Let us turn in our Bibles today
to Philippians chapter 2. Philippians chapter 2 and I'll
begin reading in verse 12 through verse 18. Wherefore, my beloved,
as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now
much more in my absence. Work out your own salvation with
fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both
to will and to do of His good pleasure. Do all things without
murmurings and disputings, that you may be blameless and harmless,
the sons of God, without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and
perverse nation, among whom you shine as lights in the world,
holding forth the word of life, that I may rejoice in the day
of Christ that I have not run in vain, neither labored in vain. Yea, and if I be offered upon
the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy and rejoice
with you all. For the same cause also do you
joy and rejoice with me. None of us could have known last
Sunday morning when we finished the message with verses 9 through
11, speaking of Christ being highly exalted, wherefore God
also hath highly exalted him and given him a name which is
above every name, that at the name of Jesus Christ every knee
should bow of things in heaven and things in earth and things
under the earth. and that every tongue should
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the
Father. When we read that and looked
at that last Sunday morning, none of us could have known that
between that time and today, one of our own would be there
with him rejoicing and singing praises worthy is the Lamb. Now I may come back to these
verses next time, but today I want to speak to us from six words
in verse 16. Six words, the first six words,
holding forth the word of life. For the last 22 years this is
what Cody Groover has been doing in Mexico. I remember Cody was
with us in our first service in 1977, October 1977, when we
first began this church. He later joined the Navy and
served for several years. And when Winna graduated from
college, they married and lived in Virginia until Cody finished
his time in the Navy. They moved back to Houston. became
a part of our church and started their family. Cody became burdened
to preach, to preach the gospel. And he did so whenever he was
given the opportunity. He preached here for us several
times and I know in other places. Then he took his family his wife,
Wenna, and his daughter, Andrea, and his sons, Austin and Cade,
and went on a vacation to visit his parents in Mexico. And, of
course, while they were there, they attended services, and I
believe there happened to be also Brother Paul Mahan visiting
at that time, pastor in Rocky Mount, Virginia. And Cody translated
for him. And when they came back, Winna
told her mother, she said, mother, I know we're going. He was determined to go there
because he was called and preached the gospel. I saw four things
that made him, in my opinion, an ideal missionary in Mexico. I saw four things in Cody. First of all, he knew the truth. He knew the gospel of God's sovereign
grace. Second, he knew the language.
He'd been prepared to speak the language there so fluently, so
well. And third, he loved the people. He loved the people in Mexico. And number four, his wife was
a true helpmate. Now, as we look at these words
today, these six words, I want us to consider three questions
holding forth the word of life. What is the Word of Life? What is the Word of Life? It
is the gospel. It is the message of Christ.
And the gospel tells us at least these four things. First of all,
the Word of Life tells us who God is. who God is, who the God
of the Bible is, because as the Apostle Paul says, there are
many that are called gods, with a small g, many wannabe gods,
many pygmy gods, as I like to say, but there's only one true God,
and God is sovereign, and He works His will in the armies
of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can stay
his hand or call into question what he does. He is God. He's not a pretend God. He's
not a God who tries, a God who wants to do something that men
will not allow him to do. But he is the Lord God of heaven
and earth. To preach the gospel is to tell
men to hold forth the word of life, who God is. The God who
is all of us our creator, who is first of all. And that he's
the one that every one of us will one day stand before. That's what it is, first of all,
to hold forth the Word of Life. It's to tell the truth about
God. And number two, it is to tell
the truth about man. The Word of Life tells us what
our problem is. Our problem is that we are all
sinners. We have all sinned against God.
It's so easy to say that. We are all sinners. But let us
recognize when I say that we have all offended God. We have all, as it were, held
up our fist in the face of Almighty God and declared, I will not
have this man to rule over me. Listen to these words from Psalm
14. David writes, and it is a description
of all of us by nature. This is a description of me.
It's a description of you. All of us, all men and women
by nature. They are corrupt. They are corrupt. They have done
abominable works. There is none that doeth good. The Lord looked down from heaven
upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand
and seek God. And they are all gone aside. They are become filthy, there's
none that doeth good, no not one. Did you notice that passage
begins with they are corrupt. Therefore everything after that
is a result of the truth that by nature we are corrupt. And because we are corrupt, we
have done abominable works. Because we are corrupt, that's
our nature. There's none good. No, not one. Because we are corrupt, we don't
understand. We don't understand the things
of God. The natural man receiveth not
the things of God, because they are spiritually discerned, and
the natural man is spiritually dead. Because we are corrupt, we have
all gone aside. And because we are corrupt, we
have become filthy. I don't like filthiness, do you?
