Well, it's good to see y'all
out seeding. Cora's cleaning out some storage unit and Julie
couldn't come, so remember them in your prayers. Be able to not play on the piano
because you can't see but with one eye, so. We go to the doctor
Friday for the next get up and if it's, may end up going to
Asheville on Monday to get a sonogram, so remember her. in your prayers
as well as the others who requested prayer. Let us begin our worship
service tonight with hymn number 268, How Firm a Foundation. How firm a foundation, ye saints
of the Lord. is laid for your faith in his
excellent word. What more can he say than to
you he has said, to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled. Fear not, I am with thee, O be
not dismayed, for I am thy God, I will still give thee I'll strengthen thee, help thee,
and cause thee to stand, upheld by my gracious, omnipotent hand. When through the deep waters
I call thee to go, the rivers of shall not thee overflow. For I will be with thee thy troubles
to bless, and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress. When through fiery trials thy
pathway shall lie, My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy
supply. The flame shall not hurt thee,
I only design, Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. The soul that on Jesus hath leaned
for repose, I will not, I will not desert to his foes. That's all the wall him should
endeavor to shake. I'll never, no never, no never
forsake. M number 126, Rock of Ages. 126. Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let
me hide myself in thee. Let the water and the blood from
thy wounded side which flowed be of sin the double cure. Save from wrath and make me pure. Could my tears forever flow? Could my zeal no languor know? These for sin could not atone. Thou must save and thou alone. In my hand no price I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling. While I draw this fleeting breath,
When might I shall close in death, When I rise to worlds unknown,
And behold thee on thy throne, Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in Thee. If you have your Bibles, turn to
Exodus chapter 33. We're going to read the last,
lead verses 18 and 19 that we've read for the last three weeks. Moses speaking to the Lord God,
he said, I beseech thee, show me thy glory. And he said, I
will make all my goodness pass before thee. I will proclaim
the name of the Lord before thee. I will be gracious to whom I
will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show
mercy. Let us pray. Our Father in heaven,
majestic and high and holy, dwells in righteousness, the habitation
of righteousness. We thank you for your goodness
that you have made to pass before us. We thank you that you have raised
up men to proclaim the name of the Lord unto us. We thank you
that you have been gracious to us and have shown us mercy. We know, because of your grace, that there is nothing in and
of us that could ever stand as meritorious before thee. We can say with David, for it
is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that
thou should visit him. We could say with Paul, O wretched
man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this dead? That I have less than the least
of sins. But you have shown us mercy and
have been gracious to us. And for this we shall ever give
thee thanks and praise your holy name throughout eternity. We
will sing praises. and thanksgiving for what you've
done for us. Father, we remember those who
are sick, those who are troubled and going through trials. Thou
knowest every case. Those families who have lost
loved ones, our dear brothers and sisters in Christ who are
sick. We remember our brother Larry Brown. She'll be with him. Nancy Bird, she's struggling
with some things. Also, Father, we pray for Randy
Perriman, that you be with him as he's going through this chemotherapy,
and for Grant with his back trouble. Remember others who requested
prayer, Lord, we ask your help for them. When I knowest every
case, know your children's woes, for they do not come except by
appointment. that we bow to your wisdom. And
thank you, Father, that your grace is sufficient for every
need. Help us tonight to worship you in spirit and in truth. We
pray in Christ's precious name. Amen. The third thing in the list,
the fourth thing we'll look at tonight is that God says, I will
be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and that is his glory. God's response to Moses' inquiry
in verse 18 sets forth what the elect are privileged to hear
and are given faith to believe, and that is the gospel. The four
things that God declares to be His glory make up the knowledge
and the understanding revealed in the preaching of the gospel.
God causes His goodness is goodness to pass before you or to be displayed
or manifest before you. That goodness is revealed in
the proclamation of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Jehovah,
Jesus, Savior and Redeemer. It is the name that will be stamped
upon the heart and rendered upon the lips of all those who heard
the gospel of God's grace until the day they die. In that gospel
the hearing sinner will discover that God is merciful, according to His good pleasure, and therefore effectively learns
that mercy is sovereignly shown, revealing that salvation is of
the Lord. Also, through the preaching of
the gospel, the sinner will learn that God is gracious to whom
he will be gracious, And the awakened sinner thus learns of
what we call sovereign grace, for he will be gracious unto
whom he will be gracious. We know also he hardens whom
he will. In this revelation of God's glory,
the sinner is utterly persuaded and convinced that he has no
part in that glory that is Nothing in him, of him, and from him
has to do with it. It all has to do with God and
His goodness and the proclamation of Christ's name and the mercy
that He shows to poor, wretched sinners. As God has shown Him
mercy, He realizes and confesses that He deserves eternal damnation. That's what mercy teaches us.
Nobody understands mercy until they realize they cannot ever
deserve it. that it keeps them back from
what they actually deserve, and that's eternal damnation. In
God's goodness, He whose name has been proclaimed the substitute
for sinners, the Lord Jesus Christ, has consumed the judgment and
the justice that was due every sinner, and it's what the sinner deserves.
