ARE YOU CONFUSED?

ARE YOU CONFUSED?

“God is not the author of confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:33), so your confusion is apparently coming from a source other than God. The dictionary says the word CONFUSION means “the interchanging of what is right and what is wrong. Confusion distracts and bewilders the hearer for the purpose of causing disorder.” How true that is when it comes to Christians having a lack of knowing where they are in the overall plan and purpose of God for mankind in general, but especially for those who have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and share His eternal life.

In Psalm 70:1, the psalmist prayed, “In You, O Lord, do I put my trust. Let me never be put to confusion.” How can you and I prevent being confused? We must first realize that as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ we are involved in a spiritual warfare. Paul explained it like this: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places … that is, in the heavens.” (2 Corinthians 10:4) Our weapons are not physical ones, but they are the thoughts we gain by an understanding and application of the entire body of truth, which is Bible Doctrine.

We must be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might; therefore, we must put on the whole armor of God, that embraces the entire realm of Bible Doctrine. “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Above all, taking the shield of faith wherewith you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.” (Ephesians 6:14-17)

Ask yourself if you truly do desire to know the truth … if you do, the Lord will provide a pastor/teacher for you who has been well trained in the original languages of scripture and is able to edify and build you up in the Christian faith. The Lord has gifted certain men for the purpose of “perfecting the saints for the work of the ministry and for the edifying of the body of Christ so that we will no longer be little children, carried about by every wind of doctrine taught by the teaching of men who lie in wait to deceive. (Ephesians 4:12-14)

Paul instructed young Timothy to make God’s Word known whether it is convenient or not, because the time will come when people will not endure sound Biblical teaching, but, because they will have strong personal desires and itching ears, they will heap to themselves teachers who will turn their ears away from the truth. (2 Timothy 4:1-4)

The result of negative volition toward sound Bible Doctrine is APOSTASY … that’s when people stand away from the truth. In Jude’s epistle he tells us that those involved in apostasy are complainers who walk after their own lusts; and their mouths speak great swelling words to gain the admiration of people because it is to their advantage. (Jude 16)

The prophet Jeremiah sadly stated to the people of his day, “An amazing and horrible thing is committed in the land … the prophets prophesy falsely, the priests bear rule by their own means, and God’s people love to have it so.” (Jeremiah 5:30, 31) And again he warned them, “Don’t listen to the lies of your teachers. They speak a vision of their own thinking and NOT God’s Word!” (Jeremiah 23:16) Then the Lord told Jeremiah that if their teachers had been instructed by the Lord and caused His people to hear God’s Word, the people would have turned from their wickedness. (Jeremiah 23:22)

The fourfold responsibility for the downfall of a nation is summarized for us in Ezekiel 22:25-31: “There is a conspiracy of her prophets (teachers) in the midst thereof, like a roaring lion ravening the prey; they have devoured souls, they have taken the treasure and precious things; they have made her many widows. Her priests (believers who are taught by the prophets) have violated My law, and have profaned My holy things; they have put no difference between the holy and the profane, neither have they showed a difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have hid their eyes from my Sabbaths, and I am profaned among them. Her princes (political rulers) in the midst of them are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain, and her prophets have daubed them with untempered mortar, seeing vanity, and divining lies unto them saying, ‘thus says the Lord’ when the Lord has not spoken. The people of the land (the average people on the street) have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy; yes, they have wrongfully oppressed the stranger. And I looked for a man among them that should make up the hedge and stand in the gap before me in the land so that I should not destroy it, but I found none. Therefore, I have poured out My indignation upon them; I have consumed them with the fire of My wrath; their own way have I recompensed upon their heads says the Lord.”

We must know our enemy! The greatest enemy man can face is religion. What is religion? It is the practice of attempting to please God by man’s works. On the other hand, Christianity is God doing all the work, and He gets all the glory. Throughout His three-year ministry on earth, Jesus’ greatest opposition came from the religious leaders … the Scribes and Pharisees, and Jesus told them that the people worshipped Him in vain, because they were taught the commandments of men rather than God’s Word. (Matthew 15:9; Matthew 23:1-36 and Luke 11:39-44)

John 12:42, 43 tell us that “many of the chief rulers of the Jews believed Jesus was the Messiah, but they wouldn’t admit it to others, because the Pharisees would put them out of the synagogue. They loved being praised by men rather than being approved by God.”

