Romans 10:14-21

Pastor Josh continues to teach us through Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

“There is a responsibility and a necessity under the sovereignty of God, to preach the gospel and to send preachers. It is defiant insubordination to say that we will just ‘trust God to save whomever he wills’. He has already establishede that he will save through our obedience…Human responsibility and divine sovereignty are not played off against each other so that one nullifies the other; instead human responsibility is always subordinate to the sovereignty of God without ‘emptying human choices of their authenticity or validity’…”

Romans 10:5-13

Romans 10:5-13

"The clear message is that saving righteousness is a work of God alone.  What did you do to accomplish your salvation?  Did you go up to heaven and send Jesus down to save us?  No?  Maybe you went down to the dead to raise Christ up from that place?  Perhaps not.  Did you bring the word of God near to you?  Preach the gospel to yourself?  Did you place the word of faith in your own mouth and circumcise your own heart? No!  God has taken the initiative.  He sent his Son and raised him from the dead.  He gives new hearts to understand, eyes to see and ears to hear.  There is no one else in heaven or on earth who could do it. Since these things have been done by God, our response is not to do anything to gain righteousness, only to respond in God-given faith.

2 John

2 John

“…(W)e very much tend to view the things of God as something that we simply need to fit somewhere into our schedules, not realizing that it is the things of God that our whole life is all about. And that these things far from merely needing to fit into our schedules, rather they should determine our schedule. Our priorites are often so inverted towards the common things and concerns of this world - even good things - that we fail to realize that we are actually relegating God to the margins…”

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The Church as Christ Will Find Her (Matthew 25:31-46)

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The Church as Christ Will Find Her (Matthew 25:31-46)

“We worship God by rightly enjoying what He has provided and sharing it equally with the community. It is given to the community on God’s behalf…Will Christ return to find that we have cared for his brothers and sisters? Have we fed the hungry, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, visited the shut-in, and provided for the one who has been persecuted and imprisoned…No one can give anything to God. He does not need our stuff. But what we do to the least of his disciples, we do it to Jesus…”

The Third Epistle of John

The Third Epistle of John

“The truth of the Gospel means nothing if merely agreed to and signed off on. A thing we said one time. An answer we got right on a true of false test. It has to be something we live and believe in. If we believe in (the Gospel) as much as we believe in gravity, or that the sun will rise tomorrow, then we will live according to that truth - then we will walk in that truth…”

Romans 9:30-10:4

Romans 9:30-10:4

“In Romans 9, we read the unpalatable truth that God himself had caused the Jews to be hardened in their hearts, but we must realize here that this was not by causing or working evil in them, or by tempting them to sin: it was the gospel of Jesus Christ...That was the stumbling block and offense; that’s what they could not handle, because he was saying to them, ‘Your works are not pure enough to merit entry into the kingdom of God.’ This infuriated the Jews because the doctrine of justification by faith alone is a violent assault upon human pride. ‘Instead of allowing Jesus to lift them up, they tripped over him.’…Romans 10 is a vital section for understanding that Paul viewed divine sovereignty and human responsibility as complementary rather than contradictory truths…”

Romans 9:14-29

Romans 9:14-29

“Paul is not saying that humans have no free will, only that, in the clearest possible terms, free will is not the fundamental factor in divine election; it depends only ‘on God, who has mercy.’…It is important, as we speak the truth about human inability to save ourselves, that we accurately portray that our weakness is not physical, or even fundamentally intellectual, but moral.  It is not as though God has commanded anything of us which we are totally incapable of, only that we will never want to do it.  The weakness is in your will…Who of us, by our own free will, would claim to be able to choose absolute and eternal submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ.  Who of us, by our own choosing, could practice perfect and perpetual obedience?  But this is exactly what is promised to us in salvation.  And this is exactly what God does in his mercy; he makes us fit for heaven.  This salvation is not of ourselves, ‘it is the gift of God… so that no one may boast.’”

Romans 9:6-13

Romans 9:6-13

“Welcome, this morning if you are visiting. We are in the most difficult part of the Bible. Not the most difficult part to understand, mind you. But the most difficult part to be comfortable with…Any attempt to explain the election of Jacob over Esau on the basis of God’s foresight of Jacob’s good works or Jacob’s choice is to reverse everything Paul is saying here and to turn the text here on its head. Paul very carefully and specifically explains that it was not Jacob’s choice or Jacob’s works that saved him only the sovereign choice of God who chooses. To come up with some apologetic that makes this make no sense doesn’t help us. We just must hear the word of God and it’s us that needs to change if we don’t like it…”

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