Four Fold Pattern (#1-3): God; Law; Bible

Pastor Martin reminds the children of the growth chart in their bedroom with an animal marker - they measure inches against a fixed standard. So the believer needs a fixed pattern to evaluate progress in sanctification.

Now most of you kids know what it's like to measure your physical growth by a little growth chart in your room. Perhaps you have one of those that has an animal or something else and then there are the little yard markers and foot markers and inch markers and every once in a while you back up against it and you have your mommy or your brother or your sister place a ruler, a book on top of your head in order to check your growth by a standard that is unchangeable.

3:52 - 4:20 Read in full sermon

The point: Pursue conformity to God's image while never blurring the Creator-creature distinction - reject any teaching that elevates believers to demigod status.

The first temptation came as a desire to be like God in a way contrary to God's will - so we are remade in God's image only within the Creator-creature distinction.

Our being like God has certain very critical limitations. To ignore them or to go beyond them is to land in the worst kinds of sin. In fact, the first temptation came in that very form, did it not? Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.

15:45 - 16:07 Read in full sermon

The point: Pursue conformity to God's image while never blurring the Creator-creature distinction - reject any teaching that elevates believers to demigod status.

He warns against pagan and Mormon theology that elevates believers ultimately into gods - biblical sanctification never blurs the Creator-creature line.

We are never recreated unto the image of God in such a way as to become half-gods or elevated ultimately into gods as you have in pagan theology and even in the theology of the Mormon church. No, no. Whatever it means to be like God, whatever it means that God Himself is the pattern of our sanctification,

16:54 - 17:19 Read in full sermon

The point: Define sin operationally as anything contrary to God's holy moral law - this gives mortification a precise target.

Quoting an old writer: 'Law is love's eyes, and without it love is blind.' Love needs the law to know what to do for God and neighbor.

As one old writer has said, law is love's eyes, and without it love is blind. And so I say in the presence of my God, O God, because you have graciously redeemed me in Christ, because by your own almighty power you have brought me to put off the old man and to put on the new, and the standard to which I would aspire is to be like you, Lord, how can I be like you? And he holds before me a transcript of his own righteousness in the Decalogue and says, You can please me and delight me in terms of what you are as a creature in relationship to me and to your fellow men. In the light of these precep...

26:52 - 27:50 Read in full sermon

The point: Read Old Testament biography asking what each story warns you against and points you toward in your own walk.

Israel murmuring against Moses, longing for the leeks and cucumbers and garlic of Egypt - written for our admonition not to murmur against God's providence.

And I see the nation murmuring against Moses, hankering to go back to Egypt to the leeks and the cucumbers and the garlic. That's a revelation of the will of God for me. God is saying, don't do what they did. The will of God, you see, is revealed even in Old Testament history. He goes on to say, neither be ye idolaters as some of them.

44:23 - 44:45 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Behind that is a great moral principle that operates in God's universe in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and I believe it will even operate in heaven.

Who plants a vineyard and doesn't eat the fruit? What vineyard owner runs to the 7-Eleven for Welch's? Pastor Martin uses the homely image to explain Paul's reasoning from the law.

And he said, who plants a vineyard and doesn't eat the fruit thereof? What man who has a vineyard goes down to the local 7-Eleven store to buy his Welch's grape juice? He squeezes out his own. Well, of course, that's obvious. But now notice. Verse 8. Do I speak these things after the manner of men? Am I proving my point simply from common, natural revelation? Or saith not the law also the same? For it is written in the law of Moses...

47:07 - 47:34 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Behind that is a great moral principle that operates in God's universe in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and I believe it will even operate in heaven.

Pastor Martin quips that 'oxen can't read' - so the law about not muzzling the ox was written for our sakes, embedding moral principles in civil law.

He said it wasn't written for the ox. As Lucifer said, oxen can't read. It wasn't written for the oxen's sake. Now notice. Yea, for our sakes it was written. Now here's the abiding moral principle that lies underneath it. He that ploweth ought to plow in hope. And he that thresheth ought to thresh in hope of partaking. That's the changeless moral principle.

48:32 - 49:00 Read in full sermon