God's sovereign will: Our position in Christ I
Vern Peterman · Apr 25, 2004
Will of God, No. 04
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826235302220

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

There's some background commentary here. Alright. Yeah. They need to file a complaint in triplicate. Okay. In this, the Believer's Unfathomable Riches, let's take a step back to get the background here. We've been talking about the will of God, and we talked a couple weeks back about how the will of God is founded in the character of God. And that's the foundation. God's not going to will anything contrary to His character. Which is good. That's a good thing. That's good.

Because we know what His character is from Scripture, and we know from Scripture that His character is unchanging. In the Old Testament, the prophets said, He says, I the Lord do not change. Speaking for the Lord. I the Lord do not change. In the New Testament, Hebrews 13.8, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. The Lord's character is unchanging. He's not going to say, I love you and I change my mind. Those two don't go together because He is consistent. The next thing we looked at is that there are things that God has purposed in the sequence of human history that are irreversible, that are unchangeable, and those things will take place.

We talked about how that is important for us to understand because there's no sense for us to seek or to pray about something that we know is already laid out. We gave the big example. There's no sense in praying, Lord, please let there not be any tribulation. There's going to be a seven-year tribulation. There's going to be a thousand-year millennial kingdom. As believers, we have been predestined to be conformed to His image.

Hello. Hi. Excuse me. There is a maroon Toyota station wagon out front that has its lights on. Does that belong to anybody in here? Nope. Doesn't ring a bell. Okay. Okay. Huh. Okay. That's one of those problems that'll solve itself if you don't solve it. So, anyway. Eventually they won't be.

So anyway, the will of God involves the things that God has determined to take place. We look today and the next two weeks at the next layer in this sovereign will of God, and that is the believer's position in Christ. We have a position in Christ that is untouchable in the heavens, that's irreversible, the way Peter puts it, uncorruptible. We're not going to find out, oh I'm sorry, that guy got messed up a little bit. We're not going to get some sort of, you know, here's a telegram, knock on the door, telegram, here's a little notice, sorry, we lost something. It isn't going to happen.

The believer's position in Christ is fixed. And like God's character, it's immutable. The Lord has put it in place. One of the things we pointed out in the main service is there's all these words that in the Greek begin with sun, it means together, with, and we have been crucified with Christ, we have been buried with Christ, raised with Him, ascended with Him, and seated with Him, and all those are spelled out in the Greek with that sun, either as a separate word or as a prefix.

What's interesting is there is no reverse of any of those. You can't find any place where it has an undoing. Paul doesn't write, you have been seated with Christ. And then somewhere later said, well John over here is an exception. He got unseated. You don't find that. Nobody got unseated. Nobody got unraised. Nobody got uncrucified. There's no instance of any reversal of any of those.

So these are things that God's put in place. So as we look at these, key to remember, these are not things that, boy, you sure hope they're there. or they're not things, you know, if you're really good, you'll get some of these. Now, these are true of every believer, and they are true universally, and as Paul puts it in Galatians 3.28, doesn't matter male or female, Jew, Greek, there's no differentiation. Okay? So, as we go through this, the first one there says, oh, I got one thing.

Paul characterizes these riches, and that's in the title here and in the introduction, as unfathomable, past finding out. These are phenomenal things. It's pushing the limits of human understanding to grasp them. It's pushing the limits of language to convey them. So they are unfathomable riches. The reason he calls them unfathomable is in part How on earth could you figure that we would get these riches? How on earth could you figure that we would be so abundantly and profoundly blessed? Who could figure that out? Use the very best scientific equipment. Use the most advanced computers and the most precise analytical techniques. We could not find it out. It is only because it's been revealed.

So the first one is that if you're a believer, you are in the eternal plan of God. And these are things that we've talked about. But that's key part. You are part of and included in the eternal plan of God. That is part of your position and possession as a believer. And those are things that we've covered there. But let's talk about this next one, reconciled. Now, what does reconciled imply? If you hear the word reconciled, what does that imply was the state before the reconciliation?