The last prophet sent by the Lord to the Jews was Malachi, and He promised to send Elijah the prophet to them before the great and dreadful day of the Lord … the day of judgment. (Malachi 4:5) Following Malachi’s message were 400 silent years during which no direct word came from God. It was during those years that the two great sects, the Scribes and Pharisees, appeared with their mass of man-made traditions that actually replaced the teaching of God’s Word to the people.

At the end of those 400 silent years, John the baptizer, a man like Elijah, appeared on the scene announcing that the people should make themselves ready to receive their promised Messiah. After Jesus was baptized by John to identify Himself with His Father’s plan for His life, John identified Jesus as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) Paul said John’s message to the people was that they should repent, that is change their mental attitude, not feel sorry for their sins, but believe in Jesus Christ. (Acts 19:4)

Where are you in God’s timetable? In your study of the scriptures, can you tell to whom the Lord is speaking? Before you can answer those questions, you must have a clear understanding of the important Biblical subject known as Dispensations which is a subject generally ignored by the majority of Protestants, but it is vitally important if we are to adjust to God’s plan and purpose for our lives, so I challenge you to consider the following:

WHAT IS A DISPENSATION? A dispensation is a period of time in human history, expressed in terms of divine revelation. It is God’s way of communicating thought to help every believer find and hold the right mental attitude toward the specific time in history during which he lives, so that he can orient to God’s will, God’s plan, and God’s purpose for his life. According to Unger’s Bible Dictionary, page 269, the Greek word for dispensations is OIKONOMIA, and it means to ‘manage a household’. It is a period of time during which man is being tested in respect to obedience to some definite revelation of God’s will. Lack of understanding dispensations has caused Christians to be divided, and many cults have also been developed as a result.

Some Bible scholars have separated these ages of history into seven periods of time, but for the sake of simplicity in answering this extremely doctrinal subject, let’s break them down into four parts:
(1) During the first dispensation there were only Gentiles on the earth. When Adam and the woman disobeyed God and ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Lord drove them out of the Garden of Eden so they would not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever in their sinful state. They and their progeny were then tested to discern between good and evil and act according to the direction of their own conscience. That dispensation ended in failure for mankind, and with the exception of just 8 people, Noah and his family, the Lord destroyed that entire civilization with a flood. After the flood, the earth was populated by the three sons of Noah. (Genesis chapters 10 and 11)

(2) The next dispensation, the Jewish Age, began when the Lord called a Chaldean by the name of Abram to leave his homeland and follow Him, and promised Abram that he would be the father of a brand new race that would be a blessing to the entire world. (Genesis 12:1-3) That dispensation continued until the death, burial and resurrection of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. When the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, the dispensation of the Jews was interrupted, but it will continue for another seven years after the completion of the next dispensation called the Church Age that began on the Day of Pentecost.

(3) The dispensation of the Church is the one in which we are now living, and it will continue until an appointed time known only by God the Father. In Acts 1:9-11 and in Revelation 19:11-16, the Church is called ‘the bride of Christ’, and Jesus will come back in the clouds of the air to take His bride to heaven, as recorded in the scriptures according to 1 Corinthians 15:51-53 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Once the Church is removed from the earth, the Jewish Age will resume and continue for another seven years. It will be the center of attention during the time known as the 7-year Tribulation, which will be the worst time an all human history, and it will end when the Lord Jesus Christ returns to set up His kingdom, called the Millennium.

