About this sermon
Peter comforts persecuted believers by reminding them that they are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. God’s foreknowledge means his love set on his people before creation, and it never depends on anything he foresaw in them. Roman sacramentalism and Arminian revivalism both make God’s saving power depend on the sinner’s permission. God changes the will of sinners so that they come to Christ, and he will never turn away anyone who comes.
Sermon transcript
Dear friends, please remain standing for the reading of God’s Word as we continue our consideration of 1 Peter 1, verses 1 and 2. 1 Peter 1, verses 1 and 2. Hear God’s Holy Word. Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who are elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood, may grace and peace be multiplied to you. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Let’s pray for God to bless the preaching of his word. Heavenly Father, we do thank you and praise you for the spirit of Messiah, the Lord Jesus. We thank you that the spirit has breathed out the scriptures.
We thank you that by your spirit, through sovereign grace, you have spoken new life into our souls, implanting us into Christ. And we thank you that by your spirit, you are at work in us, sanctifying us, conforming us more and more into the image of Christ. And that one day, indeed, we will be glorified in him. Lord, as we come before your word this evening, we pray that your spirit would once again open our minds and our hearts to behold wondrous things from your word. And especially, Lord, help us to understand the importance and the significance of the truth that we have been foreknown by you, O God, our heavenly father. We pray, Heavenly Father, that you would help us to appreciate that, indeed, we are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.
In Jesus’ name we pray, and all of God’s people said, Amen. You may be seated. The title of my sermon this evening is elect according to God’s foreknowledge part two. I know we’ve been spending a lot of time in this opening section of Peter’s first epistle, but this is a very important section and it kind of sets the trajectory and the focus of the rest of this marvelous portion of God’s holy word known as first Peter. And there are four key words to listen for in my sermon this evening. The words grace, elect, and then maybe two words that you may or may not be familiar with, the word synergism and the word monergism. Well, dear ones, when you and I face struggles and trials in our lives, what do we need? Well, of course, we need comfort.
We need encouragement. This would especially be the case if we found ourselves facing mistreatment, hostility, perhaps even outright persecution simply because of our commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. As Christians, we are committed to following and obeying and trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ and confessing him to a lost and dying world. God’s Word, of course, is a source of rich encouragement and deep comfort for suffering and struggling believers. In fact, one of the Apostle Peter’s main purposes in penning this epistle known as First Peter was to encourage and comfort Christians who were facing outright hostility and persecution simply because they confessed Jesus as their Lord. They were facing what Peter later on in this epistle describes as the fiery trials of affliction. It was because Peter was speaking to encourage these believers that he begins this letter by reminding them of their identity as elect exiles of the dispersion, as he calls them in verse one, as well as by reminding them of the spiritual and saving blessings of grace and peace that God had granted to them.
He highlights these blessings of grace and peace especially in verse 2. He says that they are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father in the sanctification of the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. And then he issues his opening blessing, his opening benediction, may grace and peace be multiplied to you. That grace and peace is possible because they have been foreknown by God the Father, being sanctified by the Spirit. have been sanctified for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling with his blood.” Now again, notice that among these blessings that Peter mentions here was the truth that they had been elect or chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. And we started to, on the last Lord’s Day, dive in quite some detail about what that term foreknowledge actually means in Scripture.
Now, I just want to, first of all, have us take a little step back. This morning, as many of you know, I preached on the doctrine of the Trinity. We’ve been using the Apostles’ Creed as a guide for the New Foundations series, and we considered the we considered our Lord’s Great Commission where he commands his church to go and baptize in the name of the Father Son and Holy Spirit and and So we considered the doctrine of the Trinity I want you to notice the Trinitarian blessings that are mentioned here in in verse 2 in verses 1 & 2 and We see God the Father being mentioned. We’ve been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, the first person of the Trinity. In the sanctification of the Spirit, that’s the third person of the Holy Trinity.