There was a lostness, okay? Is there another description? Lost is certainly a good word. Is there another description? There's a separation that takes place, yep. Separation that takes place. Have you ever in your human experience seen somebody reconciled? Have you ever seen that? seen a reconciliation take place? And what happened?

Well, the two parties agreed. Okay. The differences were solved. Were solved and dealt with, yeah. And what was the character of the parties before that? They were probably very antagonistic. Okay. Yeah, lots of antagonism. Lots of hard feelings, hard words. Maybe even stone-cold silence. I recall when I was going to high school, I lived like 13 miles from the high school because we were out in the country. We lived two miles off of Pave Road. But the bus driver every day would have a bus stop, and it was real interesting.

There was a house right alongside the highway, and these two brothers had lived in the house. Apparently neither of them married, and they lived together in this house. And one of the brothers would be sitting in his car out by the highway, sitting next to the post office box, waiting for the mail. And apparently he would wait for the mail for hours every day. But what was interesting, though he and his brother had lived in the house, they hadn't spoken to each other for a couple of decades at least. There was something they were ticked off about, and they lived in the house and apparently had no financial arrangements to do anything different. But so they lived in the house together and the one brother sitting out by the post office box, the mailbox out front, was one way of him spending some separate time apart from his brother. Because they had nothing else to be, you know, spending separate time for. And so there was this, you know, so far as I know, it never was reconciled.

And so this is an issue, there's some definite separation going on there. an apparent problem. I mean, this is one of those things that all the kids on the bus kind of knew the story and could see every day this guy's sitting out there and, you know, these guys just don't talk to each other. Well, that's obviously an analogy and doesn't fit the picture completely, but the point being there is a separation. There is definitely something there. This is not just somebody's figment of imagination. There's something that causes the separation.

In this case, There's two aspects of this reconciliation for us to look at. The first one is reconciled by God. The second one is reconciled to God. And this is key. Among human beings, quite frequently we're in a situation where there's a mutual need for reconciliation. Both of them have some kind of a problem with the other, and so frequently the situation is mutual. The picture here is different.

God didn't need to get reconciled with us. We were the one with the problem. So what happens? We need to be reconciled to God. And so that's the picture you see. It's one-sided. We're the ones that are separate. We're the ones that created the offense as human beings.

And so it's a reconciled to God. We need to be reconciled to God, not Him to us. Secondly, that reconciliation was accomplished not because of us, but because of the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus satisfied what was the problem in the reconciliation. He satisfied the offense. And therefore, we are reconciled by God, not just to God. Both aspects, we are reconciled by God, by His doing, reconciled to God because we're the one who was separated because of the offense.

One way to put it is, God's immovable. We're the ones that need to move. But we don't do it by our own doing. We're doing it instead by God's doing. God's the one who made the effort to have us do the moving. And He did it through Jesus Christ. Now, redeemed. We've looked at this both in our study of Philippians as well as Colossians just a few verses ago.

Colossians 1.14 being one of those. What's the picture of this word redeemed?

It has nothing to do with blue chip stamps. Remember those? S&H green stamps or blue chip, one of those two. I can remember a pile of those filling a drawer. What's this idea of redeemed? What's that talking about? Turning something in for something else. Yeah, there's an exchange that takes place, isn't there?

The picture that is used here of redemption is typically one out of position of slavery, or capture, and paying the price to purchase out of slavery. Scripture uses several different words. To simply buy a slave would be agorazo, and Scripture sometimes uses that word, but also ex-agorazo, that is, to buy out of the market. That is, not just to buy the slave, but also to take the slave out of the marketplace altogether. And scripture sometimes uses that word.

But there's another word that is used here, and that's to actually pay a ransom. To pay a ransom. And that was typically used if you had some slaves that were captured either in a military capture or even just by a bunch of thugs. They're saying you want them, you gotta pay a ransom price. And so scripture at some places actually uses that term where a ransom was paid to buy us out of a position that meant either slavery or death. So we have this word redeemed.

