harvestoc.net blog, Monday, November 9, 2009
Audio, Rom 11:1-6 'Divine Reservation' (8-Nov-09 Evening Sermon)
[click here for audio]
Main ideas:
1) God has the right to reject anyone and everyone.
2) God has not used that right upon Israel.
3) God’s action in the heart of a person to save him is always stronger than the action of that person in his heart to rebel.
4) It is impossible for God to set His special love upon a person and then later to change His mind—even our sin can’t change the special love that God sets upon us.
5) We can’t tell what God is actually doing from what we can see
a. He works everywhere at once.
b. He works in the heart, which is beyond our ability to observe
6) God saves for His own sake. Salvation is about God maintaining His rights, and not at all about any imagined rights of ours.
7) You can tell whom God has saved because their changed hearts are displayed in changed actions. But it is always salvation that produces the actions, and never actions that produce the salvation.
8) The first of these actions that salvation produces is the faith through which we are justified. This faith is produced by God’s saving action; it never earns God’s saving action.
9) The point of “remnant style” saving is to show how completely by grace they are chosen.
10) The point of saving by grace is to eliminate all boasting and reserve not just some people for God, but especially to reserve ALL GLORY for God.
Questions for application:
1) Do I really understand the right of God to damn EVERYONE to Hell? Do I freely acknowledge His right to do this to ME?
2) Do I have a sense of the absolute desperation of humanity, with no rights whatsoever, and deserving to be damned? Do I have a sense of MY desperation before God: MY having no rights before Him, MY deserving to be damned?
3) Am I amazed that even for utterly desperate, totally Hell-deserving sinners, instead of insisting upon this right, He has insisted upon His divine right to SAVE? Am I amazed that He would insist upon saving ME?
4) Whom have I written off as unsavable?
a. What people groups or religions?
b. What individuals?
5) Am I pessimistic about the CURRENT state of the church and the spread of the gospel?
6) Am I tempted to downplay Scripture’s description of true heart change as being visible in ACTIONS?
a. Do I ever excuse wicked actions with the good news that actions cannot save?
b. Do I ever give myself credit for righteous actions as if God didn’t savingly produce them?
7) Which do I care more about: the rights and glory of God, or the imagined rights and stolen glory of sinners?
8) Do I really love God: Does it really make a difference to me that God would get glory out of a situation?
Labels: Sermons
¶ 8:00 AM
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