I just don't like filthiness. I don't like filthiness in my
house or anywhere else I might find myself. I like it to be
clean. Did you know that you and I,
before God Almighty, are filthy? And ourselves, we are filthy. And the Scripture says all of
our righteousnesses That's our good works, our good deeds before
God are as filthy rags. When the fountain is corrupt,
all of the water that comes out of the fountain will be corrupt. And that's what God says about
us by nature. They are corrupt. We must be convinced when God
the Holy Spirit convinces us of sin. We must be convinced
that there's nothing good we can do. There's nothing. Not a decision. Not a prayer. There's nothing. Because everything
that comes out of us, us being corrupt, everything that comes
out of us is also corrupt. The Gospel, it declares the truth
about man, as well as the truth about God, that He is sovereign,
that man, our problem is that we have sinned against our Maker,
we have sinned against God Almighty, and one day we will stand before
Him. It is appointed unto man once
to die, but after this, the judgment. I listened to a pastor from England
recently, and before he became a pastor, he was a science teacher
in a public school in England. And he said, this has been back
several years, but he said he convinced, there was five, I
believe, five science teachers in this public school, high school.
And he said he was able to convince them not to teach evolution as
fact. He couldn't convince them that
evolution is not true. He doesn't believe it's true.
He knows it's not true. But he was able to convince them
not to teach evolution as fact to these children. If you must
teach it and you must teach it only as theory. And he said that
several weeks later he got a message from one of the other teachers.
And she said this to him. She said, I sure hope evolution
is true. Because if it's not, I've got
a lot to answer for. It's a religion, isn't it? Evolution. It's a religion, my friends.
And it's man's attempt to convince himself that He is not responsible
to God. Number three, holding forth the
word of the life, not only to tell man who God is and what
our problem is, but to tell us what God has done to remedy our
sin problem. And he did this for the praise
of his grace, for his glory. He planned salvation from before
the world. The Lamb's Book of Life was written
before the world began. He is a Lamb slain from the foundation
of the world. The Lord God Almighty, He chose
to make His Son, He who is equal with Him in the Blessed Trinity,
God the Eternal Son, the Word He chose to make Him the head
and the Savior of all that He chose to save. He did that from
before the foundation of the world. And all of those that
He chose in His head, in the head rather, Christ is the head.
He is God's first elect, but all who are chosen in Him. are
chosen in Him by grace. And all of this took place before
the world was created. Before there ever was a sinner,
before Adam had ever sinned and plunged the whole race into sin,
God in eternity had purpose to the praise of the glory of His
grace to save a people. chose them in Christ, gave them
to His Son. And don't you know the Lord Jesus
Christ, He received each and every one that the Father gave
Him, received them as members of His mystical body, as sheep
of whom He is the pastor, of His bride that He is the husband
of. This meant that Christ, the eternal
son of God, would come into this world, the incarnation. Just
next month, people will be singing Christmas hymns and Christmas
carols, joy to the world. The Lord has come. That's what
it's all about, isn't it? It's about the eternal word of
God joining to himself, that body that was prepared him from
the Virgin Mary, so that we do not have two persons, we have
one person in two natures. He's both God and he's man. He's man that he might obey,
that he might suffer, that he might bleed, that he might die. but he's God that his obedience
and his suffering and his death would be sufficient to satisfy
Almighty God on behalf of those who were given unto him. He came into this world as a
man and he was not esteemed. He was
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we did hide our
face from Him. And that's what God says. God
sends His lovely, darling Son into this world, and how did
man receive Him? There's no room in the inn. He had no place to lay His head. As a man, He knew what it was
to be weary, to be thirsty. And yet as God, while he was
weary, think of this, sitting on the well, weary from his journey,
at the same time as God, he was upholding the world. Upholding
all things by the word of his power. God's appointed time, he was
made a curse. Cursed is everyone that hangs
upon a tree. The Apostle Paul tells us he
was made a curse that he might redeem us from the curse of the
law. The curse of the law is death,
and God's law cursed every one of us because of our disobedience. But Christ, at God's appointed
time, was made to be sin for us, that we might be made the
righteousness of God in Him. His body lay in the tomb until
the third day. And then on the third day, he
came forth victorious. He plagued. Everyone knows what
a plague is? Christ plagued death. He conquered death. And he did that for each and
every one that God gave unto him. That's the reason I heard
the message the preacher preached Thursday in Yucatan. A blessed message. Faithful pastor. So clear. And this is one of
the things he said. He said, Cody is complete in
Christ. There's nothing we have to do
now. He was complete. And every one
of God's children, we are complete in Christ. And number four, the word of
