Jesus the Perfect Savior

Would you agree with me that Jesus is a perfect Savior? Did Jesus accomplish what He set out to do? Starting with the eternal God and His Sovereign will and thinking about what the Bible says concerning redemption, I want to consider why Christ came and if He accomplished what he came to do.  In this study, we are first focusing on the Godhead in redemption and what the Bible says about the atonement before we move to human responsibility. Salvation's plan started before the foundation of the world.

Jesus said that the whole Old Testament pointed to and testified of Him; thousands of years of prophesy pointing to the Messiah, so why did He come?  What was the aim, what was the goal? I don't want to use conjecture here. I want to know, from the testimony of God's Word, the stated purpose of why Jesus came to this Earth. Luke 19:10  "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." Two reasons are mentioned here – He came to seek and he came to save. The angel told Joseph in Matthew 1:20-21  that Mary would have a son and "thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins." The angel said that Jesus would be successful in His mission because he "shall" save His people. The text says that He came to seek, and He came to save. Did He accomplish that goal? Was Jesus successful?

We think often of man's will in salvation, but not so much about God's will. What was the Father's will concerning the work of Christ Jesus? John 6:35-40 tells us that Jesus came to do the Father's will and the Father had given Jesus a particular people to redeem, and said He Jesus would not lose one of those people. Jesus sought those the Father gave Him. The Father chose a people and the Son came to save them, and the Spirit regenerates them and draws them to Christ (Galatians 4:4-6). If Jesus died for all men, did He die for those to whom He would not send the Spirit? Is the Trinity divided? Was it the Father’s will to send His son to die for all, yet only send the Spirit to particular people? Did the Father choose a particular people, but then the Son die for all anyway? Of course not, in the Trinity there is one purpose, and plan in the eternal covenant of redemption. 

Jesus is a perfect Saviour. With all confidence, I can say that all who come to Christ in repentant faith will find Jesus to be a perfect Savior and he will in no wise cast out those who do. I can say that Jesus never fails. Jesus heroically came to this Earth on a mission to save His people, and did exactly what He set out to do. Put your trust in a Savior that never fails.

Two Catagories, One Savior - Tuesday with Timothy #52

I Timothy 4:10 For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.

We have the designation of "all men" so all of humanity, all of the world is included. Within this group of humanity there are two categories, the believers and the unbelievers. This whole chapter thus far is speaking of these two categories. A little further, and two more categories are in view, false doctrine, which is concerned with the ascetic (what to eat, whether to marry) contrasted with true doctrine. Verses 1-3 are about men who depart from the faith and teach doctrines of devils, contrasted by the faithful brethren in verse 6. These unbelievers are people in Timothy's midst, even some in the church. He is preaching to both categories of people, who are hearing now two different doctrines.

Now, let's look at the immediate context:

1Ti 4:7-11  But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.  (8)  For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.  (9)  This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.  (10)  For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.  (11)  These things command and teach.

Here we also find two categories. The life that is now, and the life which is to come. Thus far in the argument, Paul as set several items against each other.

    A                                    B
Believers                    Unbelievers
Pure Doctrine             False Doctrine
Spirituality                 Sensuality
Bodily Exercise         Godliness
Life that is now          Life that is to come

Category A is concerned with truth, believers, and godliness and eternal life. Category B, which is being fought against, is to do with the earthly.  These differences in worldliness and living for today contrasted by truth and living for eternity.  Now we get to verse 10 in which Paul does connects this verse with the context of the previous chapter by saying "For, therefore".  This is a worthy saying and because it is a worthy saying and to this end, we suffer for the true gospel and fight for true doctrine for the believers as we exercise ourselves to godliness. That is why Paul labors and suffers. "Because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe."

