October 14, 2026 Elder Josh King - Bible study: "Christ, the only Mediator" I Timothy 2:5

So tonight in our Bible study we're gonna do something a little bit different.

I uh we you know we have been preaching through these series of questions and answers and then also kind of looking at predestination election from the standpoint of someone who is opposed to that or doesn't believe in that.

And while I have been studying through this, I came across an article that was written uh by Elder Michael Gowens, and the title of that article was Christ the Only Mediator.

Christ the Only Mediator.

And tonight I want to uh well let me back up and say this.

So when I came across Brother Gowen's article about Christ the only mediator, brothers and sisters, it just struck me with a two-before that it was just plain as day the way that he wrote this, the things that he brought out, the quotations that he had, even from old historical preachers from the 1600s, 1700s.

And just it just so struck me that, you know, we I as a preacher sometimes suffer even at my own home from not being able to say what I want to say.

That, you know, my wife and children will just come right out and say it, whatever you mean.

And we go all the way around the world sometimes to try to say something or illustrate our point, or and so we're afflicted with too many words.

Let me say it that way.

Oh and so when I was when I've been studying through you know some of the defense of and looking at predestination election, I came across Brother Gowen's article, and brothers and sisters, it was just like a breath of fresh air that I just was just wow, that this is just crystal clear.

And so tonight I do want to do something different.

Uh, I'm primarily not going to preach tonight, I'm going to uh teach and quote, and I want to read for you uh sections, small, small sections of his article, and um, and then I want to comment on some of them.

And uh, but I just I found, and again, y'all please go look this up.

Please go look up Elder Michael Goens, and the title of the article is Christ the Only Mediator.

You can readily find it on the internet.

It's a it's a decently long article, but it is just phenomenally well written, and it is one of the best defenses, and not only defenses, but just clear explanation of what primitive Baptist or what biblical doctrine is concerning salvation, and especially salvation by grace.

And so tonight I do want to take just a few minutes and I want to go over some of the things that just so struck me uh out of his article because I believe that they're they're that beneficial.

I actually have been in the process uh of trying to force myself, uh, have the habit of me keeping a journal, a spiritual journal, and recording things in it that are of great significance, and I want to go back and reread so that when I'm in a you know uh stuck in a waiting room or whatever the case may be, or that instead of pulling out my phone, which is a bad uh thing because we all do that all the time, instead let me pull out my journal and actually read some things that are important.

So uh when I got uh tired of writing so much about Brother Gowen's article, I said, I'm just this is so important that I just want to share it with our church.

And so, again, I'm not taking any credit for this, but I just think that he is a very uh competent elder, and the Lord has blessed him in this, and I just I want to make y'all aware of this because it really blessed my life.

So, but I do want to start tonight with 1 Timothy chapter 2, verse 5.

1 Timothy 2:5

This is basically the premise of Brother Gowen's article, that uh for there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

That's 1 Timothy 2, 5.

Well, that word mediator literally means a go-between, a reconciler, an intercessor.

And so what it's saying there, for you know, the Bible is clear that there is one God, and that there is one go-between between God and man, that is the man Christ Jesus, Christ Himself.

Well, and so Brother Gowen's in his article proceeds to explain what that actually means.

So tonight, again, I'm just gonna dive into this, and uh I'm gonna be reading some of the things that I wrote down, some of the things I'm commenting on.

So I'm gonna start with uh a quotation out of uh Brother Gowen's article.

It says, so he asked the question.

He says, Does God employ the use of external means in the eternal salvation of sinners?

So you're gonna hear the idea of means discussed.

In other words, what is the means, what is the avenue that God is using to accomplish this thing?

So he just simply asked the question Does God employ the use of external means, something outside himself?

Does he employ the gospel?

Does he employ the preacher?

You know, does he employ the missionary?

Does God employ the use of external means in the eternal salvation of sinners?

Question mark.

He also asks, is grace mediated to the sinner through human agency?

In other words, I as a pastor, am I the one who actually applies the grace to the sinner?

Or the parent who witnesses to the child?

Is the parent the one who actually applies the grace to the child or the preacher?

He goes on to ask, does the church play an instrumental role in eternal salvation?

