God alone is Sovereign

1 Chronicles 29:11

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all.

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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Deeper 2009

Living Waters Publications has just released this years line up for the Deeper Conference and with Ravi Zacharias, Mark Cahill, Johnny Hunt, Grey Koukl, and the crew from Ray Comforts ministry it is shaping up to be just as awesome as last years. Oh and yes Kirk Cameron will be speaking again.

I highly recommend attending this conference if you are interested in growing deeper with the Lord. You can check out the Deeper Conference here. Please contact me if you have any interest in attending at ifishforhim@gmail.com .

We are called to grow in holiness in Christ. Without going deeper with the Lord how can this happen? Proverbs 12:28 "In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death."

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Washer in the Open Air


Paul Washer Open Air Preaching in Lima (English Subtitles) from I'll Be Honest on Vimeo.


It's nice seeing a well respected Pastor step up on a soapbox and do it old school...Thanks Lawman for the find...The video above might not be working. If not follow this link

Monday, April 20, 2009

Living Waters University, Byron



The human heart is hard against the Truth.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Delight in God

Matt Chandler - Irreverent, Silly Myths



The more I listen to Matt Chandler the more I like him...

A Letter To You


The Lord has laid you on my heart. I believe as followers of Christ we have to take a good hard look at how we move throughout the day, weeks and months of our lives. I ask you a question that I ask myself - Am I speaking, teaching and preaching the only message God has told me to speak? The message is the Gospel. Not a watered down Gospel about how Christianity and Christ will make your life better, but the true Gospel of how you have to give up everything to follow Him. The real true Gospel will be rejected or accepted, but no one should be left in a idle position.

These are the truths I see in Scripture:

God is holy, man is totally depraved and therefore cannot within his own power become right with God by his own means. Because God is perfect, He demands perfection to come into His presence, and this creates a serious problem for man. If man so much as even violates one part of God's law, he is guilty of breaking it all and therefore rendered not perfect. Violation of God's law results in death in hell for an eternity, because the law being broken is that of a Eternal God. We should NEVER sway from this truth, because we will have to give an account of speaking the whole council of God to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a Living God. But God being rich in mercy towards sinners sent His Son to die for them. Christ Jesus came, lived a sinless life, died a criminal's death on tree He did not deserve to hang on, and was raised by the power of the only true God, the God of Israel three days later. He is alive today and King over all things and commands ALL people everywhere to REPENT, turning from their sins and placing their faith in Him, making Him Lord over their lives. Man must be born again (spiritually from above) to see the Kingdom of God. Life, peace and freedom only truly exist in Christ.

You are already doing a lot for the Kingdom and for that I know God is pleased, but there is more that needs to be done. We must be very careful that we do not lose sight of the central truths of Scripture as noted above. It is not about having a great life now, but about meeting God in righteousness, which can only be found in Christ Jesus. As I can see that God has His hand on your life right now, and can feel the Holy Spirit will use you in greater and greater things in the future, please join with me to begin praying for strength, pray for God to raise up labors, pray that God would give us a desire to go deeper with Him, and for His name to be glorified around the world.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Our Sovereign God


This is such a great article from Dr. MacArthur I just had to post it here. Hope you enjoy...


(By John MacArthur)

No doctrine is more despised by the natural mind than the truth that God is absolutely sovereign. Human pride loathes the suggestion that God orders everything, controls everything, rules over everything. The carnal mind, burning with enmity against God, abhors the biblical teaching that nothing comes to pass except according to His eternal decrees. Most of all, the flesh hates the notion that salvation is entirely God’s work. If God chose who would be saved, and if His choice was settled before the foundation of the world, then believers deserve no credit for their salvation.

But that is, after all, precisely what Scripture teaches. Even faith is God’s gracious gift to His elect. Jesus said, “No one can come to Me, unless it has been granted him from the Father” (John 6:65). “Nor does anyone know the Father, except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him” (Matt. 11:27). Therefore no one who is saved has anything to boast about (cf Eph. 2:8, 9). “Salvation is from the Lord” (Jonah 2:9).

The doctrine of divine election is explicitly taught throughout Scripture. For example, in the New Testament epistles alone, we learn that all believers are “chosen of God” (Titus 1:1). We were “predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will” (Eph. 1:11, emphasis added). “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world . . . He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will” (vv. 4, 5). We “are called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son . . . and whom He predestined, these He also called; and whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified” (Rom. 8:28–30).