In truth there are just a few passages given here The reality is there are dozens of passages that we could bring to bear, but these certainly make the point clearly enough. And if you want to look into that more, you can look into, I think it was a chart that we gave out with that Colossians 114 passage that gives the other words and a number of the other references.

You're sure free to look at that. Now, how about this no condemnation one? That's number four here. How many of you like condemnation? If you really like it, then this is no blessing at all, but no condemnation is one of the things that we have as part of our position in Christ. In the big picture, we have been uncondemned, because condemned was our prior state, right? And this moves us as believers, part of our change in position is as you pointed out, a change from total condemnation to one of absolutely no condemnation.

And you know it's interesting as human beings we sometimes have a hard time letting go of that. I mean positionally it's true. It's a hundred percent true. There's no quibbling about that. In our daily experience a lot of people, even believers, have a hard time letting go of that.

Hal and I have both shared about instances where we've talked to people and we find that the Lord will forgive people for all kinds of things, but I've done something too bad. Too bad. Is there any such thing as too bad? No. Basically, if you look through the length of Scripture from one end to the other, some of the people that are saved by faith through the course of Scripture did some pretty awful things. There's no question about it. Scripture even makes some substantial emphasis on those who did some pretty awful things.

What did Moses do while he was still in Egypt? He murdered a man. And so God said, well, sorry Moses, you're just done. You're out of the picture, right? No. The Lord still used him. Here's Paul. He's writing to Timothy. 1 Timothy 1, verses 12-16. He outlines to Timothy how awful he was. He says, I was a blasphemer. He says, I persecuted the church in Acts. He says, I persecuted the church to the point of death.

His point was not to cause the Christians trouble. He was there to rub them out. And he says, in the great offense to the Greeks, he says, I was guilty of hubris, which to the Greeks was an unbelievable offense. It's a combination of shaking your fist at the gods and having a sadistic pleasure in the pain and agonies of your fellow man. He says, I was guilty of offense to the Jews, to the church, and to the Greeks of the worst. And he says, and God had mercy.

So, can we do something that does an end run around this? No. We cannot do something that is an end run. If we say that there is still condemnation left, it's because we don't believe what Jesus said when he said it's finished. It's because we don't believe when the author of Hebrews writes, and he says, once for all.

Well, how much is all? All. I think all means all. I think it's interesting, if you don't mind if I can comment, it's interesting that both, on this point forward, if you look at the TULIP doctrines or the TULIP theory, both the Armenians and the Calvinists struggle with this condemnation thing on both sides of the coin.

That's right, they're still wanting to bring it in. And that seems to be the saddest part about this, is that even people that say they're Calvinists and believe that they're eternally secure, fight with the concept that they won't know until they're dead whether or not they were a part of the elect. So they've been struggling with condemnation their whole life, where someone who's more Arminian struggles with it every time they do something wrong, they think they're condemned all over again. Sure, and what happens is they don't believe that you've been seated, and he says, well I've been seated, and then they want to unseat themselves. Well, good luck finding that in scripture.

You can't get there. But you're correct. Both ends, and that's why some weeks back I just said, you know, there's a tug-of-war, this Arminian-Calvinist controversy, and the biblical position is drop the rope. Drop the rope. There's no mileage in pulling on either end of this thing. What we want to do is to see what Scripture says and take God at His word and not try to extrapolate.

I think both ends arrive at some issue with condemnation. You're correct. And the reason they do is because they insist on making every aspect understandable to human beings. And that's a problem. The reason we need revelation is because we cannot understand it on our own. Okay, so this condemnation is a key point. It is a key point for us to understand because, as Larry pointed out, Christians, it seems like, are forever not understanding the simple, the key point.

