Favorably Disposed to Us #2

God loved us in Christ before the foundation of the world. And if you've been saved, if the Spirit of God has worked in your heart, you're loving in response to that work of His. God does not love you because you first loved Him. You love God because He first loved you. Did God choose you or did you choose Him?

Well, that's a question that has had Christians at odds with each other for centuries. Hello and welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Bill Wright, and today Don brings our series called Reflections on Our Lord to a Close by clearing up the confusion surrounding the subject of predestination.

Right now, to continue in his ministry of teaching God's people God's Word, here is Don Green from the Truth Pulpit. God chose us. He adopted us into His family so that we can say that we are children of God. And for this reason, Scripture says in 1 John 3, for this reason the world does not know us because it did not know Him. But beloved, Scripture says, 1 John 3, 1, Beloved, behold what manner of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God, and we are. And for that we praise His name. And go further, go further and take it and work it out into what it means for your daily life here today as you're walking through difficulties, struggling with temptation, dealing with difficult family or different matters that all of us face.

Step back from all of that. You can't begin to understand the purposes of God in those difficulties until you remember the big picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ. You must view all of that through the lens of the fact that God chose you and saved you in order to deliver you into His heavenly kingdom. And as a result of that, when you see that overarching eternal perspective, you realize that in the midst of your difficulties, it must be true that God is favorably disposed toward you even though it seems like your circumstances are set hard against you. Don't interpret the goodness of God through the lens of the difficulty of your circumstances.

Rather, reverse it. Start with the eternal purpose of God. Understand your security and blessing in Christ, my Christian brother, my Christian sister, and view everything through that prism so that you say, whatever else is happening in these relational or financial or physical reversals that I'm facing, whatever else I might think about them, it has to be that God is favorably disposed to me in the midst of them because He chose me and adopted me into His family, and He had prepared that blessing for me before the beginning of time. And we have to go back to that again and again and again. Paul goes on, and if you're new to our church, you can go and find... I did a number of sermons on this passage, so we're just doing a little bit of summary.

If this incites your interest, then go and look for those sermons online to where we discuss them in greater detail. It's not just that God chose us in Christ. Secondly, He redeemed us. He redeemed us in Christ.

Paul opened talking about our God and Father in verse 3, and then he moves and he brings the Lord Jesus Christ into it and speaks more specifically about the work of Christ in verse 7 as he goes from what the Father has done for us to what the Son has done for us. And in verse 7 it says, In Him we have redemption through His blood, obviously the shed blood of Christ on the cross. And what was it that the shed blood did for us? It brought about our redemption. It brought about the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished on us. At the cross, Jesus Christ paid the price necessary to bring us out of our slavery to sin. And if you would just turn toward the end of your Bible a couple of books to the book of Colossians. The book of Colossians, which was written at about the same time in prison as the book of Ephesians. You get a divine commentary on this, of just exactly what it was that Christ did for us when He redeemed us.

In verse 13 of Colossians chapter 1, Colossians chapter 1 verse 13, He rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Scripture describes fallen, unsaved men as being in multiple bondages of slavery. We are slaves to our own sin. That's why people can't break their bad habits.

It's because they don't have control over their hearts and their lives and their own affections. Scripture describes us as being bound to Satan, blinded by him, and in a place of complete spiritual helplessness. Having no ability of our own to respond to God, having no ability to give ourselves new life, having no ability as a natural man to overcome the supernatural bondage in which Satan was holding us, and the supernatural bondage of the power of sin, beloved, you and I were lost and hopelessly helpless.

Hopelessly helpless. And what had God appointed? What had Christ done? Redemption through His blood. At the cross, the Lord Jesus Christ secured your salvation. He made it infallibly certain to occur.

That's why he could say, it is finished. And at the cross, Christ, by His shed blood and by the power of God, in the resurrection, by the resurrection power of God, the power of sin, the power of Satan was broken by our Lord Jesus Christ. And He did this on our behalf.

He did it for us. Satan had no binding over Christ. Satan had no power over Christ. So Christ didn't need to deliver Himself from the power of Satan. Christ had no sin, and so there was no sin for Him to be delivered from.

Don't you see? That when He went to the cross, He was doing it for us. He was doing it for His people. And why would He do that?

That's the question of the hour. Why would Christ do that? Why would God the Father choose us and adopt us into His family? Why would Christ go to the cross after living a righteous life for some 30 years? Why would He do that? For sinners, like you and me.

Why would He do that? The text tells us. Verse 4, it was in love. Verse 7, it was according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. Boundless grace. Boundless mercy. Gladly showered upon us by the Lord Jesus Christ.

And not in a miserly, stingy way. He lavished it upon us. He poured it out in abundant measure far more than anyone could have asked for. And why did He do that? Beloved, it was not because you deserved it.

Because you did not. He did it because that's what He's like. He is a generous, loving, gracious Savior who gladly brought you into the family of God through His redemptive work on your behalf. He gladly did that.