Mercy has flown to the center on the wings of satisfied justice.
That's how it comes to you. Mercy doesn't come to you unless
justice has been satisfied for you. And that satisfaction took
place on the cross of Calvary when our Lord Jesus Christ said,
it is finished and gave up the ghost. That is, he died in the
room instead of his people. He died instead of you dying.
then mercy was poured out upon you and you saw what you were.
The Lord says that his glory is that he will be gracious unto
whom he will be gracious. We sing a lot about grace. We
talk a lot about grace. The poet wrote grace is a charming
sound upon the sinner's ear. Those who wish to disallow true
gospel preachers and believers Thinking to disparage them, call
them gracers or sovereign gracers, for that is a badge of honor
that the believer gladly wears. The concept of grace salts their
language and informs every aspect of their lives. To say that they
have gone to seat on grace is an understatement. It is the
theme and song of the believer. In Hebrews 13, the Lord said
it is a good thing, a good thing that the heart be established
with grace. Peter said that we are to grow
in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
we do grow in grace in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. After
destroying Babylon and the Chaldeans whom God calls the evil mountain
in Jeremiah, Zerubbabel, who was a type of the Lord Jesus
Christ, brings forth the headstone of the temple. The headstone,
we know, is Jesus Christ, just as He is the chief cornerstone
of the temple. And we know the temple is the
church of the living God. And He brings forth this headstone
of the temple with shoutings. And the shoutings that He makes,
according to Jeremiah 51, 25 and Zechariah 4, 7, is grace,
grace unto it. Grace, grace unto it. That's
the shouting that goes on as the Lord builds His temple, as
Christ is laid in the cornerstone and the final one, the headstone. Paul the Apostle, disclaiming
anything about himself or by himself or from himself, declared
this, I am what I am. by the grace of God. When our
Lord described His glorious finished work of salvation in Ephesians
1, He said all of salvation from pole to pole, every aspect of
it, every aspect of it, was for the glory of His grace. This is what people will find
out in glory. This is what those who are judged
at the judgment will find out, that all those miscreants, all
those lousy, sorry off-scourings of the universe, all those wretched
sinners who could never do anything good and could never do anything
without sin, were saved! And they will HAVE to announce
and believe as they are cast into the lake of fire that salvation
MUST, after all, be by grace it must be by grace if you know
anything about yourself you know that to be true when Paul described
what he preached in Acts 20 he said he preached the gospel or
the good news the gospel of the grace of God in the great Bible
conference when Paul in Acts chapter 15 brought back a Gentile
sinner to Jerusalem because a ruckus has been raised in the church,
and often in the church ruckuses are raised, among some of the
elders and some of the Pharisees that had been saved and some
of the Jews that had been saved. that it just wasn't possible
that these fellows were truly saved because all Paul had did
was go out and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and told them
that they were free from the law, that circumcision availed
nothing to them, that they were free from the law and that God
had given them grace and faith. All they did was believe the
gospel and God had saved them. And the Jews and the Pharisees
who had confessed Christ said, that can't be all to it. In fact,
when you say that today to most people, when you say it today,
Debbie told me one time she was talking to another religious
teacher in school many years ago, and Debbie just told her,
no, my salvation is all of Christ. Christ alone, that's all my salvation. And the girl said, well, you
have to do this and you have to do that. No, you don't. Salvation
is by the grace of God. And when Paul brought back this
Gentile that had been saved by grace, the Pharisees said, Well,
if he'll submit to circumcision, we will say that he's really
saved. But he has to submit to circumcision. Because you've got to keep the
law in order to be saved. And in Acts chapter 15, that
Bible conference was held. Paul brought them back. The elders
of the church were there. Simon Peter was there. He's kind
of the head guy in Jerusalem. And it says in verse 6 of chapter
15, And the apostles and elders came together to consider this
matter. because the sect of the Pharisees were saying these fellows
had to keep the commandments of Moses. And when there had
been much disputing, so there was some rankling going on in
the church that day, Peter rose up and said to them, men and
brethren, you know how that a good while ago God made choice among
us that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel
and believe. You remember the instance that
caused that. Peter was on the rooftop praying. And God gave him a vision where
he let down this great sheet. And on this sheet were all manner
of unclean and clean beasts. And the Lord said, Take, eat.
And Peter said something that should never come out of the
lips of the believer. He said, Not so, Lord. You can't do that.
There's unclean beasts. You can't eat no unclean beasts.
The Lord said, Don't you call unclean what I've made clean. Now that was just a preparatory
thing. because peter was about to go down to the house of cornelius
a gentile and take the gospel to him an unclean unfit non-jewish
person he says go down there and preach the gospel to him
and god saved cornelius and his house and they were all baptized
they were all baptized so peter said by my mouth he sent me to
the gentiles and god which knoweth the hearts bear them witness,
giving them the Holy Ghost even as He did unto us." He gave them
the Holy Ghost just as He did unto the disciples. "...and put
no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts
by faith. Now therefore, why tempt you
God to put a yoke upon the neck of His disciples, which neither
our fathers nor we were able to bear?" And that was the law.
