September 09, 2007

CALL TO WORSHIP

(Tune: Come Thou Fount)

Jesus Christ, our God and Saviour,

Guide and Counsellor and Friend,

Bearing all our sins and sorrow,

Kind and loving to the end.

Jesus Christ, our consolations

Flow from Thee, our sovereign God;

Love and faith and hope and patience

All are purchased by Thy blood.

Born Thy people to deliver,

Born a child and yet a king,

Born to reign in us forever,

Now Thy holy kingdom bring.

By Thine own eternal Spirit

Rule in all our hearts alone;

By Thy all-sufficient merit

Raise us to Thy glorious throne.

(2 Timothy 4:8)

MORNING WORSHIP:

10:00 Bible Study: Video sermon by Richard Warmack

11:00 Service: Speaker Mark Pannell, Eager Ave. Grace Church

Birthdays: Felton Riggins – Sept. 11^th.

A BLESSED REALITY

The blessed truth that Christ died a judicial, legal death based on the sins of God's elect imputed to Him in no way diminishes the reality of what He Himself suffered unto death nor what we as the ones for whom He died receive as the result of His death. His death based on sin imputed was REAL, and sin did not have to be imparted or infused to Him in order to make His suffering unto death real. Our sins could never have contaminated Christ's divine nature, and had our sins contaminated His human nature, He would have been disqualified to be our Substitute and Redeemer. The doctrine of sin imputed to Christ and righteousness imputed to His sheep at the cross is no legal fiction or non-reality. It is the real justification of God's elect in Christ. Whenever God declares something to be so, it is no fantasy, pretense, or illusion--IT IS BLESSED REALITY! Those who see imputed sin and imputed righteousness as merely a legal fiction reveal a serious misunderstanding of the ground of salvation and of the Gospel of God's grace in Christ Jesus. The doctrine of sin imputed to Christ and righteousness imputed to us at the cross in no way diminishes or denies the necessity and the greatness of the Holy Spirit's work in the new birth. Our Lord said that we must be born again (John 3:3,6). Without the new birth, there is no salvation, but the work of the Holy Spirit IN us is the fruit of the work of Christ FOR us. Also, the work of the Holy Spirit in us is to reveal the glory of Christ and His finished work for us.. When we see the preeminence of Christ in our salvation and rest in Him and His finished work alone, we honor the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Col. 2:9). This is a blessed reality.

-- Bill Parker, Pastor of 13th. Street Baptist Church

FAITH

Faith looks neither to works, nor worthiness in self, but considers what Christ is to the soul, and what the soul is in Him- righteous, perfectly and everlastingly righteous. Then joy, GREAT JOY, springs up. See the claim of faith is “My God.” (Isaiah 61:10).Faith does not cause the Lord to become our God, nor adopt us into His family, but it claims that peculiar and precious interest in Him, which the word of His grace reveals. The Father draws us by His Spirit, to His Son as our righteousness. The Spirit bears witness that we are righteous in His Son. Then faith makes the claim, boasts of it, and glories in it. Then Jesus has our hearts and our hopes. Our affections are placed on Him, our hopes center in Him.

—W. Mason

Where else can I hide?

"For in the time of trouble He will hide me in His pavilion: in the secret of His tabernacle will He hide me; He will set me up upon a rock." Psalm 27:5

We have no refuge but Jesus where we can hide our guilty heads. Where else can I hide? In the law? That curses. In self? That is treacherous. In the world? That is under the curse of God. In my own righteousness? That is filthy rags. In my own strength? All is weakness. In my own resolutions of amendment? They will all issue in my falling more foully than before.

J.C. Philpot - (1802-1869)

An extract from “The Chief of Sinners Saved”

1. Man's subjection under sin. He is "sold under sin," Rom. 7:14, and brought "into captivity to the law of sin," ver. 23. "Law of sin:" that sin seems to have a legal authority over him; and man is not only a slave to one sin, but many, Tit. 3:3, "serving divers lusts." Now when a man is sold under the power of a thousand lusts, every one of which has an absolute tyranny over him, and rules him as a sovereign by a law; when a man is thus bound by a thousand laws, a thousand cords and fetters, and carried whither his lords please, against the dictates of his own conscience and force of natural light; can any man imagine that his own power can rescue him from the strength of these masters that claim such a right to him, and keep such a force upon him, and have so often baffled his own strength, when he attempted to turn against them?

2. Man's affection to them. He does not only serve them, but he serves them, and every one of them, with delight and pleasure; Tit. 3:3. They were all pleasures, as well as lusts; friends as well as lords. Will any man leave his sensual delights and such sins that please and flatter his flesh? Will a man ever endeavour to run away from those lords which he serves with affection? having as much delight in being bound a slave to these lusts, as the devil has in binding him. Therefore when you see a man cast away his pleasures, deprive himself of those comfortable things to which his soul was once knit, and walk in paths contrary to corrupt nature, you may search for the cause anywhere, rather than in nature itself. No piece of dirty, muddy clay can form itself into a neat and handsome vessel; no plain piece of timber can fit itself for the building, much less a crooked one. Nor a man that is born blind, give himself sight.

God deals with men in this case as he did with Abraham. He would not give Isaac while Sarah's womb, in a natural probability, might have borne him; but when her womb was dead, and age had taken away all natural strength of conception, then God gives him; that it might appear that he was not a child of nature, but a child of promise.