(4) The Millennial reign of the Lord Jesus Christ will usher in the last dispensation of human history. It will begin when He returns to the Mount of Olives from which He ascended. He will set up His 1,000 year reign of perfect environment on this earth. (Acts 1:9-11 and Revelation 19:11-16)

Satan is a master at counterfeiting, and he has been successful in convincing entire Christian denominations that we are in the Millennium right now. If that were true, Jesus Christ would be ruling as king in Jerusalem, there would be no sickness and no death except for capital punishment, the lion and the lamb would lie down peacefully together, and a 100 year old person would be considered a child, because people will live to be eight and nine hundred years old as they did before the flood in the days of Noah. None of these things are taking place today, so where do people get their false teaching? Basically, it comes from the seminaries that train their pastors … not from knowledge of the original languages of scripture! In the early 1900’s, scholars discovered the syntax and etomology of the language in which the scriptures were written, so they have the tools with which to present a more accurate interpretation of scripture. The great reformers like Luther and Calvin came out of the dark ages, and during the 16th century they were instrumental in translating God’s Word from the Latin into the language of the common people. However, they each held onto some of the false teaching to which they had been exposed earlier in life … for example, Martin Luther would not give up on infant baptism as he had been taught, and John Calvin believed that some people are elected for salvation and others are not, but neither of these are true Biblical doctrines.

Alright … you may ask, “What’s the big deal about dispensational interpretation of the Bible? My church doesn’t teach that, so who cares … maybe it isn’t that important after all.” Rejecting the doctrine of dispensations will cause a problem if your church teaches that you must keep the 10 Commandments in order to please God, because they were given to the Jews so they would know what God required of them even though He knew they would not be able to keep them. If you break one of those commandments, you are guilty of breaking all of them, and there isn’t a member of the human race who has never coveted … that is, wanted something that belongs to someone else. The apostle Paul found that out, and it made him realize he was a sinner with a very active sinful nature. Only ONE member of the human race has been able to keep the Ten Commandments, and that was Jesus, because, being born without a human father, He came into the world without a sin nature.

In this present Church Age, we have been given hundreds of commandments throughout the New Testament epistles … not just the 10 given to Israel. When Moses was in Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, he not only received the two tables of stone on which the Lord wrote the Ten Commandments, but he was also given the dietary and social laws by which the Children of Israel were to conduct themselves in the society in which they lived.

What about Sabbath Day observance? God is very clear about that in Exodus 31:16,17: “Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations for a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between Me and the children of Israel forever.” It was for those in the Jewish dispensation … not for the Church Age, and yet many require keeping it today.

How about tithing? Tithing was a form of income tax for the Jews … both believers and unbelievers were to give a tithe of ten percent of what they produced every year. They also gave offerings on a free-will basis. In this Church Age, we are required to give willingly: “Every man according as he purposes in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly nor of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver.” (2 Corinthians 9:7)

The subject of baptism is probably the most controversial of all, but it can easily be solved when you understand the true meaning of the word, because it was transliterated, not translated, from the original Koine Greek language of the New Testament, and it always means identification.

There are actually 7 baptisms … 3 of them are wet, and 4 of them are dry. The idea of sprinkling practiced by some goes back to Old Testament rituals of animal sacrifices, and were used to indicate identification of the sins of the one bringing the offering with an innocent substitute. They were used as teaching aids to help people understand what the coming Savior would do for mankind.

Water baptism by immersion of a candidate in water was first seen in the scriptures when Jesus was baptized by John the baptizer. (Matthew 3:13-17; Luke 3:27; John 1:31-44) At His baptism Jesus was identifying Himself with His Father’s plan, and it signified the beginning of His 3-year ministry on earth. No one can follow Jesus in baptism, because His was unique … Jesus was not a sinner.

During Jesus’ ministry on earth, John baptized believers in water to identify them with the future kingdom … the Millennial Kingdom. John’s message was “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2) To repent does NOT mean to feel sorry, but to change your mind or attitude about something. The apostle Paul said in Acts 19:4: “John truly baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe in Jesus Christ who would come after him,” Those who believed in Christ as their Messiah at that time will live in their resurrection bodies during Jesus’ 1,000 year reign.

