May 7, 2006

 

Christ crucified is the basis of our hope before God; and “Christ in you the hope of glory” is the sweet, joyful experience of hope.

 

Daily Readings for the Week of May 7-14

                Sunday                    1 Chronicles 18-21                                  Thursday                                1 Chronicles 2-5

                Monday                  1 Chronicles 22-24                                  Friday                     1 Chronicles 6-7

                Tuesday                  1 Chronicles 25-27                                  Saturday                  1 Chronicles 8-11

                Wednesday             1 Chronicles 28-2 Chron. 1     Sunday                    1 Chronicles 12-15

 

·         I am preaching today for First Baptist Church in Jacumba, California, where Bro. Bob Harman is pastor. Bro. Larry Criss will preach to you this morning and Bro. Ron Wood tonight. I plan to preach to you Tuesday night from Exodus 3.

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  William Stewart Hacker-10th

 

NURSERY DUTY THIS WEEK

Today: Shelby Fortner (AM) Celeste Peterson (PM)          Tuesday: Nancy Criss

 

Christ Jesus, Lamb of God — Don Fortner

(Tune: #33 — Stand Up and Bless the Lord — SM)

 

1.        Christ Jesus, Lamb of God,

For chosen sinners slain;

For me You shed Your precious blood;

And it was not in vain!

 

2.        My faith now lays her hand

On Jesus crucified.

Confessing all my guilt and sin,

In Him I’m justified!

 

3.        By grace through faith I see, —

My guilt my Savior bore,

When hanging on the cursed tree,

And I’m condemned no more!

 

4.        Believing, I rejoice

To feel the curse removed;

I bless the Lamb with cheerful voice,

And trust His bleeding love.

 

Feelings and Experience

 

We do not and must not trust our feelings and experience. Christ alone is our trust. But religion without feeling and experience is as useless as a bucket without a bottom. Love cannot be known without feeling and experience. Show me a guilty man who has been pardoned, and I will show you a man who feels and experiences liberty. Show me a dying man who, believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, is anticipating eternal glory with Christ, and I will show you a man who feels the blessed experience of “a good hope through grace.”

 

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Saving Knowledge

2 Corinthians 5:16

 

In 2 Corinthians 5:14 Paul declares that all who are born of God are constrained, motivated, and ruled by the love of Christ. The love of Christ rules in our hearts, he tells us in verse 15, because we have been born again. We have been born again because Christ died for us. His death as our Substitute obtained and guaranteed our new birth. And, being born of God, we live, not unto ourselves, but unto Christ, who died for us and rose again. Then, in verse 16, the inspired writer tells us that our knowledge of Christ is not a carnal apprehension of the intellect, but the gift and revelation of God the Holy Spirit. — Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.”

 

                Be sure you understand what the Spirit of God tells us here. Our knowledge of Christ is not a carnal apprehension of the intellect, but the gift and revelation of God the Holy Spirit. Being born again by the omnipotent grace and irresistible mercy of God the Holy Spirit, all who are taught of God, know Christ after the Spirit, and not after the flesh.

 

                In the 1600s John Owen wrote, “Of all the poison which at this day is diffused in the minds of men, corrupting them from the mystery of the gospel, there is no part that is more pernicious than this one perverse imagination, that to ‘believe in Christ’ is nothing at all but to ‘believe the doctrine of the gospel!’” Yet, that horrible heresy is taught and promoted by many today.

 

Will Worship

 

Will worshipping Arminians have long taught that faith in Christ is nothing but and act of the will, mental assent to the historic facts of the gospel. When I was a seven year old boy, I was conned into a profession of faith by will worshipping fundamentalists, who told me that salvation would be mine if I would simply believe “God’s plan of salvation.” Giving assent to what I was told, a “soul-winner” put his arms around me, with tears in his eyes, and announced, “Praise the Lord, son, you’re saved! You are born again.” But I didn’t know God from a gourd.