Again we have two categories of people, those who believe (Group A) and those who don't (Group B).  Now, even my Arminian friends must admit that Jesus cannot be the same kind of Saviour to both categories. Jesus did not eternally save the rich man in Luke 16 who lifted his eyes up in Hell and save Lazarus in Paradise. Then it says especially of those that believe. Paul says that Jesus is the σωτήρ (sōtēr) the deliverer, sustainer, preserver of all men. God gives life to both believers and unbelievers. Those false brethren who teach sensuality and the doctrines of devils (1 Timothy 4:1) do so with their Lord's air, God's food "which God created" (1 Timothy 4:3) in the bodies God gave them (1 Timothy 4:8) . But Jesus is the eternal Saviour, not only of the body, but of the soul to those that believe. Following the flow of the chapter, I think this is clear that Paul is tying up his final thoughts on these two groups of people by showing two different categories of "salvation" or deliverance. Those that are profaning the truth of the gospel and promoting a sensuality are doing so by taking God's creation (I Timothy 6:13; Acts 17:28).
Jesus is the Saviour of all men because there is no other name under Heaven whereby we must be saved. He is the sustainer and protector and keeper of the whole universe. Paul uses the same idea in Acts 13:23 "Of this man's seed hath God according to his promise raised unto Israel a Saviour, Jesus..." Did God raise unto Israel a Saviour? Yes He did, but why is Paul preaching to the Gentiles? Because God had blinded the eyes of the Jews (Acts 28:25-28; Romans 9-11).

When I present the gospel, I compel men to come to Christ, and if they do in faith, Jesus will save them.  Jesus is the only hope for humanity. He is the only Saviour of men. But especially the Saviour of those who believe, because Christ saves them.

Remember what Paul is doing here. He is instructing Timothy to preach the truth even when people don't want to hear it. Preach the truth when there are heretics in his number who are trying to lead people away. Preach the truth when church members are trying to split the church by preaching about fables and old wives tales. Preach the gospel, Timothy. Labor in the gospel, suffer for the gospel and keep these faithful sayings. Why? Because the truth that Timothy declares is the true gospel, that Jesus is the Saviour.  He is the Saviour in an experimental way for those that believe. Christ died for them and saves them. Keep preaching to believers and unbelievers alike. Preach the gospel to the lost; preach it to the saved.

Be Filled with the Spirit - by Lewis Kiger

Ephesians 5:18 says this: “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit”

The filling of the Spirit is one of the most controversial subjects among Christianity. Ask any average believer, what it means to be filled with the Spirit and there is no telling what kind of reply you might get. The responses may range from indifference to ignorance or even to religious superstition.

Yet, the Bible clearly explains that when any individual flees to the cross and finds forgiveness of sins and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ that the Holy Spirit of God comes to dwell within them immediately, completely and unceasingly. Romans 8:9 states that if anyone does not have the Spirit of God, they are not the child of God. At the very moment of salvation, every believer has all the Holy Spirit they are ever going to get. Yet, there is a difference between the indwelling of the Spirit and the infilling of the Spirit. The question is not, do we have “all the Spirit,” but rather; does the Spirit have all of you?

We who are saved are commanded here in this Inspired Text to be filled with the Spirit. Readers, the human spirit fails unless the Holy Spirit fills. Too much of our Christian life is attempted in the flesh. We seek to serve God in our own power and we fail again and again. Trying to serve God without the enabling of the Spirit is a tiring and unproductive task. It is akin to buying a brand new car with all the bells and whistles, but you don’t know how to operate it. So, you just put it in neutral and push it everywhere you go. So is the Christian who seeks to serve God by his own strength. It will wear you out and you will not get very far.

Each of us, if we are to honor God with our lives, need to be Spirit-filled Christians. This text is a command, not a suggestion. God never makes suggestions. God always gives directives. We are commanded by God, to be filled with the Spirit.

The verse actually begins with a prohibition against drunkenness. “Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” The believer is never to be needlessly under the influence of any substance, alcohol included. Intoxicants lower our inhibition, they make us more vulnerable to sin and more susceptible to yielding to what is forbidden.

The prohibition in this passage from drunkenness states that it is excess or debauchery. Too many of us have known men and women who have wasted away their lives because of the powerful influence of alcohol.

Drunkenness causes us to lose control while being filled with the Spirit causes us to gain control. In fact, Galatians 5:22,23 lists the nine fruit of the Spirit; the last of which is self-control.  To be filled with the Spirit is not some spiritual intoxication or inebriation where you lose control of yourself. Instead, the filling of the Spirit will cause you to exercise temperance or self-restraint.