When Peter wrote that we are “chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1 Peter 1:1, 2), he was not using the word “foreknowledge” to mean that God was aware beforehand who would believe and therefore chose them because of their foreseen faith. Rather, Peter meant that God determined before time began to know and love and save them; and He chose them without regard to anything good or bad they might do. We’ll return to this point again, but for now, note that those verses explicitly state that God’s sovereign choice is made “according to the kind intention of His will” and “according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will”—that is, not for any reason external to Himself. Certainly He did not choose certain sinners to be saved because of something praiseworthy in them, or because He foresaw that they would choose Him. He chose them solely because it pleased Him to do so. God declares “the end from the beginning . . . saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’” (Isa. 46:10). He is not subject to others’ decisions. His purposes for choosing some and rejecting others are hidden in the secret counsels of His own will.

Moreover, everything that exists in the universe exists because God allowed it, decreed it, and called it into existence. “Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases” (Ps. 115:3). “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps” (Ps. 135:6). He “works all things after the counsel of His will” (Eph. 1:11). “From Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). “For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him” (1 Cor. 8:6).

What about sin? God is not the author of sin, but He certainly allowed it; it is integral to His eternal decree. God has a purpose for allowing it. He cannot be blamed for evil or tainted by its existence (1 Sam. 2:2: “There is no one holy like the Lord”). But He certainly wasn’t caught off-guard or standing helpless to stop it when sin entered the universe. We do not know His purposes for allowing sin. If nothing else, He permitted it in order to destroy evil forever. And God sometimes uses evil to accomplish good (Gen. 45:7, 8; 50:20; Rom. 8:28). How can these things be? Scripture does not answer all the questions for us. But we know from His Word that God is utterly sovereign, He is perfectly holy, and He is absolutely just.

Admittedly, those truths are hard for the human mind to embrace, but Scripture is unequivocal. God controls all things, right down to choosing who will be saved. Paul states the doctrine in inescapable terms in the ninth chapter of Romans, by showing that God chose Jacob and rejected his twin brother Esau “though the twins were not yet born, and had not done anything good or bad, in order that God’s purpose according to His choice might stand, not because of works, but because of Him who calls” (v. 11). A few verses later, Paul adds this: “He says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy” (vv. 15, 16).

Paul anticipated the argument against divine sovereignty: “You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?’” (v. 19). In other words, doesn’t God’s sovereignty cancel out human responsibility? But rather than offering a philosophical answer or a deep metaphysical argument, Paul simply reprimanded the skeptic: “On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this,’ will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use?” (vv. 20, 21).

Scripture affirms both divine sovereignty and human responsibility. We must accept both sides of the truth, though we may not understand how they correspond to one another. People are responsible for what they do with the gospel—or with whatever light they have (Rom. 2:19, 20), so that punishment is just if they reject the light. And those who reject do so voluntarily. Jesus lamented, “You are unwilling to come to Me, that you may have life” (John 5:40). He told unbelievers, “Unless you believe that I am [God], you shall die in your sins” (John 8:24). In John chapter 6, our Lord combined both divine sovereignty and human responsibility when He said, “All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out” (v. 37); “For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him, may have eternal life” (v. 40); “No one can come to Me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (v. 44); “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life” (v. 47); and, “No one can come to Me, unless it has been granted him from the Father” (v. 65). How both of those two realities can be true simultaneously cannot be understood by the human mind—only by God.

Above all, we must not conclude that God is unjust because He chooses to bestow grace on some but not to everyone. God is never to be measured by what seems fair to human judgment. Are we so foolish as to assume that we who are fallen, sinful creatures have a higher standard of what is right than an unfallen and infinitely, eternally holy God? What kind of pride is that? In Psalm 50:21 God says, “You thought that I was just like you.” But God is not like us, nor can He be held to human standards. “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isa. 55:8, 9).

We step out of bounds when we conclude that anything God does isn’t fair. In Romans 11:33 the apostle writes, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?” (Rom. 11:33, 34).

(Today’s post was adapted from John’s book Ashamed of the Gospel published by Crossway Books.)

Thursday, April 2, 2009