For obedience to Jesus Christ, that’s the second person of the Holy Trinity. And all of this, again, underscores the fact that that there was an implicit and devotional Trinitarianism in the early Apostolic Church, a Trinitarianism that existed in Christ’s Church even from the earliest days of the Apostles. Even though the doctrine of the Church hadn’t fully developed or hammered out the doctrine of the Trinity, it’s there in the Bible. It just took the church some time studying the word to bring it out. And, you know, God actually allowed in his providence heretics to rise up in the church. And that forced the church to go back to the scriptures and say, wait a minute, what does the Bible actually teach here? And so we have the Trinity in the Holy Scriptures and Trinitarianism saturates the scriptures, especially the New Testament epistles like First Peter.
In any case, On the last Lord’s Day, we focused, as I mentioned, on the term foreknowledge. Perhaps we focused to such an extent that maybe it was a bit wearying. I did a lot of linguistic, talked about the linguistics of it and so forth. But one of the things, one of the reasons I did that is because it’s so important to get a right understanding of what this term foreknowledge means. And what we learned on the last Lord’s Day is that the term foreknowledge does not merely mean being able to foresee. When the Bible says that God has foreknown you, it doesn’t just mean that God looked down the corridors of time and saw in advance the choices that you would make. The idea of foreknowledge is an idea of foreloving. In the Bible, when God is said to know someone, it indicates a knowledge with affection, a love, if you will. not merely to foresee or know about or to know in advance, but to forelove.
So to be foreknown by God the Father is to be loved with a purposeful, everlasting, saving love. In scripture, of course, as I mentioned, the word no can often carry with it the sense of love as in when it says Adam knew his wife Eve means a lot more than simply that he knew about her or was intellectually cognizant of her, but that he loved her with intimate marital love. Well, on the last Lord’s Day, we contrasted the so-called Arminian understanding of God’s foreknowledge with the biblically reformed understanding of God’s foreknowledge. And Arminianism, of course, is named after that famous or infamous Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius. And according to Arminius, God’s election of us was conditional. It was conditioned upon the foreseen faith and obedience and perseverance in faith and obedience of believers. And this foreseeing of faith, this is how many of our fellow Christians of an Arminian persuasion understand the term foreknowledge.
However, as I tried to demonstrate on the last Lord’s Day, the Arminian understanding of God’s foreknowledge is fundamentally incorrect, indeed fundamentally unbiblical, because it misunderstands the biblical term for foreknowledge, and it is also contrary to what the Bible teaches us about the graciousness of our salvation in Christ. Tonight, I want to have us spend the bulk of our time considering some of the reasons why it is so important for us as Christians to have a correct understanding of God’s foreknowledge. And this is the first main heading of your sermon outline. If you’re following along, let’s consider some reasons why it is important for Christians to have a correct understanding of God’s foreknowledge. Is it so that we might pride ourselves in being theologically correct? No, this actually has really practical implications. It’s important to understand what foreknowledge means, first of all, because how we understand God’s foreknowledge will ultimately determine whether or not we are being consistent in our belief in salvation by grace alone.
You see, friends, like Roman Catholics who know their church’s theology, Arminians who know their theology will assert with vigor and energy that they are champions of salvation by grace alone. You talk to many Arminian Christians, evangelicals of an Arminian persuasion who believe in this foreknowledge, this view of election, this foreseeing or knowing in advance view of election. And they’ll say, hey, we believe like you guys in salvation. In fact, we affirm salvation by grace alone. They use the same words that we do. Arminian evangelicals will claim that they believe that salvation is an unmerited gift of God and not at all an achievement by human merits or human good works. So at least at the surface level, it would appear that Arminian evangelicals and Calvinistic or Reformed evangelicals, if we can use the term evangelical to describe ourselves, that we are all in agreement, at least on the fundamental tenet of salvation by grace.
However, It’s when we dig beneath the surface that it becomes clear that the Arminian understanding of salvation by grace is quite different from the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace that we confess in the Reformed faith. We use the same words, the same terminology, but we don’t necessarily mean the same thing. You see, like the Roman Catholic Church, Arminian evangelical churches hold to what might be described as a synergistic view of salvation, which is a fancy way of of saying that a cooperative view is from S.Y.N. the word sin or soon, which means working together with together or with. And so Armenians believe that salvation is ultimately a cooperative process between God’s grace on the one hand and human free will on the other hand, and therefore. When you take it to its logically consistent extreme, Arminian theology cannot claim to believe in salvation by God’s grace alone, but rather salvation by God’s grace plus human free choice, human free will.
