Marveling at Salvation Through God's Sovereign Providence

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Seeing and savoring this providence makes us marvel at our own salvation and humbles us with trembling joy. Humbles us because of our sin by his providence from eternity to eternity God chose us, his elect. He chose us from eternity when he saw that we deserved nothing but condemnation. [00:01:14]

He predestined us to be his children and share the likeness of his son in spite of our unworthiness and treason and recalcitrance. He purchased us at the cost of his son's life, his only son's infinitely valuable precious life. He called us the way he called Lazarus out of death. [00:01:45]

He caused us to be born again, and he did all of that before we thought anything, felt anything, believed anything, did anything. Indeed before we could think anything, feel anything, believe anything, do anything. This is why the apostle Paul said all of it was to the praise of the glory of his grace. [00:02:15]

He gave us freely the will to believe, the will to repent, and through that believing and repenting he justified us, declaring us to be righteous perfectly righteous in the presence of the all holy God, forgiving all our sins and becoming 100% for us and not against us. [00:02:47]

He gave us his Holy Spirit as a seal so that we would be infallibly kept for the day of redemption and he is working in us now what is pleasing in his sight and he will keep us. He will keep us from falling and bring us safely to glory. [00:03:20]

It is a great tragedy that millions of Christians do not know that this is true about them, that all of it is owing to the all-pervading all-embracing providence of God. They have been taught a salvation with themselves as the decisive cause at the point of their believing their conversion. [00:04:13]

This view of their own decisive power obscures the glory of what God has actually done for them. It strips them of stunned thankfulness for the gift of faith. It dulls the intensity of their amazement that they were raised from the dead. It takes away the wonder of their perseverance. [00:04:40]

When my mother was killed in a bus accident in Israel, my father almost died in the same accident. He flew home on the same plane with the body of my mother, and after nursing him to the point where his injuries could take it, he and I drove alone to the cemetery to pick out a grave marker. [00:05:13]

And we discussed what it would say and both of us were very happy to settle on First Peter 1:5 and on her gravestone or her grave markers made out of brass are the words kept by the power of God. I have stood over that grave many times in the last 46 years. [00:05:32]

And praised God for his sovereign providential majesty in keeping her believing and in keeping me to this very moment a believer. I mean keeping me from making shipwreck of my faith. He is the reason that hasn't happened. It is a glorious thing to see that the sovereign God chose me. [00:05:58]

The older I get, the more amazed it becomes. I think that must have been what moved Jude, the second to the last book in the New Testament, to close his book with the greatest doxology in the Bible, and all of it is to celebrate the keeping power of God that God keeps his own people. [00:06:55]

Oh that we could see and savor this providence oh how we would exalt in the freedom and the fullness and the sovereign effectiveness of our salvation if we see God's providence as it really is, we will be glad that it is all from God and through God and to God. [00:08:18]

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