Here Paul starts off Romans 8. What does he say? There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. He doesn't say, there is therefore now not very much. There is therefore now occasional. He says none. Zip. Nada. Not a bit. So if you want to feel condemned, go ahead, but you've got no basis for it. It's up to you. All right. Number five.

Related to God through propitiation, a satisfaction of God's holiness. Now it's interesting. It says related to God through the satisfaction of God's holiness. We mentioned before that God's will is always consistent with His character, and this is one aspect of that. The satisfaction of God's holiness says that because human beings prior to salvation are basically sinful, that the holiness aspect of God must be satisfied. He took the step to satisfy that holiness by paying the price. His holiness was satisfied by the price that Christ paid.

And we, as a result of that, have a relationship to the Lord. Scripture continually reinforces that relationship. We may disturb the fellowship while we're here on planet Earth, but we cannot touch the relationship. And people often get that mixed up, just like they get condemnation mixed up. I don't lose relationship with the Lord because my fellowship with the Lord is disrupted.

Yes. You can actually put in place here also, well, it goes back to actually number one is about his immutability you were talking about. Yep. And, well, I mean, in a relationship when you have, like the father and the son have a relationship, they have a never-changing relationship. It's a constant thing. It's always there. It's not here today and gone tomorrow. In this number five, I would still go back to number one in a way. Yes, it's related to the unchanging character of God, isn't it?

Number six, all sins removed by His efficacious blood. All sins. All. 100%. See, we're not going to come somewhere along the path and the Lord's going to say, oops, I forgot something. This is a 100% deal. That's why the Lord could say, it is finished. And by the way, it is finished is not only in itself a total statement, as we pointed out a couple weeks back, it is finished is also in the perfect tense. It means a completed action. Ongoing results into the future. There's no, boy, I've got to go back and fix something. There's no touch up here. God did 90% of it and you've got to do the 10%. There's none of that. It is a completely finished, completed transaction. Now, number seven.

Vitally joined together with Christ for judgment of the old self unto a new walk. That is, we've been crucified with Christ. Dead with Christ. This goes back to our having been united with him in his death. That's the key point here. That's these with or together with words that come out strongly in the Greek and the English translations seem to bring it across well too. We have died unto sin. That is, not just died, but we have died unto sin, in relationship to sin, so that we be alive to God. That's the message of Romans 6 and 1 Peter. Died to sin, alive to God.

Death is not a matter of termination and cessation and annihilation. Death is a matter of separation. Key point. And he goes and underscores that point in Romans 7, starting with verse one in the next several verses, he underscores the point death is not annihilation, termination, and cessation. Death is separation. That's what's happening. Nothing gets terminated and not annihilated in the crucifixion, but something very definitely gets separated, and that separation is we become separated positionally from sin and alive to God. Very clear in scripture. Alright, now, this is one of those flip-the-thing-over kind of things. We've been buried with Christ. This is, again, part of our having been united with Christ.

The reason for the burial, some people will say, well, you're already dead, why do you have to get buried? There's a couple of reasons. One is that the burial is the certainty of death. If somebody just pulled them off the cross, somebody might say, well, yeah, you'd pull them off before they died. They just happened to resuscitate. But the burial is, nope, I'm afraid this guy really is dead. And, you know, even they put the various, you know, treatment spices and things of that sort on there, wrapped them up tight and put them in the grave. And so it is certainty of death.

And it's one more thing, it is the place from which we are raised. Christ was not raised from the cross, he was raised from the tomb. It's the place from which life comes. So we have been buried with Christ and then raised with Christ by walking to a new life. So our having been raised with Christ assumes those prior sequences. We will be looking at these truths additionally as we go through the book of Colossians here, because the book of Colossians is key on making clear, as well as Ephesians, those passages are key in making clear our having been united with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding.

Okay. And this is one that the vast majority of Christendom doesn't understand. We're free from the law. Free from the law. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You can look at all sorts of documentation from different so-called Christian groups, and boy, they've got a lot of law to lay on you.