It is a grace plus theology, just like Romanism is a grace plus theology. There’s obviously some important differences between the Arminian view and the Roman Catholic view. But when you get down, dig beneath the surface, at the foundation level, it’s very much the same. And let me just illustrate this. And maybe you’ve heard certain preachers on TV or on the radio or over the Internet say things like, well, you know, friends, God has done His part to save you, but you have to do your part. Or maybe you’ve heard this statement. God cast his vote for you. Who cast his vote against you? Satan cast his vote against you. Who cast the deciding vote? You cast the deciding vote. You ever heard a preacher say that? God cast his vote for you. Satan cast his vote against you.
But you cast the deciding vote. That, my friends, is synergism. That is the cooperative view of salvation. It’s by God’s grace plus human cooperation with that grace. Again, as I mentioned, this view is called synergism. And when it comes to affirming a synergistic understanding of salvation, it’s interesting to observe. that evangelical Arminianism and Roman Catholicism are in essential fundamental agreement. Both systems hold to the synergistic or cooperative understanding of the salvation process. And therefore, both systems, I would assert, are ultimately systems of works righteousness, at least when they are taken to their logical conclusion, which thankfully they often are not. But nevertheless, when you take it to their logical conclusion, they both end up being systems of works righteousness. For both systems teach that while God’s grace is certainly necessary, absolutely necessary, nevertheless, salvation ultimately depends upon man’s choice or man’s actions.
For example, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that you attain salvation through obtaining merit before God. And how do you get that merit by which you are ultimately justified and saved? You get that merit through your cooperation with God’s sanctifying grace. And how does that sanctifying grace reach you? It comes to you through Rome’s sacramental system, especially through the mass and penance and things like that. Evangelical Arminianism, on the other hand, teaches that you attain salvation by making a freewill decision for Christ as you cooperate with God’s prevenient grace, especially as that grace is offered to you through modern evangelical new measures like the sinner’s prayer and the altar call and rededicating your life to Christ and so forth. Practices, by the way, that were unknown in the Church of Jesus Christ until about the mid-1800s.
Though these systems are very different at a surface level. I mean, the Roman system is a system of salvation through sacramental grace. Evangelical Arminianism is often a system of salvation through revivalistic grace, through these new measures. They both essentially teach the same thing. They’re both saying essentially that God is powerless to save you unless you, sovereign man, sovereign woman, sovereign boy, sovereign girl, unless you allow Him to save you. We hear that kind of language all that time in the evangelical world. We hear preachers say, oh, just let God have His way with you. Allow God to come into your heart. It’s all about you granting God permission. After all, God is a gentleman and he would never force himself upon you against your will. Of course, that’s a character of the Reformed view, but the point is, salvation according to the Arminian system is ultimately up to you.
It’s your decision, not God’s. But God’s word and the Reformed faith in line with God’s word presents a very different view. A view known as monergism from the word mono, which means one. And it points to the fact that God and God alone is the only one who saves us from beginning to end. Salvation is ultimately of God alone from first to last. As the Apostle Paul states in Romans 9, a chapter where he is talking about the mystery of divine election, Paul writes in Romans 9.16, So then, it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy. It is not of him who wills, Contrary to what our Arminian friends say. Nor of him who runs or exerts himself. Contrary to what the Roman Catholics would claim. But it is of God who has mercy.
Sola gratia. Grace alone. Salvation is not a cooperative process where we are equal parties with God in the salvation process. No. Salvation is by God’s grace alone. God alone saves you, brother, sister in Christ. Yes, it is true that in the gospel call, God does indeed command all men everywhere to repent and that all who hear the gospel are indeed held responsible to repent of their sins and to put their faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ alone for their salvation. However, the scriptures also teach that It is only by His grace that we are able to repent and believe. Indeed, by His grace, God gives what He demands. For faith and repentance are themselves gifts of God which Christ has purchased for those whom the Father has foreknown. those who have been chosen in him before the foundation of the world.
