Today’s Speaker: Brother Mark Pannell will conduct the 11:00 am service today. Pray for him as he delivers God’s word.
Television Broadcast: Our Reign of Grace Television program is being broadcast on WFXL Fox 31, Channel 4. The program will air every Sunday morning at 11 AM. Pray that God will use it for His glory.
Radio Broadcast: Sunday morning at 9:30am on 98.7 FM –WISK. To hear sermons on your computer click on www.americusradio.com
Web Sites: Visit our newly designed web site at: www.rofgrace.com
The apostle Paul tells us that God has made foolish the wisdom of this world. All the world's wisdom is but foolishness if it doesn't answer the question or resolve the problem of how an infinitely holy and just God can justify sinners such as we are. All wisdom is foolishness that does not consider this the most important question of eternity. All wisdom is folly that does not consider this matter immediately and urgently! I sometimes see on signs or bumper stickers the words, "Jesus Is The Answer." I think to myself, "How true...but the problem is that very few even know the question." You see, Christ is only glorious as the Answer if you know the question. What is the question? How can God as He is, justify sinners such as we are? How can He maintain His honor, satisfy the claims of His justice, keep His law, magnify Himself in all His attributes, display His full glory and at the same time justify an innumerable company of sinners? The answer to this question is the good news of the gospel! The answer is the Answer, the Lord Jesus Christ. "Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, {I say}, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." (Rom. 3:24-26) If God is only just, all must perish because of sin. If God is only Justifier and seeks to justify at the expense of His justice, He ceases to be God. Only in Christ can He be and do both. That is why Christ is the Wisdom of God! The preaching of how God can be just and yet justify sinners in Christ is "foolishness" to some and a "stumblingblock" to others; but "unto them that are called...Christ the wisdom of God." The Spirit of God reveals the glory of this wisdom in the face of Christ. "Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the LORD." (I Cor.1:30,31) Thank God for His wisdom in Christ!
Gary Shepard
Rom (6:12)Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.
What is it to “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body”? The previous verse 11 states that we should “reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord”. The only way that a believer cannot let sin reign in our lives is to continually remember that we are indeed dead to sin by the body of Christ. He has suffered the full penalty for sin by the shedding of His blood, and He did it not as a private person but as our representative and substitute. The only sinners, who are able to “let not sin reign in their mortal body”, are those for whom Christ died and God the Holy Spirit has called by the gospel. Not just any gospel, but the gospel that reveals Christ imputed righteous as the only ground and bases for justification before a holy God. These are the ones that have been slain by God’s Holy law and have been shown that there is no way that they could ever be saved by their law keeping. God reveals to them the sin that deceives, the sin of thinking that there is something that we can do to contribute to our salvation. Until God does this work in His elect, sin continues to reign in our mortal body, but when God regenerates and converts the sinner, sin will not reign in our mortal body. We will see ourselves as dead to sin and alive unto God by Jesus Christ our Lord. This will create within the believer the right motive to obey God and avoid sin in our lives. God enables believers to do this by continually causes them to look to Christ for all of salvation. We know that this old fleshly body is dead because of sin. We have no confidence in anything that proceeds for it. We walk in the Spirit, looking to Christ, the author and finisher of our salvation.
--- Jim Casey
ABSOLUTELY CONTRADICTORY
Grace and works of any kind, in the point of acceptance with God, are mentioned by the apostle not only as opposites, or as contraries, but as absolutely contradictory to each other, like fire and water, light and darkness; so that the affirmation of the one is the denial of the other (Rom. 4:5; l l:5, 6). God justifies freely, justifies the ungodly, and him that worketh not.
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