I was talking to a fellow this last week who came to Denver after roughly a 20-year absence. because he still had this animosity with one of the pastors in town after 20 years about some things that were unfair. And what had kept that smoldering and festering was a matter of mutual application of law to each other.

And why is that? Because the law, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3, is a ministry of death, it's a ministry of condemnation, And in Galatians, it's a curse. How do you like that? Sign up for the ministry? And so what happens is here all this bitterness, this acid burning at heart had been because of mutual application of the law. They each had condemned the other under the law. And so this thing continued to smolder after 20 years of nursing this smoldering ember.

But the relationship we have with Romans 7 is that we are dead to the law. Again, what is death? Death is separation. With death as separation, we are dead that is separated from, positionally, the law. Does the law cease to exist? The law doesn't cease to exist. Do we cease to exist? No. But the separation, because of are having been crucified with Christ, we are dead too, dead in relationship to the law.

And that says neither one ceases to exist, but our relationship to the law has been completely severed, separated from the law. There are five different ways, and we won't go into them today, in which the law still has validity. None of those areas of validity of the law apply to the believer. They all apply to the unbeliever. All to the unbeliever.

We are dead to the law, 100%. Delivered from the law. Delivered from. Away from. And that's a part of dead too. Those are kind of two aspects of the same thing, aren't they? Yeah. That's correct. Although it's a Mosaic law, although Paul, as he writes, actually writes of two kinds of law.

One is specifically the Mosaic law. The other, though, is a law principle. Because, in fact, if you ask the vast majority of people in Christendom who still hold to the law, they notice I use the word Christendom. It's not true biblical Christianity. If they hold to the law as still being valid, you will find almost universally they don't hold to the Mosaic Law.

They hold to some other reconstitution of the law. If you ask them, okay, are you sacrificing bulls and you're celebrating the Feast of Pentecost and you're doing all this stuff? Oh no, we don't do that. We've got something else. And so what happens, they've come up with their own law But it's not the Mosaic Law. So what is it?

It's law principle. It's the principle of the law, the idea that I am going to be righteous because of adherence to the law. The idea that I am somehow going to be satisfying to God, pleasing to God, because of fulfillment of some law, whether it's the Mosaic Law or some other law I've concocted. So what's interesting, you can typically identify it It is not always brought up clearly in the English text, but the Greek text will have the law with a definite article, and then drop out the definite article where it says law principle.

So, a general answer to your question, but a good point to bring it up. Yes, the Mosaic Law is specifically what he's referring to, but there's also a law principle, and Paul writes about both. Okay, how about this children of God? Boy, we've got like five things headed up under that. One of them, C there, is specifically listed as children of God. There are different aspects to our being children of God. Born again, what passage do you think of when you hear that phrase born again? Yeah, here's Jesus talking to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, right? And the thing that just baffles Nicodemus is Jesus comes to him and says, you must be born again.

And he's like, huh? He can't comprehend this thing. He says, how am I going to pull that off, you know? This born again, why did he tell Nicodemus you must be born again? What's the deal here? Isn't the first birth good enough? What's the problem? We need some kind of change here. This isn't just an adjustment of minor proportions. The magnitude of it is big. What else? What did our first human birth do for us? We were born under sin. Oh, man! You could have gone all day without telling me that. Yeah, and Bob stated the problem. We were born under sin.

And that's why the first one isn't going to work. Matter of fact, that's why we most definitely need a second one. The first one isn't going to work because all that did was give us a huge, huge problem. Matter of fact, it's a problem big enough we can't solve it.

How about that? A new creation? Yeah. If you've ever seen somebody who really totaled a car, hopefully they came out okay, but if you've ever seen somebody who completely totaled a car, somebody's going to come to them and they're going to say, you know, I don't think you better try to fix that thing. I think you need a new car. The old one's hopeless. That's obviously, like any analogy, it doesn't convey the whole picture. But the point being, if you see some car and it's just a crumpled wreck, forget fixing it. You've got to start over again.