Those three were ritual baptisms, and they all involved water. Real or actual identification is shown by the following four dry baptisms, which are:
(1) the baptism of Moses that took place when the Children of Israel were identified with Moses in the Red Sea and in the cloud that led them through the wilderness for 40 years, as explained by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:1,2.
(2) the baptism of the CROSS or CUP, took place when our Lord Jesus Christ was identified with the sins of the entire world. (Matthew 20:22)
(3) the baptism of the believer in the Church Age when God the Holy Spirit enters him into union with Christ. (Acts 1:5; Romans 6:3; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:5; and Colossians 2:12) The term “in Christ” is seen throughout the New Testament epistles.
(4) There is one more dry baptism to come, which is the baptism of fire. That identification will take place at the Great White Throne judgment when unbelievers of all the ages will be resurrected to stand before the perfect judge, the Lord Jesus Christ, and be judged according to their works … NOT THEIR SINS! On the basis of their rejection of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross, they will be cast into the Lake of Fire with the devil and his angels, where they will be tormented day and night throughout eternity. (Revelation 20:10-15)

Neither ritual nor water baptism can save anyone! Baptism cannot add anything to the work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and those who say it does are adding to God’s plan of salvation for mankind.

Paul told the Ephesians: “There is ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, and ONE BAPTISM.” (Ephesians 4:5) Also in Ephesians 5:30-32 he said, “We are all members of His body, His flesh and of His bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and they two shall become one flesh. This is a GREAT MYSTERY, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.”

A person is saved in one way only, and that is by FAITH ALONE IN CHRIST ALONE!

“Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

Many teach that the Church is ‘spiritual Israel’ and that God is finished with Israel. If that were true, we should throw away all the teachings of Moses and the prophets of old, because their messages were for God’s people Israel! God’s attitude toward them in the future is clearly expressed in Isaiah 49:13-16: “Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into singing, O mountains; for the Lord has comforted His people and will have mercy upon His afflicted. But Zion said, the Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me. Can a woman forget her nursing child and not show kindness to the son of her womb? Yes, she may forget, yet I will not forget you, Israel. Look, I have graven you upon the palms of My hands.”

What then is “the Church”? It is a great MYSTERY! Paul told the Corinthians that it is the wisdom of God regarding a promise for time that was pre-designed and had set limits. He also called it “the bride of Christ” in Ephesians 5:32. It is the ‘age of no prophecy’. The next event in history will be the resurrection of ALL Church-Age believers. It is called ‘the rapture of the church’ in theology, and the events involved are explained in
1 Corinthians 15:51-57 and in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18.

How is the Christian life to be lived in this Church Age? It must be “by faith and not by works!” Colossians 2:6 says: “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him”. Paul said in 2 Corinthians, “For we walk by faith, not by sight”.

In this Church Age, God the Holy Spirit is here to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ … not Himself! Jesus told His disciples the night before His betrayal, “But the Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” (John 14:26)

Today we see thousands of emotional believers earnestly trying to glorify the Holy Spirit and ignoring the fact that Jesus told His disciples, “When the Comforter has come, whom I will send, even the Spirit of truth which proceeds from the Father, He shall testify of Me.” (John 15:26) The Holy Spirit has a special ministry to believers in the Church Age, beginning with His work of identifying them with Christ at the moment of salvation and also permanently indwelling them. By contrast, in the Old Testament the Holy Spirit did NOT indwell people, but He came upon certain people for a particular purpose, as in the case of Saul and David. We read in 1 Samuel 16:14 that “the Holy Spirit departed from Saul because of his disobedience to the Word of God, and an evil spirit troubled him.” When David was anointed king, we read in 1 Samuel 16:13: “Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brethren; and the Holy Spirit came upon David from that day forward.” David knew that the Holy Spirit had been removed from Saul, but after his sin against Uriah and Bathsheba he wrote Psalm 51:11 and prayed to the Lord, “Cast me not away from Your presence, and take not Your Holy Spirit from me.”

If you’d like to become an invisible hero and glorify God, you must perceive and metabolize Bible Doctrine and be oriented to dispensational truth. Also, you must develop spiritual self-esteem and be spiritually independent from counseling and/or leaning upon others. Instead, you must have a personal, daily intake of God’s Word. Motivation is the result of having positive volition toward learning. Since the Bible is the ‘mind of Christ’ according to 1 Corinthians 2:16, it is necessary for us to learn to think as He does about every situation in life. His thoughts and ways are different from ours, as Isaiah 55:8,9 tells us: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

In the Church Age there is no specialized priesthood as there was in Israel … now every believer is a priest and is able to represent himself before the Lord in prayer without going through a mediator. 1 Timothy 2:5 tells us, “There is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.” And Peter, who became an apostle to the Church said in his epistle to Jewish Christians who were scattered all over the earth: “You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people; that you should show forth the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9)