He graciously did that. And when you start to recognize that, you start to do two things. One, you are humbled by the reality that your position in Christ was secured not by your goodness but by His. You are humbled to realize you did not deserve this. So there are times where you cry out, Lord, why me? And it's not the why me of why am I suffering, which is common to unredeemed men to say. No, the Christians should be saying, Lord, why me? Why such love and grace on me? Because it wasn't anything in me that could have prompted that. And then you say, oh, and then the sun starts to rise on your understanding.

Then it must be because of you. It must be because of your love and grace that you have done this on my behalf. Undeserved love, undeserved grace, lavished upon me an unworthy sinner. And so when that starts to form in your understanding, you praise God and you praise Him not primarily or first and foremost for any earthly blessings that He's given to you. You set everything earthly aside and you look up at the majesty of His being and you thank Him for the grace of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And so we praise Him because He chose us. We praise Him because He adopted us. We praise Him because Christ redeemed us at the price of His own blood, beloved.

You know, if we understood something about the physical tortures of the cross, it would change our perspective. But far infinitely more, if we understood something about the nature of the redemptive work of Christ and how He suffered the wrath of Christ for all of our sins, God chose you by name before the foundation of the world. Christ was suffering for you by name on the cross. Somehow in the infinite mind of Christ and in the infinite justice of God and the infinite grace of God, Christ was absorbing every individual sin that you had ever committed and suffering the punishment for it. Christ suffered for my covetous thought yesterday around 2 o'clock, along with the thousands, if not millions, of other sins of which I'm guilty. And He gladly did it. As a brother to the redeemed, as the elder brother to the redeemed, He gladly saved us and paid the price for all our sins at Calvary. How can you not love Him? How could anyone understand this and not say, what, henceforth and forevermore, the only purpose in my life is to live to the glory of this One who loved me and gave His soul up for me like that?

How could you have any other kind of response? And understand this, beloved, I say this sympathetically, but I say it clearly and directly. Scripture teaches us that those who have heard clearly the gospel of Jesus Christ and reject Him, Scripture says that those who have heard the gospel and deemed the Son of God unfit for their submission and worship, they will face the strictest judgment of them all. It won't be the murderers. It won't be those that have committed crimes that are viewed as the most heinous by man.

In God's eyes, the most heinous crime that you can commit is to hear about the gospel of Jesus Christ, to hear and see set before your eyes the glory and majesty of His holy name, the majesty of His person, the majesty of His work, and then to reject that and say, I will not have that man reign over me. I will be my own. I'll be my own God. I'll worship what I want to, but I will not submit to Christ. I will not submit to the holy Word of God written in the 66 books of the Bible.

Man, if you walk away from that, if you reject that, the lowest, hottest part of hell is reserved for you because that is a direct insult. That is high-handed rebellion against the Christ who freely offers this gift of salvation to everyone who will believe. And if someone walks out of here today unbelieving, understand this.

It won't be because of anything on God's side. You'll walk out unbelieving. You'll walk out rejecting Christ because of the sin and rebellion in your own heart, and you will face accountability before a holy God for that. And so if I were you, if I were you, I would repent right now.

I wouldn't wait till the end of the service. You should bow your heart now and say, Lord, I see how clearly I've rebelled. I see how clearly my life has been against you. Have mercy on me, the sinner.

Yes, I've done all of these wicked things in my flesh, but I see now that my greatest sin is vertical. I've ignored you. I've rejected Christ. I've mocked him.

I've treated him as unworthy of my time and attention. God will hear a cry for mercy like that, beloved. Jesus said, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I'll give you rest. There is no unwillingness in God for you to be saved. The unwillingness is found in your own wretched heart if you walk out of here and are not a Christian. Well, there's one more aspect here, and I'm just going to go through. I'm just going to leave it here.

We'll save the rest for another time. God the Father chose us, adopted us. Christ the Son redeemed us with his shed blood. Then we see the work of the Holy Spirit and the kindness of the Holy Spirit to us as well in that he sealed us. Look at verse 13 where it says this. It says, in him, that is in Christ, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you believed in response to the work of God, you believed, you know, your faith, beloved.

I'm going on a little tangent here. Faith, true faith, true saving faith, is an indication, is the evidence in your heart that you've been chosen by God for salvation. The fact that you believe in Christ, truly believe in Christ, is one of the initial marks that you've been chosen for salvation. But understand that it is the choice of God, it is the work of God that produced faith in your heart, and it is the work of the Spirit of God that produced faith in your heart. It's not something that you conjured up in your own power in order to believe, and then God said, oh, I must respond now because he's believed. No, no, you believe because the Spirit of God was graciously working in your heart in order to take out your heart of stone and put in a warm, beating heart of flesh that would respond to the living God and the invitation to Christ. You had nothing in you that would have responded. You were cold, you were dead, you were bound by Satan, bound by sin. There was nothing in you that could have possibly, possibly started this process. That's why Scripture says we love because he first loved us.