Question mark.

And then his answer is those answering in the affirmative were loosely and informally termed means Baptists.

And those responding in the negative were labeled anti-means Baptists.

Well, what does all that mean?

In other words, those people that believe that you need the church, you need the scripture, that you need a preacher in order to communicate to a person, in order to get them to respond in faith and pray the sinner's prayer.

Therefore, that would be in their understanding that God has now employed the preacher, God has employed the parent, God has employed the missionary, God has employed the witness as a means by which he is using to help save that person, you understand.

That's what, and so Brother Golds is trying to explain that people that believe that way are referred to generally as means Baptists.

They believe that God employs external means outside of himself in order to quote unquote save somebody eternally.

And then those people who don't believe that God employs anybody or anything outside of himself were generally referred to as anti-means Baptists.

Now, you understand that this language is old.

Like this was uh Baptist controversies back in the 17 and 1800s, and this is the terminology that they use that you know he's a means Baptist or an anti-means Baptist, but I'm just simply trying to explain what that's talking about.

Now, so the Bible clearly teaches, for instance, that means are involved in Christian discipleship.

So he quotes John 17, 17, sanctify them through thy truth, thy word is truth.

In other words, in other words, why am I here as a pastor?

I am a form of means.

But I am not a form of means to save anybody to heaven, brothers and sisters.

God calls men as pastors to do what?

To equip the saints for service, right?

To feed the flock of God.

So I am here by a means by which to help you grow in Christ or to help you grow up in the Lord.

In other words, God is the one who plants the seed, but I am here to help water, I am here to help shepherd, I am here to come alongside, I am here to help equip.

So the Bible does clearly teach that there are means in the Bible that, you know, why are there preachers of the gospel?

Why are there missionaries?

Well, this is for the edification of people who are already spiritual, who are eternal.

I am a means, a pastor, by which to help equip born-again folks in their discipleship, in their walk with God.

I am here to help you walk with God better, as it were, to help be a guide, to help be an under-shepherd, as it were.

But I am not here to save you to heaven because I can't do that.

So that's what we're talking about.

So there are some people, especially outside the Old Baptist, that believe that God uses all manner of external means by which to save somebody to heaven, as an example.

The Catholic Church would believe that the church itself is a means of salvation.

As in, you have to be a member of the church and you have to take the sacraments in the church, and you go through a priest to pray to God.

That in other words, God is a facilitator.

In other words, he's it's using the means of the church to that end.

Now, so the let me give you three questions.

Is Christ the one and only mediator, i.e., the means, the medium, the instrument that God uses for salvation?

And mine and your answer to that would be yes.

We believe that Christ alone and nothing else is the means, the instrument that God uses for the eternal salvation of souls.

He does not use any other means outside of himself.

So, but this is the debate.

Because this is the debate that has been going on for hundreds of years, that Baptists were having it back in England with other faiths and orders.

So, is Jesus Christ the one and only mediator of salvation?

Or is salvation mediated through the agency of gospel preaching, and then the sinner's exercise of faith, and then the repentance or participation of sacraments in the church?

Well, see, there are people that are on both sides of that issue.

Now, we believe that, as our scripture says, that Christ is the only mediator between God and man.

But other faiths and orders believe that Christ technically is not the only mediator or the only means of a person's salvation.

So this was the theological issue behind the primitive missionary division.

In case y'all didn't know.

The reason why the Baptist church split is for this very reason.

Now, if you go back and read some of those early writings, a lot of them had practical issues, like, you know, mission societies or the structure of the church or whatever, but all of those things were birthed out of this very theological debate.

That one group of Baptists believe that God employs means outside himself, i.e., the preacher, the gospel, the witness, the missionary, that God needs the missionary to go and witness, otherwise, those people won't be saved.

And then other Baptists believe, no, that yes, we should witness, we're called to witness and a disciple, but at the same time we simultaneously believe that it is God and God alone that is doing the saving, and he does not employ man in this process of eternal salvation.

And this is the core of the debate between the split between primitive and missionary, either God alone or God plus other means of salvation.

Now, does God channel the grace of eternal salvation through human instruments, i.e.

the pastor?