Too many Christians place too much emphasis on the first half of this verse and not nearly enough on the second. The command to be filled is just as stringent and necessary as the command not to be drunk with wine. If we are to be fruit-bearing Christians we must be filled with the Spirit. This demand is not for a select few, but for every believer. Further yet, the original language presents this mandate to us in the present tense meaning, “keep being filled with the Spirit.”

A well-known evangelist was asked one time if he was filled with the Spirit to which he replied: “yes, but I leak.” And so do we all.

We are filled with the Spirit when, and only when, we yield to the Spirit. When we disobey God it grieves the Spirit. To be Spirit-filled, we must maintain a steady diet of Scripture. We must live in fellowship with God by avoiding sin and obeying His Word. The Spirit-filled Christian will take up his cross, die to himself and follow after the Lord Christ.

Only God knows what could be accomplished if all His children would surrender their whole lives to Him and seek to faithfully serve Him by the empowerment of the Spirit.

Pastor Lewis Kiger

Memorial Heights Baptist Church

svdbygrace2@roadrunner.com

Sermon Prep on the "hard, high road"

"What is more surprising and disquieting is the fact that those who might be expected ex officio to have a profound and permanent appreciation of literature may in reality have nothing of the sort. They are mere professionals. Perhaps they once had the full response, but the ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ has long since dinned it out of them. I am thinking of unfortunate scholars in foreign universities who cannot ‘hold down their jobs’ unless they repeatedly publish articles each of  which must say, or seem to say, something new about some literary work; or of overworked reviewers, getting through novel after novel as quickly as they can, like a schoolboy doing his ‘prep’. For such people reading often becomes mere work. The text before them comes to exist not in its own right but simply as raw material; clay out of which they can complete their tale of bricks. Unfortunately, ambition and combativeness can also produce it. And, however it is produced, it destroys appreciation." C.S. Lewis - An Experiment in Criticism. 

Lewis was talking about professors and reviewers of books who view reading great works as merely a job and though they read, they no longer profit from them. They allowed their deadlines to hardened them.

I thought of sermon prep as I read this. It can become easy to ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ and become a sermon smith rather than feed off the Word in the study. Sunday is always just around the bend. It's coming and you have to have something to say. Though it can be stressful and difficult and does require great amounts of mental labor, prayer, and time; don't allow the continual work in the Text to harden your soul to where you are no longer speaking the Words of God, but performing your outline. The farmer that labors has to take the firstfruits (2 Tim 2:6).  You can make excellent outlines, but are you feeding your soul? But the consequences are far more grave for a man of God than a literary professor.

The Ten Tenets

Scott Oliphint  provided, in his book Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith, ten crucial theological tenets for a covenantal, Christian apologetic. If you are interested in shaping your worldview or getting more indepth in the tenets listed below, I recommend the book.

1. The faith that we are defending must begin with, and necessarily include, the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who, as God, condescends to create and to redeem. 

2. God’s covenantal revelation is authoritative by virtue of what it is, and any covenantal, Christian apologetic will necessarily stand on and utilize that authority in order to defend Christianity. 

3. It is the truth of God’s revelation, together with the work of the Holy Spirit, that brings about a covenantal change from one who is in Adam to one who is in Christ. 

4. Man (male and female) as image of God is in covenant with the triune God for eternity. 

5. All people know the true God, and that knowledge entails covenantal obligations. 

6. Those who are and remain in Adam suppress the truth that they know. Those who are in Christ see that truth for what it is. 

7. There is an absolute, covenantal antithesis between Christian theism and any other, opposing position. Thus, Christianity is true and anything opposing it is false. 

8. Suppression of the truth, like the depravity of sin, is total but not absolute. Thus, every unbelieving position will necessarily have within it ideas, concepts, notions, and the like that it has taken and wrenched from their true, Christian context. 

9. The true, covenantal knowledge of God in man, together with God’s universal mercy, allows for persuasion in apologetics. 

10. Every fact and experience is what it is by virtue of the covenantal, all-controlling plan and purpose of God.

Ornery Article

 In Huckleberry Finn, Huck found himself taken up by a family that was in the middle of a blood feud. All week, the two families would kill one another; except on Sunday, when they would all go to church together. Huck described the sermon: “It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.”