life tells us that salvation is by grace through faith. Turn
with me back a few pages to Romans if you want to. Romans chapter
5 and verse 17. The apostle says, for if by one
man's offense, that one man of course is Adam, by his offense,
by his sin, death reigned by him. Much more, I'm so thankful
for much more, aren't you? They which receive, now notice
this, abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness. Much more. Remember in the first
chapter of John it tells us he was full of grace and truth. We receive abundance of grace
in Christ. Abundance of grace. All kind
of grace comes to us through Christ, right? Electing grace,
calling grace, keeping grace. Every grace, we receive abundance
of grace through Christ, through the second Adam, the last Adam. And we also received the gift
of righteousness. I want to try to tell you a story
that our daughter told me yesterday. The second service, Winna knew
that they wanted to bring Cody's body back to the States, and
so she took the clothes or sent the clothes to the funeral home
that he would be dressed in, which was suit and white shirt
and tie. Now in Yucatan, Mérida, A guayabera
is a suit, white shirt, and tie. I mean, that's just it. The people
had never seen Cody in a suit and tie. At the funeral home,
when they came Friday for the service, the casket I assume
was open, they saw Cody's body. And the preacher who preached,
he said, we see Cody Grover today dressed Muy elegante, very elegant. They'd never seen him dressed
like that before, his body dressed like that before. But then he
said this, if we could see Cody, if we could see his soul dressed
in that spotless robe of righteousness, how beautiful, how elegante it
would be. That righteousness that He gives
unto those who trust in Him, a beautiful, perfect, shining
robe of righteousness. Second question, and I'll be
brief on these last two. How is the Word of Life held
forth? The Apostle said, holding forth
the Word of Life. How is the Word of Life held
forth? It is held forth by preaching.
By preaching. A man called me yesterday, and
if I understand the story right, he went to Mexico several years
back, and he went there to be a missionary, but he didn't know
the Gospel. And his thought was to to debate
in a public place, to debate sort of like apologetics, you
know, try to prove the truth of the gospel. And I believe
he was riding one of the public transportation buses there and
saw the sign of the church and went there or heard somehow and
went there. And Cody told him, that's not
missionary work. That's not what it is to be a
missionary. A missionary is to preach the
gospel. Preach the gospel. It's not our
place to try to explain the gospel and defend the gospel. No. Preach the gospel. And God
uses His gospel. And this man was saved that I'm
speaking of. Cody heard the command, go into
all the world and preach the gospel. He was instant in season
and out of season. And let me tell you something,
here's something that many of you do not know, and there's
no way you could know. Besides Cody preaching in our
country, and just recently he made a trip through the southeast,
many states in our country, He regularly preached in a number
of states in Mexico. He preached in the Dominican
Republic and a man originally from there called us Friday night
thanking us or expressing his condolences and he said he heard
the gospel and his mother who lives in Columbia, South America,
she heard the gospel. Cody's ministry, truly, among
Spanish-speaking people, was a worldwide... From Italy, the Canary Islands,
And as I said, all over the Spanish-speaking world. The Word of Life was held forth. And as always, when the Word
of Life is held forth, it is a saver of death unto death and
a saver of life unto life. And the Word of Life that Cody
held forth was a saver of life unto And many have come and expressed
that to Winna in the last several days. And third, here's my last
question. What is the life held forth in
the Word of Life? What is the life held forth in
the Word of Life? It's eternal life. It's knowing
God. This is life eternal. that they
might know thee, the only true God in Jesus Christ, whom thou
hast sent. The life held forth in the word
of life is eternal life. It is knowing God. It is abundant
life. The Lord Jesus Christ said, I
am come that they might have life and that they might have
it more abundantly. What is it to have life more
abundantly? It is to have life that can never
be lost. Adam had life, but he lost it. He came, Christ came, that we
might have life, abundant life, life that can never be lost. I read the saying just this morning,
Christ, the fact he was given his sheep. And not one of them is going
to be lost. And this author went on to say,
if he were in heaven and one of his sheep was not there, he
would search through hell, the grave and everywhere else to
find that one sheep. Not one is going to be lost.
He said, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow
me and I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish. Neither shall any man pluck them
out of my hand." Cody finished his course. Just
like the Apostle Paul was able to say, I've finished my course. I've kept the faith. Henceforth,
there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness. And not for
me only, but for all those who love him. love his appearing. Let me remind us also that your
faithfulness in supporting the gospel and Cody was always thankful
he was always so thankful that God called him And you folks have been faithful
to support him 22 years, holding forth the word of life. Let us sing a hymn and then we'll
be dismissed. Remember me.