the exact same word, and
it's interpreted one time as foreknowledge and one time as
foreordination. On down here in chapter 1 where
he said, We weren't redeemed with corruptible things like
silver and gold, but with the precious blood of the Lamb, who
barely was foreordained before the foundation of the world.
That's the same word that he uses for foreknowledge in Romans
chapter 8. Very same word. He said, I'm God. I declare the
end from the beginning. From ancient times, the things
that are not yet done, saying my counsel shall stand and I'll
do all my pleasure. What God ordains, he foreknows
because he's God. There's nothing in between that's
going to keep him from doing what he purposes to do. That
makes a difference, I'm telling you. It makes a difference in
your understanding. God doesn't look down through
the telescope of time to see who would and wouldn't choose
Him. That'd still be works, wouldn't it? That'd just be future works
instead of past work. He's the source of all things.
There's nothing to see in the future that God has not ordained.
He's the source. What God foreknows, He foreordains. Listen to this over in Romans
chapter eight. He said, whom He did foreknow,
them He also did predestinate. Huh? What did He know? He know
what He predestinated. That's what He knows. God declares the end from the
beginning. All right, secondly, all these
elect, he said, how do we know we're elect? Okay, preacher, I see that. I
see where God blessed all of His elect. But isn't that just
talking about the Jews? If He's talking about the Gentiles,
how on earth do we know if we're elect? Instead of being miserable
with something else, now I'm going to be in misery over that.
Am I His elect or not? Well, he says all his elect are
going to be manifested through sanctification of the Spirit,
unto obedience, and the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. That's what he says here in 1
Peter 1. We're elect according to the foreknowledge of God,
through sanctification of spirit, and basically what he tells us
in 2 Thessalonians 2.13, it's sanctification of spirit and
belief in the truth. That sprinkling of the blood
has to do with the understanding of what that blood is, and the
Holy Spirit taking that blood and applying it to your heart
instead of trying, through your imagination, for you to try to
apply something else to it. My good works, my prayers, my
this, my decisions, No, the Holy Spirit takes that blood of Christ
and shows you what it is and what it means, and then He sprinkles
it. He sprinkles it on you. And that's
what Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 13. God hath chosen you
from the beginning to salvation through sanctification of spirit
and belief of the truth, whereunto He called you by our gospel. Belief of the truth is a hard
understanding of the death of Christ and His sufficiency to
put away our sins. In Romans chapter 3, beginning
with verse 24 and concluding verse 25, He tells us, being
justified freely by His grace through the redemption that's
in Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth to be the propitiation
for our sins, now listen, through faith in His blood. That is,
we understand about that blood and we understand its sufficiency.
We understand who died and why he died. And that God raised
him from the dead and declared his acceptance of that blood.
With his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us. That blood was pictured in Egypt
when God's elect sprinkled the blood on the doorpost and the
lentils, believing that God, the wrath of God, that He was
coming in to destroy all the firstborn. But those who had
the blood on the lentil on the doorpost, He said, I'll pass
over you. I'll pass over you. Elections
manifested by faith, which is the gift of God. It's given of
God. You can't just believe. You can't
just, I'm going to believe. No, don't work that way. Don't
work that way. You know, it's a funny thing.
One day a man don't believe, and then he hears something,
and the next day he believes. Isn't that something? He can
conjure that up. God gave it to him. God gave
it to him. Some of you have given me gifts
since I've been here. You gave me a gift. There's no
way I could get it apart from you giving it to me. And he said,
by grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves,
it is the gift of God. That doesn't exclude your repentance,
it doesn't exclude your understanding, it doesn't exclude your hearing.
He's just simply telling you that you've done all of these
things because God gave you the ability to do it. 1 Peter 1.3 According to His abundant
mercy, He said, He hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by
the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is a living hope. We trust
a living Savior. I don't know if people run around
wearing these crosses and things. Here in the tomb, He's seated
at the right hand of God. He's alive. I've had so many over the years
try to go back to the beginning and try to find hope in those
old experiences. Brethren, it's not my resurrection
from the dead that gives me any hope. It's His resurrection from
the dead. My resurrection from the dead
was to be able to see His resurrection and what it meant. We have a lively hope, a living
hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And my hope is just as it was
appointed to me in the beginning. It's in my representative. It's
all in him. I have hope because God raised
up my representative from the dead and seated him at his own
right hand. delivered for our offenses and
raised again for our justification. And listen to this, here's what
he said in Romans 8. He went through all these things
and then he comes down to the end and he said, listen to this,
he said, Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?