Huck would probably think this is a pretty ornery article too,  because the doctrine of predestination and election is a most humbling teaching and it rubs against the grain of our natural feelings. The doctrine of election is that in eternity, before God created the world, He chose among the children of men sinners to whom He would show mercy and save in Jesus Christ. God "predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of His will" where God had made us accepted in Christ (Ephesians 1:4-6 ).

The fact of God's sovereign election of sinners unto salvation is found throughout the whole Bible. Whether in explicit, clear, undeniable teaching, (Ephesians 1; Romans 8:28-30; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14) or through examples of the lives of believers, you find God's choice of particular people. God chose Noah and his family. God chose Abram out of all the other Chaldean men. God chose Isaac, not Ishmael. God chose Jacob and not Esau prior to them being born, doing either good nor evil (Romans 9). God chose Israel and not Egypt or the Canaanites, or Amorites. God chose Paul on the road to Damascus, and not his traveling companions. Why? Grace – underserved favor to undeserving sinners.

Election is a worshipful, God exalting doctrine because God gets all the glory. Men will allow God to be everywhere, except His throne, but the Lord is in Heaven and does as He pleases. Charles Spurgeon said "…I am quite certain that, if God had not chosen me, I should never have chosen him; and I am sure he chose me before I was born, or else he never would have chosen me afterwards; and he must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why he should have looked upon me with special love."

The question for Bible believers is not whether God chooses, but why. If God saves based on what we do, then it is no more grace.  Ephesians 2:8  "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God". Christian, love God as he has revealed Himself. Worship the Potter (Romans 9:20-23) and believe that salvation is of the Lord.  dougnewell4th@gmail.com

Work and Suffer - #51

1Timothy 4:9-10 This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe. These things command and teach.

To be a faithful pastor, you must preach the word of the Lord. "This is a faithful saying" includes all that was said before about being a faithful pastor. What Paul has said is true and worthy to be believed. Everyone has advice and knows what  a preacher should do, but only the Word of God should bind the conscience of the man of God. Not all advice is bad, not all advice is good. Paul isn't giving advice and you need to believe it.

Paul believes this truth so much that he gives his life over to the work and suffers for the glory of Christ. Paul loved those he ministered to enough to tell them the truth whether they hated him or not. Van Til used to say we should be "mild in manner, strong in matter". You can be kind and gentle and winsome all day and litterly twice on Sunday, and if you are faithful to the Word of God, you will suffer reproach from those who do not want to hear the truth. Once you refuse old wives fables (4:7) the story doesn't end there, because those that sell fables are not going to be happy. Paul suffered for the sake of the gospel - it is worthy to suffer for.

Man of God, the gospel is more important than our feelings, more important than our own lives. We are the ambassadors of Christ and must count it all joy to be able to declare the truth. The God we serve is the living God. He is living so He can bless you. Living, so He will support you. He is living, so He sees you in your work. Trust Him. Trust your Saviour. He will be your strength when you have none and He will support you when the time comes to hold to these faithful sayings. Take heart and take courage that the living God is with those that declare His truth. This doesn't mean that you will have no troubles. It means that when you do have troubles, keep in mind that you are the ambassador of the Living God declaring His message and there this road of suffering for the truth is a well traveled road.

Next time, we will get a little more in depth about the "Saviour of all men". Earlier in the series, a man said that my treatment of chapter two was "the most ridiculous thing he had ever read in his life". So as not to disappoint my semi-Pelagian friend, I want to give a full treatment of the passage.

Make Judah Great Again

“It was Jeremiah’s lot to prophesy at a time when all things in Judah were rushing down to the final and mournful catastrophe; when political excitement was at its height; when the worst passions swayed the various parties; and the most fatal counsels prevailed; It was his to stand in the way over which his nation was rushing headlong to destruction; to make an heroic effort to arrest it, and to turn it back; and to fail, and to be compelled to step to one side and see his own people, whom he loved with the tenderness of a woman, plunge over the precipice into the wide, weltering ruin.” 

W.G. Moorehead