And We Know

[0:00] I'm glad you all are here tonight.

[0:11] Last Monday night we met and continued our study on the perseverance of the saints.! And we covered verse 1 of Romans chapter 8.

[0:22] ! That verse reads as follows, There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, if you weren't here, I think we've got copies of that lesson over here.

[0:33] If we don't, I can get you a copy. Tonight we're going to pick up our study in the second verse. We're not going to study all these words at all.

[0:49] But for the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin.

[1:03] He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the flesh.

[1:25] For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law, and indeed it cannot submit to His law.

[1:39] For those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.

[1:56] But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

[2:16] And that's actually Romans 8, verse 2 to 11. And I'm just wondering if there's anybody in here that thinks we're really going to get through all those tonight. And the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write those words.

[2:34] And he speaks there of two laws. One, the law of the Spirit of life. And of course we know that is another, the third person of the Holy Trinity. The very Spirit of God.

[2:47] However, we note another law spoken of in this passage that is described as the law of sin and death. A number of theologians over the centuries believe that was a reference not to the Mosaic law, which we usually associate with the Ten Commandments.

[3:07] And neither do they believe that this is the whole field of laws and commandments found in Scripture. Rather, many theologians believe this is a reference to the sins which humans commit because of their nature inherited from Adam and which sins lead to death.

[3:29] And the Holy Spirit, by revealing the finished work of Christ in our hearts, has delivered us from death to eternal life with God. And we speak of our threefold deliverance of salvation.

[3:46] We have been delivered from the power of sin. That is a sin that has power to cast us into hell. We've been delivered from that.

[4:00] Connected to this is our deliverance from the penalty of sin. Christ took our penalty. He paid the price for us. He did so by imputing our sins to Himself and imputing to us His righteousness.

[4:19] As we studied last week, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. We are being delivered, third, from the very presence of sin.

[4:31] That's an ongoing process through sanctification. that will not be complete until we are joined with Christ in glory.

[4:42] John had a comment about that in his first epistle, 1 John 3, 2, We shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.

[4:53] Well, there's so much we could say if we work through every verse and every word of Romans chapter 8. But I'm not going to do that.

[5:05] We're going to leave that behind us because I'm going to draw us back to our focus in this portion of our overall study entitled Salvation God's Way.

[5:20] We are examining the great reform doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. At some point, Baptists started calling out eternal security of the believer, which I've added to the eternal security of the true believer.

[5:35] You have to add those words nowadays because so much is passed off as being true that's not true or genuine that's not genuine. There are many passages in both Old and New Testament that support this crucial fact in Romans chapter 8.

[5:59] But Romans chapter 8 is the definitive statement on eternal security or on perseverance of the saints. This is where we find it.

[6:11] It's a definite statement on our security as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now we're going to slow down. If that's possible, we're going pretty slow now.

[6:23] And we're going to look at these word for word in 10 verses in the book of Romans chapter 8. And we're actually going to skip forward and we're going to begin in verse 28.

[6:40] And if you get a copy of this lesson and you see in verse like in verse one word 28 put a little space between the N and the V and it makes more sense.

[6:50] In verse 28. It's not an in verse. It's in verse. This is the area of Scripture where we learn that we are secure in Christ.

[7:02] Now we've already looked at some of those, haven't we? John 6. John 10. We've looked at others. But this is the definitive statement. And I'm going to begin in verse 28 tonight.

[7:16] And it would be more accurate for me to say I'm going to begin in a portion of verse 28 tonight. We're only going to get to a portion.

[7:29] The verse that we're going to be looking at, verse 28, actually contains four parts. And we can refer to them and this isn't rocket science, portion A, B, C, and D.

[7:45] It's real simple. And we will begin with portion A or more accurately with portion that I list as Romans chapter 8 verse 28A.

[8:00] And we're going to see B, C, and D will follow. Here is our verse for tonight. Our part of a verse. And we know.

[8:15] Verse 28. First three words. Depending on your translation. And we know. Beginning in verse 28 until the end of Romans chapter 8 are the details of our salvation and why our salvation is secure in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[8:47] Why are we secure? Paul, writing by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is going to tell us in these verses from verse 28 to the end of the chapter.

[8:57] In our overall study of salvation God's way, there is no more important section of Scripture than these. Because this tells us we're going to be in heaven.

[9:09] It assures us that are followers of Christ. We're going to be in heaven. As it pertains to these great truths, there's no better way to begin than with these three small inspired words containing nine letters in the English alphabet.

[9:32] It's not very long. Not very long at all. These simple words stand as every Christian's absolute certainty of eternal security as expressed here by the author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit.