Notice, by the way, the close connection between foreknowledge and sanctification and sprinkling with the blood of Christ. God has foreknown us, and he has therefore chosen to set his everlasting saving love upon us and to make possible that faith and repentance by which we receive the blessings of salvation. So it’s important to have a correct understanding of God’s foreknowledge if we’re going to be consistent in affirming salvation by grace alone. Now, I will say, brothers and sisters, I believe that many of our Arminian friends are inconsistent in their Arminianism. That they are true brothers and sisters in Christ who are simply, you know, they don’t put all of the logical pieces together in their minds, and they do trust Christ alone for their salvation in spite of their theology. But nevertheless, when taken to its logical extreme, Arminianism as a theological system is a false gospel.
And those who are consistent in their Arminianism cannot be true Christians because they’re not really trusting in Christ alone, but Christ plus something they do. That’s the Galatian heresy. Also, it’s important to understand the truth about foreknowledge because when taken to its logical end, acceptance of the Arminian view of foreknowledge is the denial of the sovereign God revealed in Holy Scripture and the worshiping of an idol which allows man to hold on to a measure of his own fallen autonomy. In the Arminian system of salvation, God is not the ultimate sovereign. Man is. The Arminian God is forced to beg and plead and grovel before sovereign man to, oh, please, please, please believe in my son and be saved. And if you don’t, I’ll be so crushed But in the biblical system, God is absolutely sovereign over every sphere, every realm, including the realm of salvation.
Again, while humanity is indeed held fully responsible for its sins, and while God does not compel human actions by a direct external force, God does not force us against our will to believe in Christ. Nevertheless, God is the one who sovereignly changes the hearts of his people so that they willingly, freely believe on the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, you and I would never want the Jesus revealed in this book. God commands and invites all to come to Christ. No one wants to come. unless the Holy Spirit is at work in their hearts and in their lives. God doesn’t force us against our will, but he changes our will to make us willing. All of this is wrapped up in and implied by the doctrine of God’s foreknowledge, God having loved us from before the foundation of the world.
And this change of heart is the ultimate outcome of God’s gracious foreknowledge of his people in Christ. The Arminian understanding of God’s foreknowledge also brings no real lasting comfort to the true believer. Since Peter wrote this epistle in part to comfort and to encourage these harassed, persecuted believers who faced a fiery trial of affliction, let me ask you the question, what comfort would it be to these believers If Peter was basically telling them in verse two that their election depended upon their continued faith and obedience, that would be the implication if the Arminian understanding of foreknowledge was correct. You see, according to the Arminian understanding of foreknowledge, as I think I’ve tried to explain, but let me just illustrate this. Insofar as I understand how the Lord has worked in my own life, I believe that I think it was August 22nd, 1982, was the date when I knelt beside my bed in my bedroom.
It was the summer after my freshman year of high school. I was a 15-year-old, and I called upon the name of the Lord Jesus for salvation. I believe that is when God, in sovereign mercy, had affectionately called me to faith in Christ. According to Arminianism, God chose me because In eternity past, he looked down the corridors of time and he saw that on August 22nd, 1982, Jeff Willauer would accept Jesus Christ as his own Lord and Savior. And based upon foreseeing what I would do on that date, God chose to save me. He chose me as one of his people. However, what if the foreknowledge view of election is correct? then what comfort is there for me if I stumble and fall? If I struggle with faith? If I face persecution and God forbid, deny my Lord?
What comfort is there? Knowing the weakness of my own flesh. There would be no comfort. What comfort would it be to these Christians if Peter was essentially saying to them, hey, come on now, guys, pull yourselves together. Keep a stiff upper lip. You know, you can handle this. You can crush this. In the end, God’s loving choice of you depends upon your continued good choices and your continued good actions. So just do more. Try harder. Be better. Come on, buck up. Be a man. Right. What comfort would that be to these beleaguered, harassed, and discouraged Christians? Such counsel would likely just have sunk these discouraged believers who desperately needed a word of grace into further discouragement and further distress. What we need, we are strengthened by grace, not by being harangued, not by being Law heavy preaching.