Finally we come to the subject of SALVATION BY GRACE. Whatever God does it is perfect and it is permanent. He gives ETERNAL LIFE to anyone who believes in Christ, but thousands of believers are being taught that they can DO something to lose their salvation, so they spend their life punishing themselves … just spinning their wheels and wondering day by day if they have lost their salvation. Jesus said, “I give unto them eternal life, and they shall NEVER perish; neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand. My Father who gave them to Me is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hand. I and My Father are one.” (John 10:28-30)

Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has placed a desire for that which is eternal in the heart of every human being who is born into this world, and if He didn’t do that, we would never have such a desire. When a person believes in Christ and is born again, God does ALL the work … we can’t do a thing for salvation!

When God placed Adam and the woman in the Garden of Eden, they were physically alive, and they were also spiritually alive. Every day they had an opportunity to have their desire for eternal things fulfilled; however, they disobeyed God and died spiritually, that means they no longer had fellowship with the Lord. We are all descendants of Adam and the woman, and we were born physically alive, but spiritually dead. Your life began when God, not your parents, gave human life to your soul, and Adam’s original sin was imputed to your biologically formed Old Sin Nature. Every one of us is born with a sin nature, and the moment we came forth from our mother’s womb, the Bible says we were wretched. When a little baby is born, he may appear to be sweet and pure, but in the eyes of the Lord that baby is a sinner and needs to be saved. At birth, we are helpless in two ways … first, we are under spiritual death, which means we are totally helpless to do anything about a relationship with God There is NOTHING within us that goes on a search for God, and that’s why we need to be born again. We must be born of the Spirit, because we don’t have a human spirit. Secondly, we are born humanly helpless, but that can be resolved through help from our parents, teachers, family, friends and the culture in which we live. No information resides in our brain at birth, but as we grow and find ourselves in an academic environment, we gradually overcome our helplessness through education. The point is that as we grow physically, we should become independent and not have to rely on others to help us. While we can improve our physical helplessness we cannot solve the fact that we are spiritually dead, which means we are totally depraved. What is total depravity? By definition, it means that Because of Adam’s sin, nothing man can do will give him a relationship with God. Never at any time in your life did you go searching for God. (Psalm 14:1-3) God always comes searching for us! Therefore, mankind is blind, deaf and dead to the things of God. In fact, Jeremiah 17:9 describes what we are like: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can understand it?” In that scripture reference God is NOT talking about our cardiovascular system, but He’s referring to our brain … where we do our thinking. Man is born in bondage to his evil, sinful nature, and that is why, in grace, the Lord placed within the heart of every man a desire for that which is eternal. If God didn’t give us a desire to know Him or to know why we are here, we would never even consider it but would be just like the animal kingdom … not concerned about the future.

We all have a void. Something is missing in our lives that only God can fulfill. God fills that void by showing the Tree of Life to the unbeliever … that tree is the cross on which Jesus died as the substitute for ALL the sins of mankind. Bible Doctrine is a Tree of Life for the believer and is provided so the believer can grow up spiritually. God put within us the desire to know spiritual things, because without it we would never get to know Him. If you went to a graveyard and attempted to communicate with someone in a grave, they would neither hear nor respond to you, because they are physically dead.

Being spiritually dead does not mean we have a little spark within us, and God comes along and fans that spark, and it becomes a fire. That idea is untrue. We were born spiritually dead. The apostle Paul tells us in Romans 3:10-18, “It is written, there is none righteous, not even one. Their throat is an open grave, and with their tongues they keep on deceiving. The poison of asps is under their lips, and their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their path. The path of peace they have not known, and there is no fear of God before their eyes.” That, my friend, is a description of you and me without the help of God. It is a picture of the entire human race, and if God did not put a desire to know Him within our heart, we would eventually self-destruct.

