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Jack Brooks, teaching pastor.

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8/26/2019

God is Never the Author of Sin.

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God never causes people to sin. Human moral choices self-originate, except in cases of demon possession.
 

Even though God is sovereign, that doesn't mean there's only one will in the universe. If we human beings were divinely programmed robots, predetermined by God unto every choice we make, then there is no moral accountability. Accountability for wrong actions would fall back on the invincible programmer, none would fall on the robots. But the Bible is clear that there is such a thing as human moral accountability. Therefore, human beings are not programmed robots. 

  1. God never directly causes anyone to sin.
 
  1. God maintaining nature, which allows people to use their bodies and objects around them to perform evil acts, is not the same thing as God causing those acts. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, when God maintains the hardness of wood, that does not mean that God caused the rioter to swing the bat. 
 
  1. God permitting someone to sin is not the same thing as God causing the sin. Christ said that sin springs from the heart, Matthew 15:19.  James, in the letter of James 1:13-15, said that evil desires are enticed and reach out from within us, giving birth to sin.
 
  1. God removing restraints against sin does not mean that God caused the sin. Romans 1 says that God holds back the inner dominion of the sinful nature, unless the person rebels against Him and begins to worship idols. The Lord also sets up obstacles in the outside world against certain types of sin, such as police forces or the military. But sometimes the Lord weakens or removes these restraints. The person thus released from restraints does what they do freely.

  2. Examples from Scripture of free-will choices (stated or suggested).  
 
  • In a prophetic passage in Isaiah 54, God promises that, in the future kingdom, any strife stirred up against Israel will not be His doing (Isa. 54:15).  This implies that, at times, strife against Israel was God’s doing (see 2 Chron. 21:16, Habakkuk 1:5-6ff), in the sense of planning and allowing certain evils to erupt against Israel from their enemies. But the distinction in verse 15 implies that most sins are completely self-generated, by the people themselves. God did not play even a circumstantial role.
 
  • God exclaims in Jer. 32:35 that Israel’s sacrificing of their children to Moloch “never entered My mind!” His outcry implies the Jews' self-origination of that horrible sin. God did not cause them to do it, and He made it clear in His word that such practices were forbidden (Deut 12:31).
 
  • Christ gave Jezebel time to repent (Rev. 2:21).
 
  • If repentance is irresistibly caused by God -- if it is a change of spiritual attitude caused in the soul by God alone -- then Christ waiting for Jezebel to do something she could not do, would not do, appears to be futile and unwise on His part. Him waiting for what He knows is impossible casts a quizzical shadow over His wisdom and goodness. Her decision, or non-decision, to repent must have been her own.
 
  • Paul’s words about adapting his style and manner to the people with whom he worked reveals that social conduct changes people’s receptivity to the Gospel (1 Cor. 9:19-22). This assumes that some aspect of human decision-making can bve positively affected by entirely natural, social forces. 
 
  • Christ’s teaching that rich people have an extremely hard time entering the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:24) reveals that natural circumstances affects spiritual receptivity to the Gospel. A non-spiritual circumstance (lack of wealth) makes it easier for a poor person to repent and believe, where a non-spiritual circumstance (wealth) hinders it. On one hand, this shows that our wills are not as wildly free as we like to think, since something as trivial as money affects us so. But on the other hand, it implies that receptivity to the Gospel is not solely caused by an inward spiritual force.
 
  • In Romans 2:4, Paul says that God is working toward repentance in every unsaved person toward whom He shows kindness, forbearance, and patience. Since God shows at least some kindness, forbearance, and patience toward everyone, this illustrates that God wants everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). It also implies that repentance is not a heart-changing force. “Forbearance” of sin is something God chooses not to do (punish sin). Forbearance is not a positive, assertive power that God gives to someone.
 
  • In Romans 10:1, Paul prays for the salvation of all Jews without exception.  He does this, even though he just finished writing Romans 9. In turn,  This means there was nothing in God's eternal will which would have made Paul's prayer unanswerable, since the Holy Spirit would not lead Paul to pray for something that He made clear was metaphysically impossible. God would not have us pray for the decretally impossible. In fact God rebuked Israelites who blamed the sovereign predetermination of God for their sin of rejecting Christ (Isa. 29:15-16a, Rom. 9:19-20). Paul rebuked that wicked line of thought with, “Who are you to talk back to God?” The very idea that God had eternally predetermined them not to have faith and not to be repentant was a rebellious, blasphemous form of excuse-making.

However we sort out the complicated, difficult relationship between God's sovereignty and man's will, it is clear that God has preserved a degree of free-will in the human race, and that, in the Bible, God speaks to people and deals with them as if their decisions originate with them.

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8/26/2019

Look Out For Humanism!  It Will Undermine Your Prayer Life.