The law is necessary to show us our sin and our weakness and to humble us before the Lord and to show us the way that the Lord would have us to live. But the law cannot comfort the beleaguered and the discouraged Christian. Only the word of grace can. The grace of the gospel and God’s foreknowledge of us is not that He foresees that we will be good Christians, good disciples, always faithful, always onward and upward. No. The comfort of foreknowledge is that God set His love on us, not because He saw anything worthy in us, not because He saw us persevering in faith. We persevere in faith because He has loved us with His everlasting love for knowledge. He has chosen to love us from before the foundation of the world. This is where true comfort comes from.
Dear ones, what truly comforts us as God’s people is understanding that God’s love for us is an omnipotent love that is grounded in eternity. The love of an all-sovereign God that cannot be thwarted by puny man. A love that reaches back into eternity past and stretches forward into eternity future. In other words, the love of God’s foreknowledge. That love which has elected us in Christ unconditionally from before the foundation of the world. But the consistent Arminian cannot view God’s love as an eternal, sovereign, omnipotent, unchanging love, a love that not merely offers sinners a conditional salvation through faith in Christ that sinners themselves must secure by jumping through the appropriate hoops, but an omnipotent love that actually and eternally secures the salvation for all who are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.
Dear listener, do you know in your own life the eternal love of foreknowledge? You say, well, how can I know that? And that brings me to my final point this evening. How can we know with certainty that we are elect according to the foreknowledge of God, the Father, that God, and not because he foresaw anything worthy or meritorious in us, but simply because he chose according to his inscrutable will to set his eternal saving love upon us even before he created us. How can we know that we are the recipients of that love? Well, here in chapter 1, verse 2, Peter teaches that God’s foreknowledge of His people is the foundation of all other saving graces that they enjoy. Our election, our being chosen by God, is said to be based upon or according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.
God’s loving of us from eternity past. His eternal saving love for us in Christ. And then Peter goes on to list some of the blessings that are the outworking of that love of foreknowledge in the lives of his chosen ones. Blessings such as sanctification of the Holy Spirit, redemption through the atoning blood of Christ, and a life of faith-filled obedience. Now, there’s so much in this passage, and we’re going to come back And we’re going to consider further in future weeks the significance of the sanctification of the Spirit and what it means to be chosen for obedience to Jesus Christ, what kind of obedience He’s speaking about, and so forth. We’re going to dive deeper in future weeks, but tonight I just want to focus more in general and give a summary of these two blessings.
And how they can how if you see these blessings that work in your life, you can be assured that indeed you have been foreknown by God the Father. If you see these evidences of salvation at work in your life. First of all, brothers and sisters, you have been foreknown by God the Father. If you are being sanctified by the Holy Spirit, it says that we have been chosen or elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father in the sanctification of the spirit. Well, that raises another question. Well, what does that mean, pastor? And how do I know that I’m being sanctified by the spirit? Now, as I will argue and in a future sermon, I believe that when Peter uses the term sanctification here, that he has especially in mind initial sanctification or regeneration, what we would call being born again or regenerated by the Holy Spirit.
But that initial born again, that initial regeneration and sanctification leads to a life of progressive sanctification, growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. So if the Spirit has caused you to be born again and is at work in your life, how will you know that? Well, there’s many things that could be said about that, but one thing I will suggest, brothers and sisters, if you are being sanctified by the Spirit, if you’ve been born again and are being sanctified by the Spirit, the Spirit will produce within you a sense of your own spiritual poverty and will drive you outside of your own self-reliance to reliance upon Christ and Christ alone. This is what it means to be poor in spirit. You’re not being sanctified by the spirit if you think you’re crushing it in the Christian life.
If you think, hey, I’m really I’m reading my Bible, I’m going to church, I’m saying my prayers, I’m being faithful. Now, all of those are good things and you should continue doing those things. But if you’re relying on those things as a as a way of saying, well, I must be I must be getting really sanctified. I’m just being, I’m just crushing it in the Christian life. I mean, and you know, I’m not looking at pornography. I’m not getting drunk. I’m not partying, partying wildly or anything like that. Well, all of that, it’s good to avoid all of that bad stuff, but it’s possible to avoid all that stuff and be nothing more than a good Pharisee. Just living an outwardly Christian life is not enough. You need to be trusting Christ and Christ alone.
