Galatians
3:6-9
just
as Abraham “believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”
Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham. And the
Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached
the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, “In you all the nations shall be
blessed.” So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.
The
gospel of Jesus Christ was preached to Abraham, in that we are saved by God's
grace and our faith that believes God. That is the blessing "all
nations" receive through Abraham - we believe like he did, and we are
saved. In the same way, you and I are a blessing to "all nations" by
our decision to believe God and walk according to that belief, for men are
still saved by grace through faith. That fact has always been and forever will
be. Without faith, it is (and always will be) impossible to please God -
believing that He "is" and that He is good is the bedrock of saving
grace. (Hebrews 11:6)
Our
flesh and our carnal nature, however, war against the simplicity of faith,
always seeking to justify itself through its own goodness and nobility.
Therefore, we hear numerous messages, some mixed and some perverted, telling us
there are other ways to God and other ways to please Him. Jesus is often left
out and relegated to a sideshow in God's plan of redemption (and if I can be
pleasing to God some other way, why do I need redemption???). So you will hear
none of the rugged, bare truth of our lostness and our desperately sinful nature,
little about the awfulness of the Calvary, the Blood of the Lamb - that is left
out, no longer central to today's message. It's all about people and their
needs, and our responsibility to relieve those needs. We are told we must fix
the wrongs, change the world, procure justice, etc. But there is no
acknowledgment of our inability to do anything worthy without Christ - and who
needs faith when we can accomplish our goals by being good on our own? (By the
way, "giving back" is nowhere in the scriptures, and is, in fact,
antithetical to Christ and His Word - the world never gave you anything to
"give back" but sin. This is the voice of the Anti-Christ).
Believing
God is the greatest thing any man or woman will ever do, and this cannot be
learned in a day, or in a laboratory, or in any field of our choosing. The Lord
will place us in impossible and dire straits, he will squeeze and strain us, He
will frustrate and offend us until we surrender to Him or forsake Him. The
purity of our faith makes all the training and testing worth it to Him. Even
Jesus learned obedience through suffering, and so will we.
You
will never hear this message preached by great preachers of the day. What
message are you preaching?
Love
you,
Pastor
Eric