[9:52] Paul, writing by inspiration, says, and we know. That is powerful. That is so powerful. This is not the Apostle Paul's personal opinion.

[10:08] He didn't write personal opinion. He wrote the words of God. Those three words reveal and express to us the inerrant, infallible, inspired, authoritative, verbal, and plenary truth of the Word of God.

[10:30] Now those words bear some explaining tonight. Inerrant means the Bible is completely true and truthful in all that it teaches.

[10:44] Infallible refers to the doctrine that the Bible is unfailing in its purpose. Inspired refers to the act of the Holy Spirit upon the biblical writers that ensured that what they wrote was the Word of God.

[11:01] And you know, it's amazing. He did it without violating their intelligence, their literary skills. He worked through their intellect and came out with the perfect Word of God.

[11:16] Authoritative means that the Scriptures were actually God-breathed. They are panoustos. God breathed out the Word onto the sacred page and they are wholly true in all things that they assert.

[11:31] Now, I have to make a little sidebar comment here. In the original autograph and therefore function with the authority of God's own words.

[11:43] In the original. And we're going to talk about that here in just a little bit, just in a moment. Verbal and plenary means that even down to every word found in the Bible is given to us by God.

[11:58] Every single word. Every single word. Now, when we talk about these characteristics of the Bible, again, we're talking about the original autograph, the copies that Paul wrote out.

[12:15] Regrettably, none of those any longer exist. or they have yet to be discovered by the archaeologist Shoveler. my feelings are they probably have gone out of existence.

[12:29] They would be so old. It is very interesting that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, I believe in 1947, just a year before my birth, when they were discovered by a shepherd boy of all people, that's significant, I think, they discovered the complete book of Isaiah.

[12:55] And what was so interesting, in 1947, the oldest book of Isaiah we had at the time was from 900 A.D. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, not very old.

[13:10] 900 A.D. This discovery of Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls took us back to 200 B.C.

[13:21] So they went from this document 900 A.D. to 200 B.C. That's 1,100 years. That is an amazing span of time.

[13:35] When the two copies were compared, they discovered something really amazing. There wasn't a comma missing.

[13:46] There wasn't a punctuation missing. There wasn't a word missing. Now, we're not going to develop that tonight. It's a fascinating study, though, how scrupulous the Jews were in writing down Scripture.

[14:01] I mean, it was an art form. And they had like seven supervisors that reviewed their work. If they're writing a scroll and they got one little jot or tittle out of place, then they had to go through a ceremony of destroying that scroll with all these priests that were supervising and start that page over.

[14:28] So, they were very precise in making sure they were recording the Holy Book of God. So, Paul opens this crucial section with three words from God.

[14:45] And we know. I'm going to tell you about those three words. When you think about them, there is no room for doubt in the choice of those words.

[15:00] Remember, they came from God who cannot lie. They came from the only perfect being in the universe. And He writes down to us a message and we know.

[15:13] We know. No room for doubt in those choice of words. they are based on God's authority. It can never be successfully challenged.

[15:25] As followers of Christ, we know that every aspect of our life is in God's hands and God will use that fact to put His glory on display.

[15:37] We can also know that what follows will work for our ultimate blessing. We know these things. But the thrust of Paul's opening given to him by the Holy Spirit is that not only do we know, but it is implied and we can know.

[16:00] We should know. John's going to write about that in the first epistle, chapter 5, when he says, these things I've written that you may know that you have eternal life.

[16:12] Here, Paul perfectly compliments John. They got their material from the same author, Holy Spirit, and Paul gets his information and he says, and we know, and we can know.

[16:25] That is an extremely important concept. We know because God has allowed us to know. We know because we can know because God wants us to know.

[16:37] We can know because the words are ultimately of divine origin. These words have been inspired perfectly by a perfect God.

[16:51] Now, there's great tragedy here at the same time and this tragedy has existed down through the centuries. Sadly, it is true especially in our day.

[17:06] Men have always challenged the accuracy and authenticity of Scripture. Scriptures are always under assault, always under attack.

[17:20] In our day, there is a wholesale rejection of the clear meaning of the Bible. I heard men say, well, that's an old Jewish Bible, that's an old Jewish book, and it's ancient, and it's moldy, and it's kind of like our Constitution where they want to rewrite that for modern interpretation.

[17:40] They will put modern interpretations on the Word of God. The Bible interprets itself. It interprets itself. In our day, there is a wholesale rejection of the clear meaning of the Bible.

[17:54] I don't think we're very far off to say that people really want the Bible to say what they want to believe and not what it really says.