But we believe that through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
we shall be saved even as they. He didn't say they should be
saved like us Jews. He said we'll be saved just like
them Gentiles are saved. That's through the grace of God,
by faith, that's how it's going to be. We're not going to be
saved because we're Jews. We're not going to be saved because
we're circumcised. We're not going to be saved because we're
under the law. We're not going to be saved because we had the
oracles and the priesthood and all the sacrifices. We're going
to be saved just like the Gentiles, just like that Gentile that Paul
has brought up here. We're going to be saved just
exactly like him. We're going to hear the gospel
and believe the Lord Jesus Christ. Law and human works have no part
with saving grace. We are not under the law, Paul
said in Romans Chapter 6. We're under grace. We're under
grace. And by the works of the law shall
no flesh be justified in his sight. Scripture says in Romans
Chapter 5 that we were sinners and sin reigned over us. Sin
was our ruler, our sovereign, our king. It told us what to
do. It made us do what we did. It reigned over us, but where
sin has reigned, grace now reigns in righteousness through Jesus
Christ, and where sin abounded, and it did abound in our hearts
and minds and in our lives, grace has much more abounded. When Jesus Christ, the Word was
made flesh and we beheld His glory, it was that He was full
of grace and truth. who told jim god with the calling
holy calling not according to our works but according to his
own purpose and grace which was given us in jesus christ before
the world began where is the grace of god same place you'll
find jesus christ the one who is full of grace.
And we have received of Him, it says, in the same place in
John Chapter 1. Grace for grace. Grace upon grace. Grace upon grace. The theme of
grace fills the pages of our hymnals. We sing songs like Amazing
Grace, Only a Sinner Saved by Grace, Marvelous Grace of Our
Loving Lord. The words grace and gracious
are seen over 189 times in this book. one could spend their lives studying
just that word and those words and that subject for the rest
of his life and never plumb the depths of them. What is grace? What is grace? Someone made an
acrostic with the word grace and said it was God's riches
at Christ's expense, G-R-A-C-E. Simply stated, it's this. Grace
is God's unmerited favor. That simply means He showed you
favor and you had nothing to do with it. You could not merit
it. You could not cause Him to do
that, whereas mercy is God keeping us back from what we deserve. Grace is freely giving us what
we could never deserve. Scripture declares that we are
elected in grace, we are saved by grace, we are justified by
grace, and we are kept by grace. To receive and trust in this
grace is to confess that there is nothing in us or about us
or from us that could cause God to show such action toward us,
to be gracious to us, and to lay all our salvation on God's
grace. The fact is, if we are saved
by grace, we readily admit and confess we have no merit. Not some, not a little. We have no merit whatsoever. Wonder of wonders. We're empty and vain. wonder of wonders God according
to his own good pleasure chose to show his chosen people grace
read Ephesians chapter 1 and chapter 2 but let's look at chapter
2 of Ephesians just for a moment I preached on this recently let's
rehearse this in our own minds just for a moment in Ephesians
chapter 2 verses 1 through 7 he says, and you, that is you
who were chosen in Christ before the world began, accepted in
the beloved, given faith, understanding, wisdom, all those things in chapter
one, and you, hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and
sins, wherein times past you walked according to the course
of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air,
the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience,
among whom also We all had our conversation in times past in
the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of our flesh and
mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, as even as
others. You look at verses 2 and 3 and
imagine you're standing before God and claiming a reason why
you should be saved. And nothing here is there. There's
no reason found why you should be shown grace. There's no reason
found why God should pay any attention to you at all except
attention and wrath. And look what it says, but God,
who is rich in mercy for his great love where he loved us. And often the word love and grace
are the same word in Scripture. Great love wherewith he loved
us even when we were dead in sins. What? When we were dead
in sins. when we were that person described
in chapter verses two and three even when we were dead in sins
he hath quickened us or made us alive or resurrected us from
the grave of our deadness together with Jesus Christ by grace are
you saved and hath raised us up together to make us to sit
in heavenly places in Jesus Christ that in ages to come forever
and ever however long eternity is for ages to come he might
show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward
us through Jesus Christ that's our salvation the believer stands
in grace justified by faith Paul says in Romans chapter 5 verse
1 and it says in verse 2 we have access into the grace wherewith
wherein we stand We stand in God's grace, and grace is sufficient
for every need. Paul, who went to the third heaven
and saw things were unlawful to be uttered as a human being,
he said, you know, I could have really gloried in that. I could
have told people, I've been there. You ain't been there, but I've
been there. He said, so that wouldn't happen, so I wouldn't
glory. God sent Satan to buffet me. with a foreign in my flesh was
painful and it hurt and I beg god three different times leave
me of that god said my great is sufficient said I'll learn
to rejoice the calamities come away God's grace in Christ's
our consolation all things god that that's all i can see hold the traditions which you've
been taught, whether by word or by epistle. Now, our Lord
Jesus Christ Himself and God, even our Father, which has loved
us and given us an everlasting comfort, consolation, and good
hope through grace. A good hope through grace. moses was asking a lot bc show
me that lord said i will be gracious we can't begin but every senator
uh... lessons