And that's what Jesus is telling Nicodemus, not about cars, believe me. But Jesus is telling Nicodemus, look, you can't just take this old smashed up wreck and expect to have something workable out of it. that you're not going to go and fix this problem by being born into the right genealogy and obeying a few laws and coming up with a few of your own. That isn't going to fix it any more than you're going to take this crumpled, smoldering wreck and turn it into a new car. Not going to happen.

So he says you must be born again and that rebirthing births you into a new family. New family, new life. The Apostle John is the one who underscores that most, especially in the Gospel of John. Quickened is a term that doesn't mean you go faster. Quickened is a term we don't use as often. It basically means made alive. Made alive.

And the reference that it shows there is Ephesians 2.1, but actually the Greek word doesn't show for several verses later. What Paul does in the first few verses of Ephesians 2 is, you were dead in your trespasses and sins, and he goes and describes what that's like, and he says, but you he made alive. You he made alive. That's the word that's come across here as quickened.

He made alive. We are made alive by God's doing. It's God's accomplishment. And we have no instance of a believer being made dead spiritually. Reseparated. Yeah, you're already there. But no undoing of this thing. There's a one-way valve on this pipe. How about this children of God? They were made children of God. Aren't we all children of God?

No! She says no! Can you imagine that? What do you mean, no? No! Oh, wow! No means no! Well, I can tell how you raise your kids. Alright. That's good for you. Alright. Okay, this children of God message here, what are we being told here? That they are all children of God. Okay, but is everybody on planet earth children of God? No. Okay. Ah, okay. You have this relationship to God as children of God, so here's this relationship.

And I've shared this before, so forgive me for being repetitive, but I was going through translating this, 1 John 3, you know, in Greek, just like about a month before we moved here. And I broke into tears when I got through translating it, because As I was translating it, it says, behold what manner of love the Father has given to us. And it's behold that is pause and soak it all up. Pause and take a mental picture.

Behold what quality of permanent, unconditional love the Father has given unto us and freely given. And one of the things we have to remember as a background to that, in the culture to which John wrote, having a loving, caring father was exceptional.

Most fathers were not involved with their kids terribly. And they expected the mother and tutors and other people to have them. Yeah, they'd have slaves taking care of the kids and the mother and other people were involved with that. As a matter of fact, up until up until reaching the age of majority, a child, unless he were legally accepted, and we'll talk about this word accepted here, unless he were legally accepted, it was legal within the Roman Empire to abandon children.

And I don't mean just leave them out on the street. You could take them out in the woods intentionally to let the wolves and the elements get them. So you could take a brand new baby and just leave them out in the woods. Let the animals take care of them and the bugs and everything else.

And that was perfectly legal. So to have a father that accepted you and showed you that level of acceptance was overwhelming. To the people who read what John wrote in those first couple of verses, they must have just put the paper down and cried. to have a father that loves you that much. That's remarkable. What an example for human fathers. What a pattern to see that. Here's a father that loves you so dearly in a world in which it's perfectly legal for the father to abandon you out into the wolves and coyotes and whatever. So that's a marvelous statement to be accepted as children of God.

And that gets underscored under .11, but we'll see if we have time to get there. Adopt, excuse me, let me cover a couple more here. A new creation, we will talk about that more this morning, okay? So at that, I'll leave it, but we'll talk about it more this morning in the main service.

The regeneration is the specific giving of new life, okay? It is related to this word quickened, okay, made alive. but it has the whole idea of coming from death unto life. It's a similar idea, but more of an all-encompassing term. From death unto life.

Now, ten, adopted. We've covered this also in the main service, and most people in our culture, when they see in Romans, Romans 80 twice mentions it, and in Galatians. Most people who see that phrase in our culture don't understand it. They say, well, adopted, that's a big deal. But adoption in our culture is for babies or kids, right? We adopt kids. Adoption was not for that in this culture. In the Roman culture, adoption was for adults. You adopt an adult, and it would be puzzling to them the idea of adopting a baby or something.

