Living in Christ: Endurance, Faithfulness, and Transformation

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The basic conviction is simply this that God speaks through his word that God speaks through his word, that the word of God actually does the work of God through the spirit of God in the people of God, so that that immediately moves the emphasis away from any notion of well I see what beg or anybody else has to say about this passage. [00:03:34]

It's not my task simply to introduce you to portions of the Bible that you have perhaps never read or never understood. It's part as a responsibility as a teacher to make sure we do understand what it says but far more than that not simply to grow in an understanding of it but rather to be changed by it. [00:04:09]

What the Bible teaches is that when we come to Jesus in Repentance and faith and we enter into the benefits of all that he has provided for us the death that he died we have essentially died with him and the resurrected life which is now his is ours to share because we are placed into Christ. [00:09:55]

And so when Paul says here in Timothy if we died with him we will also rise with him he's making the point that when a person is baptized as we baptize here people routinely on a monthly basis and they come down into the water here as the baptismal pool opens up and they come down into the water. [00:11:23]

The Christian life is not just a a series of hundred yard Sprints engaged in intermittently, but the Christian Life is if you like a cross-country run that starts and never ends until finally we breast the tape and are welcomed into the kingdom of God, but along the way it's a long obedience in the same direction. [00:15:30]

If we endure, we will also reign with him. What Paul does here in just a phrase is reinforce what he has provided for us in the opening paragraph of the second chapter hence the pictures of the soldier and the athlete and the farmer they drive home for us this notion of endurance. [00:15:05]

If we deny him, he will also deny us. Again Paul is simply reaffirming what we find in the gospels in the record of the Lord Jesus himself, Jesus who was a compassionate and kind and loving Shepherd the most loving man and clearest of teachers who ever lived when he addressed his disciples in Matthew chapter 10. [00:23:15]

Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my father who is in heaven. Do you get what he's saying there? He says you you might be tempted to think that the real issue of your life. [00:24:22]

If we are faithless, he remains faithful. You of course are immediately saying, well how can that possibly be surely, um what what we're having here at the end is just a little bit of encouragement, and that of course is the way in which it is understood by many you're sensible people you have to decide for yourself. [00:26:20]

It's pretty obvious that God is a faithful God we've been singing about that this morning, we can be confident as James tells us that he doesn't shift and change like shifting Shadows, and so it may be that what Paul is doing is distinguishing between the denial of apostasy which is to deny him to deny that his blood is a sacrificial offering. [00:26:40]

God's faithfulness explains not only his threats but also his promises usually when you're with youth groups they try and stump you with all kinds of difficult questions and I admired our youth guys for being able to navigate their way through but it's not unusual for some bright spark to ask you on one evening is there anything God cannot do. [00:28:22]

He cannot act contrary to himself, he cannot act contrary to himself, he can be faithless, therefore he can't say one thing and mean another, he's not like us, numbers says that numbers 23 God is not a man like ours that he would lie or like a mere mortal that he would change his mind God doesn't do that. [00:28:55]

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