It's God that justifies. Justified who? His elect. Who is He that condemneth? If Christ had died, died for
whom? His elect. Yea rather, he said. He's not in the tomb anymore,
he's risen. And he's seated at the right
hand of God and he makes intercession for us. His very presence at
the right hand of God makes intercession for us. My hope's in a risen, active,
seated representative who arranges his providence and orders all
things. He told his apostles before he
sent them out to preach over there in Matthew, he said, all
power in heaven and earth given unto me. Now you go preach. You
go preach. He's alive, he's risen, he's
active, he's seated at the right hand of God. But there's more. This hope is not just an escape
from the judgment of God, but it's to an inheritance. Peter
goes on to tell us that we're heirs of God, joint heirs with
the Lord Jesus Christ. John, Paul, all of them talk
about it. John said this, he said, Behold what manner of love
the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the
sons of God. It don't appear right now what
we're going to be. But we know this, when he shall appear, we'll
be just like him. We'll be just like him. Oh, we're
heirs. We have an inheritance. Those
born in the wilderness of sin, when they reached adulthood,
learned that they were heirs. They were heirs. Heirs of God. And this covenant was made with
old Abraham. It wasn't meant for seeds like
as of many, like Israel still believes that it has to do with
all the Jews. It was not made to seeds as of
many, but under thy seed, which is Christ. And listen to this, here in 1
Peter 1.4, this inheritance is incorruptible and it's undefiled. And it's
never going to fade away. Boy, I tell you, trials are going
to come. Peter talks about that. He said,
if so be, you're going through these manifold temptations. It's
necessary. Necessary. There's obstacles
in the way God is going to remove. He's going to prove to you that
this faith that you have is of Him and not of you. And He's
going to send you through these trials. And you're going to go
through them, but the only thing you're going to lose is the dross.
The gold is going to go right on through the fire. This inheritance is uncorruptible,
incorruptible. It's undefiled and it's never
going to fade away. And it's reserved in heaven for
you. Does that mean God wrote it down
on a piece of paper and put it in his file? No. No. It's in his Son. It's reserved
in heaven in His Son. And that's why it's never gonna
fade away. Never. Never gonna be corrupted. He couldn't be corrupted. Lord
knows Satan tried, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't do it. And
who's this for? He said it's for you. Well, who's he talking about?
It's for you, listen to this now, verse 5, who are kept by
the power of God unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last
time. What does that mean, kept by
the power of God? What's he talking about? I tell
you, we better learn what that means because I want to be kept. I can't keep myself. I have learned
that much. I can't keep myself. So when
he said we're kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation,
what in the world is he talking about? He's talking about keeping
your mind and your heart focused on your redeemer. That's what
he's talking about. And I don't care what comes your
way, at the end of it, if you're healed, you're still going to
be looking to Christ. That's never going to change.
Now he said over there in the last part of Hebrews 10, you
read from the first part of it, in the last part of it he said,
now, the just shall live by faith, but if any man draw back, my
soul shall have no pleasure in hell. But listen to this, but
you're not of them that draw back. You're of them that believe
to the saving of the soul. You're going to keep right on
believing. Why? Because you're kept by the power of God. That
same Holy Spirit who gave you that revelation in the beginning
is going to continue to give you that revelation and that
revelation is never going to cease until He's revealed in
the last day and we see Him as He is. And there will be no explanations
after that. We'll know Him as we are known. We'll be just like Him. would
be just like it. And I think I came a long way
from when I first believed. I see deeper into the mysteries
of God than I ever thought I would be enabled to. But my hope hadn't
changed one iota. I still hope in Christ. I still
hope in Him. I just see more of Him. I've
just come to see how exalted He really is. And I tell you,
it's kind of like that old Hubble telescope. The farther out it
goes, the more it sees. But it hasn't discovered the
end because there isn't any end. And that's the way it is with
him. He's so far beyond anything we're
able to know, and we just keep on seeing and keep on learning,
but we still stay focused on him. I see them more and more clearly.
And that's basically what Peter says. I don't have time to go
through all these verses, but he tells us that these old prophets,
they wondered when God inspired them to write, they wondered
who they were writing about and who they were writing to and
what these things meant that the Spirit of Christ that was
in them was testifying of. Like over there in Isaiah 53, All through there, he's talking
about somebody, the Spirit of Christ, and it's picturing him,
and many other places. And they wondered about that.
To whom it was revealed, he said, that not unto them did he write
these things, but unto us, but unto us. And these things are
now reported unto us by them who preach the gospel with the
Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. Now, Paul said, gird up the loins
of your mind. You see why he's saying that
now? And hope to the end for the grace that shall be brought
unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And oh, what a
glory it is. That first revelation of Christ
that I heard in the gospel was unlike anything I'd ever heard
in my life. I left, I didn't know where to
cry or shout or run or what to do. I'd never had anything like
that. Never knew anything like that.
And how that Bible just, it just come together. He was the key
to all that. He's our wisdom. And it just
all come together in Him. Oh, what will it be when He's
finally revealed? When He calls us up to Himself
and we see Him as He is. My hope this morning is that
He will allow us to see Him in all His glory. Even if it is
piece by piece, we'll see it. We'll see it. May God bless you. Thank you for having me.