A Once for All Act

If the building caught fire, directions to escape must be accurate, loud, and clear. No one would pout if the details were repeated. Martin uses this to justify labouring over the precision of justification - God's directions out of wrath must be unmistakable.

And if he were to discover during the next few minutes that this building was on fire, all of us would immediately be placed in a critical, a very real emergency situation. Now, if that situation were to develop, once discovered, any directions relative to our exit to safety and away from that imminent danger of the fire should be marked by three things. They ought to be accurate, they ought to be loud, and they ought to be clear. It would do no good for someone to give us directions that merely seemed to lead us to safety,

0:16 - 1:01 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Every person sitting here this morning is either wholly justified, as justified as he will ever be, or you are as condemned now as you will be a million years into the eternity of outer darkness.

Some rooms in your home are 'in process' of being renovated for months - a mess one day and still a mess the next. But mailing a letter is an act: the moment you pull the lid and drop it in, it is posted. Justification is the letter, not the renovation.

Well, whatever it is, it must be understood as an act of God. An act in contrast to a process. You see, a process speaks of imperfection and continuance. I happen to know that in some of your homes, certain rooms in those homes are in the process of being renovated and redecorated.

9:19 - 9:46 Read in full sermon

Picture a billowing slate-coloured thunderstorm with lightning dancing and thunder shaking the house. You blink and in that instant every cloud is gone - only blue sky and sunlight. Impossible in nature, but that is exactly what justification does: one moment under the thunderclouds of wrath, the next under the smile of a reconciled God.

when a real billy of a thunderstorm blows up around us. And I mean there are those clouds that look like slate. And dancing off them there is lightning and there's thunder that shakes the table and shakes the house and you wonder if the whole thing is going to come unhinged. Imagine what it would be like to look out of your window and to see those dark, ominous, billowy, slate-like clouds and the lightning playing off the edges and to feel the thunder shaking the house.

19:57 - 20:27 Read in full sermon

Put your ear to the Apostle Paul's closet and you can hear him groaning under the burden of felt sinfulness: 'Wretched man that I am!' The same man who wrote 'Justified by faith, peace with God' also groaned under indwelling corruption.

You put your ear to his closet and you hear him groaning under the burden of felt sinfulness.

31:09 - 31:19 Read in full sermon

The point: In the presence of raging sin in your breast, dare to believe what Christ has done is enough to bring the smile of God upon your head.

It took heroic faith for Abraham and Sarah, past the years of childbearing, to believe God's promise of a son. It takes that same heroic faith to believe there is no condemnation while sin is raging tumultuously within. Abraham's faith is paradigmatic for the believer grappling with indwelling sin.

The Scripture says in the prophecy of Isaiah, if ye will not believe, ye shall not be established. You need like Abraham who in hope believed against hope. I don't know what thoughts Mr. Garlington shared with you this morning I had to miss the class but it struck me last week when he was speaking on Romans 4 why is Abraham's faith with regard to bearing a child when he's passed the years of childbearing and his wife Sarah has passed through the change of life and humanly, biologically, physiologically it's impossible to bear a child why is that incident brought in in the context of saving fai...

37:12 - 37:53 Read in full sermon

A man in debtor's prison has ten thousand dollars of debt and not a penny to pay. A benefactor pays all his creditors - his debts are cancelled and he walks free. But his pockets are empty. So the benefactor gives him ten thousand dollars. Now he has both cancellation and conferral. Justification is both pardon AND positive acceptance as a law-keeper.

It is not only an act of cancellation, but it is an act of conferral. Let me illustrate. Here's a man who's in the debtor's prison. They used to have debtor's prison.

39:19 - 39:31 Read in full sermon