A fool is described for us in Psalm 14:1 which says, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” According to God’s Word, an atheist is a fool, because he has to deny that there is something within him that desires to know eternal things. He has to squelch that thought, and eventually come to a place where he has hardness of the heart and scar tissue on his soul so that he cannot even receive the things of God. The Psalm continues: “They are corrupt. They have committed abominable deeds. There is not one who does good. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there was anyone who understands, or if there was anyone who was seeking after God, but they have all turned aside. Together they have become corrupt. There is no one who does good … not even one.” The point is, we will not and cannot please God in the spiritual realm. God does everything for us at the point of salvation, and if He didn’t help us, there would be absolutely no way a person could be saved.

It is interesting to note how inconsistent believers can be, because if you asked, “Does God do all the work in salvation?” they would have to say ‘yes’ if they truly believe in the grace of God and in His Word. We read this command in Colossians 2:6: “Just as you have received Christ, so walk in Him … that is, we receive Him through faith, therefore we must walk by faith. If you are a believer, you must realize that when you were born again, God did all the work. After salvation, God should still be doing all the work in our lives, but what do we find in many Christian churches? LEGALISM … people being given a list of rules to follow saying you can’t do this or that, and you can’t go there, because you have to make yourself holy and righteous. EMOTIONALISM … people living by their feelings rather than by the accurate teaching of the Word of God. We see all this nonsense taking place when people try to impress God with their human good works. God is never impressed with anything we can do in the flesh! He looks at the entire human race as being totally depraved and totally corrupt. We can only please God when we operate by faith in His Word and rely upon God the Holy Spirit to teach us and to guide us so proper changes may be made in our lives through the Word of God.

In 2 Corinthians 6:1 the apostle Paul said, “And working together with Him, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain. God says, ‘at the acceptable time I listened to you, and on the day of salvation I helped you. Behold now is the acceptable time; behold now is the day of salvation. How did God help us? The remainder of the verse tells us: “Now is the time to accept.” (and here’s where we must be careful, because someone will probably say, ‘Aha … you have to ACCEPT Jesus into your heart’, but that’s not what the verse is saying} It is true that we have to accept something before salvation, but it is an acceptance of information given by God the Holy Spirit regarding faith in Jesus Christ as the way of salvation. If a totally corrupt person expresses a desire for eternal thing, he will be given information from God the Holy Spirit showing him he is a sinner and needs to be saved, but he still doesn’t have enough faith to believe. Therefore, the Holy Spirit takes that little faith of the spiritually dead person and makes it good enough for the individual to be saved. That is the acceptance before salvation, so when we read in John 1:12, “But as many as received Him, to them gave He the power to become sons of God … (notice they received Him.) Whom did they receive? Did they receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? NO … because they are not yet sons of God. They received the ministry of God the Holy Spirit telling them about the work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross so they could be saved. Power is given to become a child of God when that person believes in the Lord Jesus Christ.

At the point of salvation we find three categories of grace. The first one is called common grace, which means God gives every one of us a chance to be saved. In common grace, God the Holy Spirit makes the Gospel understandable to an individual at the point of God-consciousness. It doesn’t matter who the person is or how old he is … everyone is given an opportunity to be saved while they are alive on this earth. He may have had only a 3rd grade education or be a graduate of a fine university, or be someone who lives in a very primitive tribe in the jungle, but no matter who the individual is, he needs God’s help when it comes to understanding the message of the Gospel. The second category of grace is the Divine Call in which God the Father says, “I’m going to give you … a corrupt member of the human race who is totally depraved and has a sick head and a deceitful heart … I’m going to give you a new nature so that you may have eternal life.” That is how God extends His invitation to man to be saved. That truth is stated more than 115 times in the New Testament.

By the way, there is a time when God stops calling an individual, and that is when he will no longer will listen to the call, and then he becomes totally reprobate.

The third type of grace is called efficacious grace, and it is when the Holy Spirit takes your little faith at the point of God-consciousness and makes faith alone in Christ alone effective for salvation.

Don’t miss this! Who did ALL the work at salvation? God did! After placing a desire for eternal things inside of us, that desire made it possible for you and for me to respond to the Divine call and listen to the Holy Spirit reveal the Gospel.

Whether it is God calling us and making the Gospel understandable and makes our little faith effective for salvation, the point is: YOU CAN’T DO A THING! GOD DOES ALL THE WORK IN SALVATION.

Written by Lois Delnay
02/14/2007
loisdelnay@hotmail.com

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