Today’s Speaker: Brother Jim Casey will conduct the 11:00 am service today. Pray for him as he delivers God’s word.
Television Broadcast: Our Reign of Grace Television program is being broadcast on WFXL Fox 31, Channel 4. The program will air every Sunday morning at 11 AM.
Radio Broadcast: Sunday morning at 9:30am on 98.7 FM –WISK. To hear sermons click here
“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” (Matthew 5:13)
In limited quantities, salt is a necessary mineral for life. “A little goes a long way” can certainly be said of salt. In addition to flavoring foods, it is a preservative and a necessary regulator of fluid levels and electrical signaling in the central nervous system. A body void of salt is a dead body.
Of far greater importance is the salt of the earth. Salt is the Latin for salary; wages earned in the discourse of one’s job performed. That which Christ earned by his obedience, suffering and death, the very righteousness of God, imputed to his Church, is the salt whereby the earth is salted. In Leviticus 2:13 Christ is called “The Salt of the Covenant of thy God.” God’s elect are the salt of the earth. They are the recipients of his grace and become the vessels through which the lost elect are summoned, salted and sanctified by the gospel of grace we preach, seasoned with salt and received by faith. Without this seasoning, mans preaching is good for nothing. Any “gospel” which adds to or detracts from the accomplished, finished work of Christ in his obedience, suffering and death to secure the complete salvation of his people and impute to them his very righteousness which demands their full, free eternal salvation is salt that has lost its savor. A body void of this salt is spiritually dead.
Are you worth your salt? Is your “speech always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man?” (Colossians 4:6) Are you “unto God a sweet savor of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: To the one we are the savor of death unto death; and unto the other the savor of life unto life.” (2 Corinthians 2: 15-16) Has your soul escaped the corruption of sin through the salt of the earth?
“Have salt in yourselves and have peace one with another.” (Mark 9:50)
--- Winston Pannell
Servants of Sin vs. Servants of Righteousness
But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. 18Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness. (Rom 6:17-18)
Prior to God regenerating his elect, we were all servants of sin and under the dominion of sin. Most people automatically go to outward immoral acts when they think of being a servant of sin, and those things are sin, but those things are all products of a selfish sin principle that all men are born with, a principle inherited from Adam. A principal that is full of self righteousness and religious pride. What did Adam do when he knew that God had discovered his sin of disobedience? He selfishly made himself a fig leaf covering in an attempt to hide his sin. When I think of being a servant of sin, I think of all that time before God revealed grace to me. I did not know the true and living God. I worshiped a god of my imagination. A god that would save someone if they would just straightened up their act and started living right, and the living right standard changed according to what religion you were brought up in, or what your mother and father taught you. It says here “that ye were the servants of sin”. Then it says “but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you”. This speaks of God calling His elect by the preaching of the gospel, which is “that form of doctrine which was delivered you”. The gospel of how God saves a sinner based solely on the imputed righteousness of Christ alone. God, in time and in each successive generation, delivers the gospel message to that sinner, and God the Holy Spirit regenerates and gives spiritual life to the sinner which enables the sinner to believe the gospel and flee to Christ alone for all of salvation. The sinner will then and only then “obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you”. This is when Gods elect, His sheep, all those that God the father give to Christ in eternity, and that Christ redeemed at the cross; this is when the elect of God became free from sin in their own mind, conscious and experience. It says in Rom 6:18 18Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness. When God brings us from darkness to light, when He opens our blind eyes and reveals Himself to His elect, we’re then free from that sin that deceived us and kept us going about to establish a righteousness of our own. We then “became the servants of righteousness”. When God performs this miraculous work of grace in the hearts of His elect, they are able to serve Him in “obedience unto righteousness”. They are then able to behold God as He is “a just God and a Savior”. A God that is right and just when He saves sinners based on the blood bought righteousness of Christ.
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