 

                Such deception is common among fundamentalists. But today there are some who claim to believe the gospel, or what we refer to as the doctrines of grace, who teach the same heresy, utterly denying the gospel of God’s free and sovereign grace in Christ. Theirs is a much more subtle and dangerous heresy.

 

                They tell us that faith in Christ is nothing but agreement with “God’s testimony.” They laugh at what the apostle Paul calls “the mystery of the faith,” asserting that there is nothing mysterious about it. Being too deceptive to openly assert what their doctrine is, they continue to use terms like “regeneration,” “the new birth,” “effectual calling,” “the new nature,” “the new man,” and “Christ in you.”  Yet,  everything  they  teach  denies  the  work  of  God  the   Holy   Spirit

 

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in chosen redeemed sinners, teaching that salvation is arrived at by acquired knowledge, not by divine regeneration, by an act of the will, not by the revelation of grace. This philosophy of vain deceit denies the necessity of the new birth, denies that the believer is given a new nature by the Spirit of God, denies that righteousness is imparted to us, and that we are made partakers of the divine nature in regeneration. These modern Gnostics speak of God’s saving grace as nothing but a “principle” (an accepted philosophical rule).

 

                They look upon those of us who believe God’s revelation of himself in his Word and trust Christ as our Wisdom, as well as our Righteousness, Sanctification, and Redemption, as poor, ignorant people, without spiritual understanding. Just this week, one of these deceivers described that which the Scriptures call a God given light shining “in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” “a mystical, religious experience that takes place in ecstatic ignorance”!

 

                Deceivers are never honest men! The liberals of the mid 1900s, at first, were not manly enough to openly state that they did not believe in blood atonement, regeneration, and the resurrection. They made it a point to use such words frequently. But, with their “enlightened” understanding, they gave those clearly defined biblical terms new definitions.

 

Carnal Knowledge

 

That is exactly what is happening in our day. Many, who talk much about faith in Christ and imagine that no one possesses it except those who bow to their shrines, openly assert that, “Mental assent itself is equal to faith.” That is Gnosticism in its very essence. That is freewillism of the most deceptive form. It is the assertion that salvation is nothing but a man’s decision to agree with irrefutable facts!

 

                That which they have arrived at by their imaginary “brilliance of intellect” the Holy Spirit calls knowing “Christ after the flesh,” by mere carnal reason. They are people with religious knowledge, who are totally void of grace and spiritual life, groping in the darkness of their invented light.

 

Saving Knowledge

 

Most people presume that knowledge is the basis of faith. But the Scriptures assert exactly the opposite. Hebrews 11:3 declares, “Through faith we understand.” Through faith we see, perceive, and comprehend all things spiritual. And this faith, which gives spiritual understanding, is the result of the new birth, without which no man can see the kingdom of God (John 3:5-7). Faith in Christ is the basis of spiritual knowledge and understanding. Spiritual knowledge is the result of faith in Christ. As I heard Bro. Henry Mahan say so many times, “You don’t get to Christ by doctrine. You get to doctrine by Christ.” Saving knowledge is not what you know, but who (John 17:3).

 

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Grace Bulletin

 

May 7, 2006

 

GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH of DANVILLE

2734 Old Stanford Road-Danville, Kentucky 40422-9438

Telephone (859) 236-8235 - E-Mail don@donfortner.com

 

Donald S. Fortner, Pastor

 

SCHEDULE OF REGULAR SERVICES

 

Sunday

10:00 A.M. Bible Classes

10:30 A.M. Morning Worship Service

6:30   P.M. Evening Worship Service

Tuesday

7:30 P.M. Mid-Week Worship Service

 

 

Television Broadcasts

 

Danville

Channel 6 - Sunday Morning 8:00 A.M.

Channel 6 - Wednesday Evening 6:00 P.M.

Channel 6 - Friday Evening 7:00 P.M.

 

Web Pages

http://www.donfortner.com

http://www.sovereign-grace/gracechurch.htm

http://www.freegrace.net/danville/default.asp