[18:09] They'd rather have the Bible say what they believe. That's why I always am amused when guys say, well, what that means to me, and you've got 42 different interpretations in one room.

[18:23] Or they'll say, well, God as I perceive Him to be, I don't care how you perceive, how does God reveal Himself? That's what I want to know.

[18:34] How has God revealed Himself in space-time history? And He's done so. And this is especially true, this rejection of what God says and what God means is especially true concerning a belief that God guarantees the true believers eternal security.

[19:00] What the reformers called perseverance of the saints. Perseverance of the saints. In the alternative, entire denominations have come up with systems of belief that teach that salvation is a cooperative effort between God and man.

[19:24] one. And each must do their part. And if one or the other fails, then it's not eternal and it's not going to happen.

[19:36] So each have to do their part. Now usually the denominations that hold to that will almost always say, but the failures are usually the human element that destroys the person's relationship with God.

[19:53] And then that person supposedly returns. And we're talking about people that were supposedly truly saved. when I have pastors and people that believe that and ask them well define a saved person, they're way out in left field.

[20:09] Like Barna, you know, he does surveys on Christians. He said there's 176 million Christians in America. And he said a Christian is anyone that goes to church at one time a year. I don't think Mr.

[20:22] Barna's got that very accurate. Anyway, that was personal. I threw that in for free. But they return, according to the denominations as a hold of this, to the category of again being lost.

[20:37] They were lost, they were saved, they're lost again. There are many denominations in the world that hold fiercely to the belief of conditional salvation or the truth that one can lose his or her salvation.

[20:55] We refer to those churches primarily as Arminian churches. It was named after Jacob Arminius. He held to these beliefs. And if you study his life, he was a real introverted guy.

[21:07] He didn't want to be the center of attention. He became the center of attention. But while this is far short of a comprehensive list, some of the denominations teaching conditional salvation are once saved, not necessarily always saved, are Methodists, free will Baptists, independent Christian churches, which I grew up in, churches of Christ, those are the guys without pianos or organs, General Baptists, not Southern, and General Baptists go way back, way back, 1600s, 1500s.

[21:43] Seventh-day Adventists, Church of the Nazarene, that was interesting. One of my officers, reserve officers, was killed in a car wreck, and he was a staunch believer, and he was in the Nazarene church, and that pastor got up there, everybody's a Calvinist at a funeral, everybody's a Calvinist at a funeral, oh I know he's in heaven, well wait a minute, the day before, he'd say, well you can't be sure, but that was at the church of the Nazarene where he had the funeral.

[22:11] The Wesleyan church, the Salvation army, conservative Mennonites, the Amish church, most if not all charismatic churches hold to losing your salvation, and Pentecostal churches, Pentecostal churches, and again that list is not comprehensive, many more churches and denominations could be added, now as I said earlier the common bond with these denominations is the belief that our salvation is a cooperative effort between God and man, and we are going to talk about this in a later lesson but it's coming up and I've already been studying for it, we do have to bring something to the cross, we have to bring our sins, if you're not a sinner, the cross isn't for you, Christ came to save sinners, and if none of you, if there's somebody who's not a sinner, he came to save sinners, now he also says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of

[23:19] God, there's none righteous, not even one, there's none who choose God, there's none who's seeking after God, we have now the seeker church, the only seeker in the Bible is God, he's out seeking to save the lost, to seek and save the lost, I have many friends who hold to the beliefs of conditional salvation, we have interesting discussions, we have interesting discussions, and when we had one of them died in a tragedy, a couple of them came and said, we said this morning, we wish we believed the way Tom believes, you know, I have many who hold to these, and when we discuss the topic, I ask them, are you going to go to heaven?

[24:09] And to the person, they always say, well, yes, I'm going to they assure me they or at least say they hope so. I've heard some of them say, I hope so, others say, oh, yeah, I'm going, I'm going, okay.