And who are those who trust in Christ alone? Those who know their own wretchedness. Matthew chapter five in the Beatitudes, which the Beatitudes are a wonderful portion of scripture. I believe in in the Beatitudes, Christ is describing the character qualities of citizens of God’s kingdom. And Christ says in Matthew chapter five, verse three, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. You see, my friends, if you are poor in spirit, if you’re being sanctified by the spirit, you will come to understand that you are a sinner. The more you grow in grace, the more you grow in your Christian life, the more wretched and sinful you will realize you are. The more uncomfortable you will be with your own flesh, your own inner sin struggle. You will come to understand that you’re a sinner engaged, apart from grace, that you’re engaged in cosmic treason against your creator, that you are a rebel and a transgressor against God’s holy law.
You will also find within yourself a yearning for personal holiness. Though you are poor in spirit and you say, oh, I just I never measure up. I can never seem to get there. I’m struggling. The flesh battles against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh. And what does this manifest? It manifests another aspect of the Beatitudes. As Christ says in Matthew 5, verse 6, Jesus says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. If you hunger and thirst for something, that means that you don’t have what you hunger and thirst for quite yet. But the assurance is you will be satisfied. You see, friends, Being sanctified by the Spirit doesn’t mean that our lives will be all together, that we’ll have it all together. Growing in the Christian life means growing in the knowledge and understanding of your own wretchedness and that Christ is your only hope.
He is your only hope more so now than even than he was when you first came to know him. That’s how you will feel. And you will have a love for God and for your brothers and sisters in Christ. A love that will manifest itself as well in heartfelt striving after obedience to God and acts of love for your brothers and sisters in Christ. Other evidences could be mentioned. But these are some of the chief manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s work in us. If the Spirit is at work in your heart, He will never lead you to look to yourself or to rely upon yourself or your decisions or your works or your resolutions. Nor will He ever throw you back onto your own spiritual resources or efforts for hope and peace of soul. Instead, he will always humble you in the dust and drive you outside of yourself back to the foot of the cross, relying upon the saving resources that are found in Christ and Christ alone.
You also can be assured that you have been foreknown by God the Father if you are growing in faith filled, spirit wrought obedience. We are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father in the sanctification of the spirit. for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. Now, in in his epistles, Paul sometimes speaks of the obedience of faith or of obeying the gospel. And and I believe that what Peter means here by obedience is what we would call conversion, repentance and faith. That is specifically or particularly what he has in mind. If God has led you, dear listener, to willingly respond to the gospel call by repenting of your sin and putting your trust in Christ alone for your salvation, then that too is an evidence of the fact that you have been foreknown before the foundation of the world.
You have been foreknown and loved with an everlasting love. You are an object of God’s eternal saving, fatherly foreknowledge. Pastor, I’m still not sure if that’s true of me. Well, your assurance will not be found in looking within yourself or navel-gazing. Your assurance can only be found in Christ. If you have been made willing by the grace of God to come to Jesus, to rest in Him, you can be assured that He will not turn you away. If you mean business with the Lord Jesus, He is willing to receive you. If the Spirit has made you willing. And so Jesus says, come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And don’t tell me, well Pastor, you don’t know the baggage, you don’t know the skeletons in my closet, or the baggage I carry.
We all carry baggage. We carry the baggage of our sin. And no matter how much baggage you carry, Jesus will lift that baggage off of you. Come to Him in penitent faith, and He will receive you. And those of us by grace who have come to Jesus, let us show our gratitude for His grace by living lives of grateful obedience to the Father who has loved us from before the foundation of the world with a love of foreknowledge. Let us pray. Our Lord and Father in Heaven, we thank You, Sovereign God, for the love of Christ We thank you that you have chosen us from before the foundation of the world to belong to Christ. And we pray that by your spirit, you would so work in us that we might find peace and joy and rest in our souls as we rely upon Christ and Christ alone.
And Jesus, we thank you. We thank you, Lord, that you have saved us from first to last. We thank you, O God. that we are saved by your grace alone, through God-given faith alone, in Christ alone, apart from works. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. Dear friends, let us respond to what we’ve heard tonight by rising and we’ll sing as our closing hymn. 427, I sought the Lord and afterward I knew. 427.
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