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We must avoid a positive, humanistic view of the human will, or else we will underestimate the need for prayer for people's hearts. Here is what I mean...
 
  1. Humanism teaches that human beings are either basically good, or at least born as blank slates. Neither statement is true. The human soul is born spiritually dead -- that is, lacking the Holy Spirit of God,  spiritually unclean, guilty in Adam, and powerless against the inner sin-nature.  See Paul in Ephesians 2:1-3.  Even if a person's moral conscience is instructed well, that doesn't mean they have inner power to do what they know is right. 
  2. One deep, serious fault in humanistic Christian theology is a weak, wishy-washy view of the human race's inborn sinful state.
  3. The human race, outside of Christ, is under Satan’s sovereignty. 1 John 5:19.
    1. Let us be clear: Human beings are still human beings. We were not turned into demons by Adam’s sin. We're still made in God's image (James 3:9). Our God-created human natures remain intact, even though its in a defiled, powerless state. I've read some wild teachings that claimed that human beings literally have Satan's nature in them, but this is untrue 
    2. But Jesus said it takes God’s “strong man” (Himself) to invade the householder’s home (Satan and his kingdom), for the strong man to plunder the householder’s goods (enable people to believe and be saved). Luke 11:21-22. Every conversion to Jesus Christ is a miraculous deliverance from the evil one. And He is the one who does it, each and every time!
  4. Unsaved people are spiritually blind. 1 Corinthians 1, 2 Cor. 4.
    1. A person can't make a free choice if he or she is chained by ignorance.
      1. This is why people absolutely need to know the Gospel. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Rom. 10:17). You can't believe in a Savior about whom you have heard nothing!
      2. Even when the information is available and enters the ears or the eyes, the Lord must spiritually open the mind to pay attention to it (as in Lydia's case, in Acts 16:14). The Holy Spirit must bring conviction. So natural human reason, by itself, is not adequate to the need.
  5. Unsaved people by instinct don’t like the light of Christ and run from it and Him. John 3:19-20.  The problem isn't just Satan interfering in people's hearts. We're all born with a natural pride of self, which leads to a sinful life, rebellion against God, and a fear of conviction of sin.
    1. However, Christ also said in the same passage that there are people who “live by the truth” (John 3:21). Those are the sorts of people who do not run from the light. Rather, they come to the light of the Gospel. Cornelius in Acts 10 was an important example of this kind of person. Even though he was not regenerate, he was God-fearing, God-respecting, and God-seeking.  He wasn't this way out of his own natural strength. The Lord had been intervening in his life, every step of the way. 

Don't let humanism influence your thinking.  Prayer for non-Christian is a essential part of how we all come to Christ, because we don't have the natural capacity to understand the Gospel or break free from Satan's coils.

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8/26/2019

The Kind of Faith You Need to Move A Mountain.

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It is crucial to have a full view of God’s supreme authority and power, to have the faith to move a mountain. 

Belief in ultimate human sovereignty will cause feelings of hopelessness and result in failed prayers. The Bible tells us that...
 
  1. God is all-powerful: He does anything He wishes, guided by the built-in boundaries of His own nature and plan. Psalm 115:3.
    1. God cannot sin.  God’s will is limited and directed by His own moral perfection.  
    2. God knows all things, so He never guesses and He can't make mistakes.
    3. God cannot do the logically impossible, like make a square circle. This is because God Himself is the basis of truth, and the upholder of nature's laws.
    4. God is following His own eternal plan (Eph. 1:11). This means that God is never caught by surprise, and He never improvises.
 
  1. God has an eternal plan. Eph. 1:11.  What does His plan include? How does it work itself out?
  • God's plan involves His own actions, of course.
  • God also works through human actions, and even demonic actions. There were times in the Old Testament where God permitted Satan to act in certain ways, but limited Satan in other ways (Job 1-2).
  • God can also achieve His goals through people’s sins. In Gen. 50:20, Joseph said God had a hidden agenda behind letting Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery. Even the worst sin, Christ's crucifixion, was carried out by God’s plan.  Acts 4:27-28.
 
  1. God can influence and affect human choices.  It is not true that God is helpless before human sovereignty, but this is an area where I think American Christians' faith has been taught to be weak. The human will is not impervious to God's power.  
 
