In the Words of Christ

The point: Stop quoting verses about grace while your spiritual life is being strangled by love of sin, the world, and self.

Martin uses the absolute necessity of breathing for physical life to illustrate the absolute necessity of perseverance for spiritual life and salvation. Just as one would fight desperately to breathe, so a true believer will fight desperately to persevere in holiness.

When I say that I'm going to try to demonstrate the absolute necessity of continuance in faith, in holiness and obedience if you're to attain to life by absolute necessity, I mean something that's just like the conviction you have that it's absolutely necessary to breathe if you're going to live. Now each one of you children and adults is absolutely convinced if you don't breathe, you don't live. Now you may not think of that. Days may pass and you may never think of it.

12:25 - 12:56 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin examines Jesus' teachings in Matthew 5 and 18 on radical self-denial (plucking out eyes, cutting off hands) to avoid sin and hell, demonstrating that salvation by grace…

Martin uses Hugh Hefner and pornographers as examples of those who cause others to stumble, applying Jesus' 'woe' to them and the broader entertainment industry.

Here he pronounces a woe upon those who are the occasion of causing others to sin. When I think of that and think of its application to our society, woe be to Hugh Hefner and his ilk. Woe be to the pornographers who have filled the newsstands not only of our own nation, but Steve told us right in the middle of Nairobi, Playboy magazine and all of the rest of it. Woe be to that whole crowd that has caused a whole generation to stumble into filth and into lechery.

19:10 - 19:53 Read in full sermon

Driving home: He that endures he that clings he that perseveres he that presses on to the end shall be saved. This is a matter of salvation or damnation.

Martin recounts a story from a sister church where a young man, angered by his godly father's insistence on church attendance, aimed a gun at his father, illustrating the intense hatred that can arise when someone is determined to obey God.

I must say this silly notion that God's covenant is always a covenant of family ties. What in the world does that theology do in the face of a passage like this? Jesus said, when you come and preach what I've told you to preach, it's going to divide families to the place where one family member will actually give up another one to death. Brother shall deliver up brother to death and the father his child and children shall rise up against parents and the hatred to godly parents will become so great they'll cause their own parents

33:35 - 34:20 Read in full sermon

The point: Be willing to part with the dearest human relations for Christ's sake and love Christ more than father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, or life itself.

Martin quotes John Newton's hymn 'Amazing Grace' to comfort and confirm those who have persevered, attributing their endurance to God's grace.

how can some of us look back and say thirty years we've been in the way and we have to say with John Newton it was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved tis grace has brought me what safe thus far yes through many dangers toils and snares I have already come and the proof that salvation is all of God and all of grace is that I stand today in the way of holiness and obedience and righteousness oh not perfectly no in my approaches to God

53:18 - 54:02 Read in full sermon