Hymns for service: “Nothing But The Blood” – p. 212 “Near the Cross” – p. 351
FROM THE PASTOR
I am preaching today in Ruston, LA, for Pastor Richard Warmack and the congregation of Grace Baptist Church. Please pray for me as I preach the Gospel to these brethren, and for Debbie and me as we travel home tomorrow. Please pray also for Brothers Jim Casey and Jason Renfroe as they deliver God’s Word to you here this morning.
"Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise" (Eph. 6:2). We do not come to any worship service to honor men and women. We come to worship God by honoring Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. However, let us never forget to thank God for our fathers and our mothers. Let us love and honor them for the love they have given us. We especially thank God for our godly parents who taught us and brought us up under the Gospel of His grace in Christ. On this mother's day I thank God that He blessed me with a mother who loved me and sacrificed much for me. Most of all I thank God for her legacy to me in the truth of righteousness found only in and by the Lord Jesus Christ. – Pastor Bill Parker
“I HAVE FOUND A RANSOM” (Job 33:24)
“Then He is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him (let the sinner be rescued) from going down to the pit (of everlasting destruction): I have found (devised and secured) a ransom (propitiation, satisfaction).” The ransom the Father found was none other than His only begotten Son. He found our Surety before the world was made and appointed Him not only to be the Redeemer of His elect people, but the price of redemption as well. Behold Him sent forth by the Father in marvelous grace and given as the ransom for the deliverance of chosen sinners from the claims of the law in His sufferings, agonies, death and resurrection. Who else except an infinitely wise God could have ever found so glorious, so precious, and so worthy a ransom as this. Christ was the Priest Who offered the Sacrifice, and He was the Sacrifice Who was offered. In the ransom of sinners, Christ is all.—Pastor Jim Byrd
Grace is a provision for men who are so fallen that they cannot lift the ax of justice, so corrupt that they cannot change their own natures, so averse to God that they cannot turn to Him, so blind that they cannot see Him, so deaf that they cannot hear Him, so dead that He Himself must open their graves and lift them into resurrection. – G.S. Bishop
The "one mediator between God and men" is "the man" Christ Jesus. There is but ONE man through which God will accept men and that is by "one man's obedience." Christ, by virtue of His death, put away the sin that separates His people from God. Now they "come to God by Him!" We must be declared free from guilt, and invested with a righteousness that will stand before the law of sinless perfection and entitle us to the kingdom of heaven. And if we have it not in ourselves, where must we look for it but as existing solely in the person of Jesus Christ? Dependence therefore upon that righteousness, as wrought out by Him for believers, and appointed of God for sinners to trust in, is the gracious faith of the Gospel by which the soul is justified. Satan and the world may ask us, "How can you be justified by a righteousness which is not yours?" We answer, "The righteousness of Christ is ours, and ours by as great a right as any other thing we possess, to wit, by the free gift of God: for it hath pleased Him to give us a garment who were naked, and to give us, who had none of our own, a righteousness answerable to justice. -- William Cowper
The book of life, or decree of election, is the marriage-register of the saints; in which their everlasting espousal to Christ stands indelibly recorded by the pen of God's free and eternal love. As the gold of which money is made is the king's property ever before it is struck into coin, and before it visibly bears the royal image and superscription; so the unregenerate elect are God's own heritage, though they do not appear to be such, until the Holy Spirit has made them pass through the mint of effectual calling, and actually stamped them into current coin for the kingdom of Heaven. The elect are betrothed to Christ from everlasting in the covenant of grace; they are actually married to Him, and join hands with Him, in conversion; but they are not taken home to the Bridegroom’s house until death dismisses them from the body. -- Augustus Toplad
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