  1. God, as punishment for sin, hardened the hearts of Pharaoh, the Egyptian army, and the Amorite kings Og and Sihon. Ex. 4:21, 7:3, Jos. 2:10, 11:20, Dt. 2:30.  Their crazy stubbornness drove them to destruction. Heart-hardening in the Bible was always a punishment for sin.
  2. God gave Daniel favor in the eyes of the chief official. Dan. 1:9. Somehow God influenced the chief official to view Daniel favorably. It doesn't especially matter how God did it. Maybe God used natural factors, maybe He used supernatural factors, or maybe a combination of both. Nevertheless, the fact remains that God is the one who caused the official to favor Daniel.
  3. Solomon says that the Lord can direct the heart of a king very easily (Prov. 21:1). Solomon doesn't limit this truth to humble, God-fearing kings. He means all kings, which we see Old Testament examples of this in Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and Artaxerxes king of Persia. 
  4. God can heal a person of demonic influences from his mind, which restores the person's normal thinking. Luke 8:35. By removing devilish influences, God enables a mind to function.  
  5. God punishes knowledgeable rejection of the Gospel. For example, a certain group of Jews rejected Jesus’ miraculous testimony to Himself (John 12:37-38). As punishment, God blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so they could not believe (John 12:39-40). However, that implies they could before, otherwise nothing about their state would differ.
Do you have a full vision of God's supreme power, so that your faith can move mountains?

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8/14/2019

What's With All These Apostasies?

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I have read several statements by various people recently claiming to "lose" their Christian faith. They say things like, "no one has been asking the hard questions for 2,000 years", or that science has refuted Christianity. Or that the problem of suffering, or the existence of Hell, are unsolvable issues that Christian leaders have avoided addressing.


I ask myself, what is going on here?


Did anyone in 25 years disciple them, at any point, ever, about the reasons why we believe in Christ? It sounds like no one did.


Could these apostasies and semi-apostasies be the fruit of mental laziness? In other words, they never exerted effort to seek out and find writers and thinkers like:

Ravi Zacharias,
R.C. Sproul,
C.S. Lewis,
Norman Geisler,
Corrie ten Boom,
Joni Tada,
Lee Strobel,
Ronald Nash,
Ron Rhodes,
J. Gresham Machen,
B.B. Warfield,
Ken Ham,
John Whitcomb,
or Francis Schaeffer?

There is apologetics all over the Internet.  If you Googler "Christian evidences", the selections spill all over you.


Do the apostates sincerely believe, in 2,000 years of Christianity, that literally no one has wrestled with, and answered, hard questions? It sounds insincere when they say this, considering how obviously untrue it is. It's a little like saying no one has ever seriously wrestled with the meaning of life.


In a few cases I have read, it seemed like someone was choosing a friend over Scripture. Like, they had a homosexual friend, so they decided the Bible doesn't say that homosexuality is sinful, or that it *does* say that and therefore isn't true.  But that isn't valid thinking. The question of, "Is Christianity true?" isn't answered by whether my friend likes it. 


My gut instinct is to think that

(a) there are some big ministries who do little or nothing to teach the fundamentals of the faith.

(b) Morality + music with a little Jesus thrown in isn't the Gospel, but there are churches where that's what's happening.

(c) We've been letting baby Christians, or false converts, get into positions of public worship & preaching.

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8/13/2019

Helpful Truths About Tongues.

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People are fascinated by the phenomenon of tongues-speaking. It is important to consult the New Testament, in order to understand what tongues was, and what the miracles meant. Begin first in the book of Acts.  Tongues-speaking is described happening three times, over approximately thirty years.

We learn that this miracle of tongues-speaking was predicted by the prophet Joel, in the second chapter of his book. Joel used the word "prophesy", but Peter applies it to the tongues miracle (Acts 2:14-17). This lets us know that these tongues were a direct product of God's prophetic power. These tongues did not originate from inside the speakers, just as the Old Testament prophets' predictions of the future did not originate from them. The Spirit was speaking through them.

We also learn that tongues-speaking was the miraculous, Spirit-inspired ability to pray or sing in a real language foreign to the speaker. Luke says that the 120 prayed and spoke in "languages" (Acts 2:4), which is the meaning of the Greek word glossa.  The 120 spoke actual languages, which the crowd understood (Acts 2:7-11).  In this instance, no spiritual gift of interpretation was needed. The various members of the crowd simply understood whatever language or dialect was being uttered.

Peter said this miracle was a sign of Christ's ascension (Acts 2:33). Christ on His throne intended to reach out to all language-groups of the world, using all their languages. There is no one language by which every Bible must be translated, or in which the Gospel must be preached. So, Peter tied the miracle as a sign one part of Christ's redeeming work.

It is important to notice that Peter does not promise the crowd the ability to pray in tongues. If they receive Jesus as Savior, God will give them all the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). But the Giver isn't the same thing as His gifts. If any in that crowd of 3,000 who believed ever did pray in tongues, we have no record of it.  (In the same way, there is no record of the Samaritan Christians from Acts 8 praying in tongues). Maybe they did, but we don't know because Luke is silent about it.

God gives tongues as a sign a second time, to show the apostles that God accepted Gentiles through Christ. This was how Peter interpreted the miracle God gave Cornelius and his family (Acts 10:44-46, 11:15-18). This was an important sign, to break down the hesitancy Jewish believers in Jesus felt toward Gentile converts. 