Don't ever reverse that sequence. God loved us in Christ before the foundation of the world, and if you've been saved, if the Spirit of God has worked in your heart, you're loving in response to that work of his. God does not love you because you first loved him. You love God because he first loved you. It's very important for each one of us to get that straight in our minds because that sequence changes everything that you think about genuine salvation, and it determines the way that you respond to God in your life and the way that you live in obedience to Christ and what you give your life over to, what you give your love to, how you respond to your trials.

Everything's determined by what you think about that sequence. If God chose me and I believe in response to his choice, I'm humbled by it because I realize it's not anything that I deserved. If I think that my choice determined the outcome of my salvation, then there's an inevitable sense of boasting that comes. I believed and I'm different. You don't believe? I had the insight to see it, and there's boasting there, and there's boasting in the presence of God.

I received. You know, I chose you. Don't go down that Arminian road. That leads you to bad places when you really think it out and see the consequences of it all. Here in verse 13, we see that the Spirit sealed us. Verse 13, in him, and oh, what this means is just phenomenal. In him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession to the praise of his glory. When Paul here talks about the sealing of the Holy Spirit, understand that in those times, the seal, you know, think about a seal being impressed on warm clay and the imprint of the seal is being left on the seal, and so that clay would be used to seal official documents and things like that. The seal was a mark of ownership.

The one who owned the seal was the one who was putting his imprint on the clay. Paul uses that as a metaphor to help us understand what God has done for us in salvation. What God has done, what the Spirit of God has done, is he has sealed us. Through the indwelling Holy Spirit, God has marked us as his own. God has set us apart, and he has marked us by the indwelling Holy Spirit in a way that shows that we belong to him. And one of the marks of having the indwelling Holy Spirit is a transformed life, is having a heart that is tender to the Word of God, that believes the Word of God, that loves the Lord Jesus Christ, that longs to obey, even if you obey imperfectly, as you do.

But there's this longing, there's this captivity of your heart. Your heart is taken captive to the beauty and the wonder of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you see him as the greatest thing of all, the object of your highest affection, and none can rival for it. If family must go for the sake of your loyalty to Christ, you say family must go. If the world hates me, I understand that the world hated Christ before it hated me. And I'd rather be identified with Christ in the opposition of the world than to be on the world's side in opposition to Christ.

There is just this clear dividing line that comes. My point is this, is that that heart of love and affection for Christ, that longing for obedience, is the sure, inevitable mark of a genuinely converted heart. And that evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit shows that God has marked you out as his own, and therefore you belong to him. And that mark of ownership, that pledge of our inheritance in verse 14, it's the language of a down payment. What it means is this, the fact that you have the indwelling Holy Spirit within you now in the plan and outworking of the way salvation works, it's like a down payment that God has given you.

The down payment of the indwelling Spirit is the earnest payment, meaning that there's more to come. If you have the Spirit now, it's the sure guarantee, the sure promise of God that there's more to come, that God will keep you through this life. None of those that the Spirit saves could possibly ever be lost. God will keep you through this life. God will bring you safe into heaven. You will be in his eternal kingdom, enjoying the riches and glory of Christ forever and ever without end, having been made perfect in him, glorified, the presence of sin thoroughly banished. No more tears, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more temptation, utterly removed from all of the effects of sin, glorified, made like Christ and being with him throughout all of eternity. The presence of the Spirit in your life today is a down payment that that greater gift will certainly be fulfilled for you in the end.

You step back from that and what can you say? Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He has blessed me with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. He chose me and adopted me into his family.

I can rightly be called a child of God, a child of God by redemption, not simply that God made me, but God loved me and redeemed me and I belong to him and he wants me and his family and I am. And then when Christ was on the cross, he was doing that for me. He loved me and gave himself up for me, Galatians 2.20 says.

First person singular. And the Spirit indwells me and is keeping me and is sanctifying me and even though I'm unworthy of it to this day, God has set his love upon me like that. So that I am fully assured that he is favorably disposed to me. Indeed, we love him because he first loved us. You're listening to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green and today's lesson brings our series called Reflections on Our Lord to a Close. And if you'd like to have a copy of this message or the entire series for yourself or a friend or loved one, go to thetruthpulpit.com. When you're there, you'll find all of Don's teachings along with other great free resources.

That's all at thetruthpulpit.com. And now, Don, would you please share any final thoughts on this series with our listener? Well, Bill, what I hope that this series has done for each one of us is to remind us of the glory of Christ all over and afresh again. It is just so wonderful and so transforming to realize that the eternal Son of God left his throne in heaven in order to come to earth, live a perfect life, and offer that life on a cross for guilty sinners like you and me as a sacrifice in shed blood that satisfied the wrath of God against our sins. What a wonderful savior. And when you realize that he has done that, you see how great his love is for sinners just like you. And so if you're convicted of sin today, you're feeling estranged from God, go directly to the Lord Jesus Christ and ask him to have mercy on you. It is why he came. He came to seek and to save the lost. Thanks, Don. And, friend, we'll see you next time right here on The Truth Pulpit where Don Green teaches God's people God's Word.