Because that's not the purpose. The purpose was this. It started with the emperors. The emperor said, I have nobody to take the position of emperor after me. Maybe because of not having anybody in the family to do it. So the law was set up to adopt someone as an adopted son so that they could be the next emperor. To become adopted meant that several things.

One is all the prior debts of the one adopted are entirely forgiven. The adoption accomplished that. It didn't matter what you owed to who. All prior debts completely forgiven. 100% wiped out. Your history that you had and the obligations with it died with adoption.

The person that adopted you put you ahead of any natural born sons. How about that? First place. So, adoption is not some sort of a second rate thing at all. Adoption says you are irreplaceably, unchangeably number one. Okay? You are first on the list. So, they said, adoption is sons. I mean that they dropped it. Wow. Okay? Whole different picture here. So they're seeing this adoption of sons, and for us we're kind of yawning and looking for the next verse. For them it's like, man, stop! Let me soak that in!

Because it involved a position of privilege and forgiveness of the past that was just unparalleled. It also required high-level approval. The adoption of sons for the emperor required approval of the entire Roman Senate. Other adoptions were also accomplished, but were required high-level approval. Seven adults must witness the adoption on top of that. And so it was a big deal. It was a major event. So key to look at that. And I'm going to try to touch on 11 here. I'll try to squeeze it in.

Acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. And this is one, I think what maybe we better do time-wise is I'll have to go into this a little bit more detail next time, but for now we'll introduce it. Isn't one of the things that we as human beings wrestle with from time to time, isn't part of our wrestling, are we acceptable? Are we acceptable to God? Are we acceptable to other people?

And notice how many points are here in the verses behind it. There is no question at all about the believer's acceptability. God doesn't just say, here's a verse or two. The acceptability of the believer is nailed down, shut tight, and caulked. This is an absolute welded, tight picture that we get. We are acceptable before the Lord, and the Lord makes no opportunity for exception here. As a believer, you are positionally, entirely, completely acceptable before the Lord. Our acceptability is never again an issue. I don't have to do anything to her?

Nope. It doesn't depend on me. You know, one of the things that's interesting is, and I've shared this with Hal, and as he and I will sit down and counsel with people, have you noticed how many of these things end up being key points in counseling? The kinds of things that people often struggle with. You know, I'm free from the law. I'm acceptable. I'm a child of God. Or even that picture of I'm adopted. Those kind of things. All prior debts gone.

And it's what people often struggle with and what counseling often entails is teaching them these truths. Because it is the depth and personal understanding of these truths that are pivotal for them to be freed from the many things that often encumber them. So, we'll go into this acceptable thing in more detail this next week, because we've kind of run out of time here. But hang on to this, bring this next time, and we'll take two more weeks to hopefully get through the list.

Richard? With this acceptability, I can see that there is always a tug of war, again, of two things, the will of God and your will. So you have to tie these things into place, too, because if you're not acceptable and everything else, are you operating under your will, or is it God's? And the thing is that the will of God always should be more paramount than yours. Sure. It's ultimately, do we believe God, isn't it? Yes. Do we believe God and what He said?

And that's one reason why He makes these points so clearly. One of the things you'll notice is there's very few of these that have a single verse behind it. Most of them have multiple verses. It's as if the Lord is saying, I want you to understand very clearly these things, that you are acceptable, that there is no condemnation, that you're free from the law. And He doesn't want there to be any doubt about these things that we have laid out here. And let me just offer one more thing, and that's that it's because we desperately need to know these things. Most certainly need to know them.

Let's pray. Lord, thank you for these marvelous, marvelous truths. Lord, how freeing they are. How wonderful they are. And indeed, as you've had Paul write, how unfathomable they are. How amazing that we can be irreversibly, uncorruptably acceptable to you. How marvelous that we can be called children of God, accepted in the Beloved. We give you thanks for these precious and eternal truths. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.