The third and last case of tongues as a sign happens in Acts 19. Paul meets twelve former followers of John the Baptist. We don't know where they had been all those years, but they were uninformed about Christ. Paul brought them up to date on the person and work of Christ Jesus. He asked them if they had received the Holy Spirit, but they were unfamiliar with this idea. After baptizing them in Christ's name, Paul laid his hands on them and they were filled with the Spirit and spoke in tongues (19:5-6).

This was a sign of Paul's true apostleship. Years before, a Samaritan named Simon noticed that apostles had the authority to confer the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:18), and tried to buy it. Peter rebuked him sharply. This was not something that just anyone could do, let alone buy! Paul's ability  to do this was another proof that he was a true apostle of Christ.  Paul's apostleship was often attacked, but this incident supported his God-given authority.

So: the three recorded instances of tongues-speaking in Acts were three signs. The first, a sign of Christ's ascension. The second, a sign of Gentile acceptability to God. The third, a sign of special apostolic authority.

Each of these signs were tied to three specific, unchanging historical facts in God's plan of redemption. For this reason, we should not teach these Acts incidents as timeless, universal examples. These are not examples of what all Christians everywhere should experience. That would be a misunderstanding of the miracles' purposes.

These were the signs of tongues. There is more to be learned about the spiritual gift of tongues (which, based on details of the chapter, might be a different phenomenon) from 1st Corinthians 14. Those principles would be more directly applicable to all Christians.




  

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8/9/2019

"...And Be Baptized, Washing Away Your Sins."

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In Acts 22, the apostle Paul recounted the story of his Christian conversion. He told how the risen Christ sent a devout Jewish believer, Ananaias, who laid hands on him and said, "Brother Saul, Get up and be baptized, washing away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord" (v. 16). 

What did Ananias mean?

Baptism symbolizes God in His mercy washing away our sins, based on Christ's redeeming death. The key to unlock Ananias' words is in the four word phrase, "Calling on His name." That phrase explains the preceding phrase, "washing away your sins."

According to Romans chapter 10, we call on Christ's name by putting our trust in Him. Romans 10:11-13 says, "Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”"

Paul says in this same paragraph that faith alone is sufficient for justification -- "For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified" (v.10).  Justification is when God not only forgives us of our sins, but credits us with Christ's perfect righteousness in place of our sin-spotted, totally-inadequate righteousness.

Christ, in Matthew 10, said that any who confess Him before others, He will confess that person before the Father (Matthew 10:32). Paul in Romans 10 is repeating Christ's confession promise. 

Confession of Christ with the mouth is the result of justifying faith in the heart, because "
A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of." (Luke 6:44-45).

Justifying faith in the heart and saving confession of Christ with the mouth are two sides of one coin. The first (sincere heart-faith in Christ) always causes the second (verbal confession of Christ). Their relationship is that of cause and effect. We should be careful not to sever the connection between these two things.  Also, confession is not the same thing as prayer.

Baptism is the Christian ceremony of verbal faith confession, and it was the ancient church's custom (unlike today) to baptize immediately, so that a person's baptism happened as near in time to their faith as possible. So, we can understand why the Bible associates baptism with salvation.  

However, we must also take into account the total testimony of Scripture about salvation, to understand that baptism doesn't cause salvation, and is not its own separate condition of salvation. 

The Bible gives testimony of thousands of years of sinners saved by grace, either without baptism or prior to it. People during the Old Testament times were saved the same way people today are -- as a free gift of God, received simply by trusting in the Lord's Gospel promise, apart from the sacraments. The standard of this was Abraham, in Genesis 15. Paul, in the first few verses of Romans 4, said that Abraham's salvation is our timeless example of how anyone is saved.

The thief on the cross, who confessed Christ to Christ, was saved without being baptized (Luke 23:42-43). God gave Cornelius the centurion the blessed Holy Spirit before Cornelius was baptized (Acts 10). Examples like these show God saving people without or before baptism.

The Bible closely links baptism with salvation, but not in a cause-and-effect sense. True faith comes out in the form of confession, and baptism is the ordained ordinance of confession. But verbal confessions can be false. We assume Judas Iscariot made a verbal confession of faith in Christ at some point in his life. But we know he was a child of the devil. A baptism can present a false picture. We know people who were baptized, sometimes when they were children, but then they truly came to Christ later in life.

Faith in Christ alone is sufficient to save. The Bible links baptism to salvation because baptism is the ceremony of confession. But baptism only saves, not from water coming on the body, but in the sense of it being a method of confession by which a believing person responds back to God, springing out of their grace-cleansed conscience, through Christ's resurrection (1 Peter 3:21).







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