[24:23] I then ask them, okay, one day when you get there, you're going to see Jesus walking towards you, and you're going to go up to him or he's going to go up to you, and I want to ask you a question to my friends that believe you can that they had to bring certain things to get saved more than just a bucket of sins and I say to them how much credit are you going to give Jesus for being in heaven and I've never had any of them say anything less than 100% and we would say that right 100% credit and then I will say wait a minute you just told me the things that you have to do to get there are you sure it's not 90-10 or 99-1 or you know come up with some and they don't want to go there they don't want to go there no no I'm going to give them 100% and usually that's followed when I bring that up by a period of silence because

[25:28] I know the wheels are turning in their heads of losing one salvation I have never met one tell me he actually did at one time lose his salvation and then had to get it back again I've never had him tell me that I did have a guy who was really mad at the police department when I was chief and that happened every day and he came in and he said I'm so mad I'm about to lose my salvation he was saying I sure had it but I didn't but I've never had one of them say I lost it but I got it back again if they ever do I will point out that in all the Bible there is no language or example of someone ever being born again again did that make sense we're twice born we're not thrice born we were born of our mothers dad helped out too he had a role and we are born of the spirit now if you're going to lose your salvation and

[26:52] I tell my Arminian friends this has it got to be an egregious sin I mean you can't it's not spitting on the sidewalk is it no no no no throw your gum out the window! no serious what about violating the greatest commandment love God with all your mind heart soul and strength every moment every second of every day your entire life and you never fulfill the greatest commandment and they don't answer what about the second greatest love your neighbor yourself they don't want to answer that they don't want to answer that they just don't go there but let's face it guys we need a savior every moment of our life don't we why we're still sinners Paul Romans 7 remember we studied that what a wretch am I I do what I don't want to do I leave undone the things I want to do and

[27:52] I know I should do them who will deliver me from this body of death and that's when you get into chapter 8 verse 1 no condemnation people who believe they can lose their salvation deny the words of Paul and the Holy Spirit which says and we know I've had guys tell me if you ever say I know I'm saved you're sinning yeah God wants you to know he doesn't want us to guess he doesn't want us to you know well I think so I hope so maybe I am some days I don't feel like it well that's true he wants us to know that we're in a relationship with him the correct relationship based upon the finished work of Christ not based upon my finished work not based on anything

[28:54] I did they will tell you they don't know and that and they will tell you ultimately! and I've had him tell me this and it's funny I almost would pay him to say this if I can just get to heaven and close the door behind me I'll be safe to which I say Lucifer was the highest most exalted created being in the universe remember Jesus wasn't created Jesus was over Lucifer he created him but Lucifer fell and took a third of the angelic host with him where did they fall from heaven your security is not in a place it's in a person your security is in the Lord Jesus Christ it's not in a place it's not in a place I think a quote from

[29:55] Dr. MacArthur would be in order at this point Paul is saying that the truth of eternal security is clearly revealed by God to us so that all believers are able with certainty to know the comfort and hope of that reality I mean those those words are important guys this is what brings us comfort and hope and remember hope settled Christian hope is settled it's a settled hope it's in granite when God writes your name in the Lamb's Book of Life before the foundation of the world he wrote it in ink actually took his finger and he chiseled it in stone he chiseled it in stone I always remember when Pam Farmer former member and I told you this before she graduated!

[30:48] West and she was the! valedictorian so she got to speak and she said you know all my friends here know I'm Baptist and most of you are Wesleyan and said we are very close in what we believe except we have our names written in the book of life in ink and you guys do it in pencil well some of them laughed and some of them frowned you know but Pam Pam said that Pam said that let me continue with Dr.

[31:11] MacArthur here he wants us the comfort and hope of that reality if they simply take God at his word and three of his words are and we know very important and we know because we're going to build from here into the!

[31:28] end of the chapter and we know Dr. MacArthur God's child need never fear being cast out of heaven we never fear being cast out of God the Father's house we should never fear losing our citizenship our ambassadorship we're ambassadors for Christ and our citizenship in the heavenlies and his eternal kingdom of righteousness we do not have to fear those things how did we ever achieve that we didn't Jesus did he is the propitiation the appeasement the satisfaction God sees the blood of Christ applied to our account and says I am satisfied the debt is paid in full we can have confidence in our sovereign

[32:30] God who causes all things and who is responsible for our salvation because he cannot fail it's not that it's possible for him to fail but he doesn't he cannot fail he cannot fail the Bible is filled with examples and languages language of eternal security I've noticed something about reading the Bible if you focus on a particular topic it'll come alive when you're reading eternal security is one of those one such passage was penned by Paul in his book to the Philippians 1 6 and I am sure of this that's pretty strong language that's kind of like and I know I am sure of this that he who began a good work in you will not may might will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ so

[33:32] Paul opens our study tonight with three little words and we know now I want to tell you a little something about these three words there's no period after that word no k n o w the sentence continues those three words are part of a larger sentence that makes up verse 28 and here's the here's the sentence and we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God to those who are called according to his purpose an amazing verse of scripture you won't find that in the Koran you won't find that in the in the in the teachings of

[34:32] Buddha of Krishna in Hinduism Confucius you you don't find any language like that at all and we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God to those who are called according to his purpose