The answer to that is no.

God does not use me as a pastor or you as a witness to save souls to heaven.

That is impossible.

Because you and I are not the mediator between God and man.

Amen.

Christ alone is that mediator.

Now, can I be a, like let's say I as a parent, can I be a mediator between my born-again son or daughter that God is already born of again, and then that young person is trying to grow in grace and in knowledge of God.

Can I come alongside the Lord and the Holy Spirit and be cooperative in that work and disciple my son or daughter in the ways of the Lord?

Take them to church, lead them in prayer, help them in Bible study, you know, explain the scriptures to them, teach them about things.

In other words, you know, Brother Blake and them don't just throw an electrician who is unexperienced in the most complicated, you know, electrical commercial, you know, mechanical rooms on the job because they can injure themselves or blow up$105 worth of equipment.

So, so how do the men get to the point of being able to go and navigate all that because they've learned, they've studied, they've been taught, you know, they've been apprenticed under other men that know exactly what to do.

And so, but but see, the apprenticeship is like discipleship.

In other words, I can't make you a child of God as a pastor.

A witness can't make you a child of God.

I can't put the good seed there.

God does that.

But can I come alongside the little child of God and educate them, get them experience, help them grow?

Absolutely, we can.

And that is that is what I'm called to do and what you are called to do.

But we don't save people to heaven because there is one mediator between God and man, it is Christ Jesus.

But this was the core of the debate why the Baptist split is because one believed that God did employ the means of other people.

You have to have the preacher, and the preacher calls for you know a decision of faith, and so therefore, here is God, and God ordained this man to go preach to this congregation at this time, and therefore God employed that man in the saving of that soul.

No, he didn't.

God, if that man actually responded in that uh uh worship service to the Lord in genuine and truth, then God had already born him again before he ever heard the preaching of the gospel.

He was already saved.

Christ had already saved that individual.

Now, the preacher came along and preached the gospel sermon and urged that man to join the church or to follow Christ or to be baptized.

And then, so what is the preacher doing?

The preacher is encouraging him to grow in the Lord, join the congregation, you know, let come alongside and apprentice in the church, as it were.

And let me teach you, let me lead you, let me instruct you, let me tell you what this salvation that the Lord has given you, what does this mean?

What are the ramifications of it?

How is it supposed to affect your life?

And that's what that's all about.

But somewhere along the way, people started thinking that the pulpit and missionaries and that it's our job to save people to heaven, but it's not.

So many Christians say that yes, God does employ the use of human instruments and the salvation of souls.

That would be the majority of Christian denominations today.

They believe that you need the preacher and you need the witness and the missionary to save souls to heaven.

Because this is the means, this is the instrument that God is using to save people.

That's what they believe.

And see, what we believe as Pranabaptist is not that.

Now, so those who subscribe to the position that the means of grace are salvific or to the point of salvation also endorse the idea of the free offer of the gospel.

In other words, if you think that men are part of the solution to eternal salvation, then they believe also that the free offer of the gospel is involved in the eternal salvation of the soul.

Because if a man, if I'm up here preaching, then I preach, hey, you need to join the church, you need to be saved, you need to surrender to Christ, then they believe that that is the means.

Baptists insist that the Lord Jesus Christ, not the church, is Himself the one mediator between God and men, the only means by which the salvific benefits of the covenant of redemption are dispensed.

In other words, I'm not up here saving souls to heaven and neither are you.

We are to come alongside Christians and help them grow in the Lord.

So, Baptists affirm that Christ actually listen to this.

Baptists affirm that Christ actually procured salvation by his death.

He hadn't tried to save anybody, brothers and sisters.

That Christ actually, when he died on the cross, saved every single one of God's elect forever.

He did it, he finished it, he accomplished, he actually accomplished that work.

He didn't die to make everybody savable.

He actually saved every single elect child of God forever until Christ comes back.

He did that work.

Babylists affirm that Christ actually procured salvation by his death, so that the gospel is now, under that understanding, a declaration or a proclamation of a specific and objective fact, not a general invitation or free offer.

Good works give evidence of grace.

They are not conditions to final salvation.

In other words, when you see good works, somebody doing that, that's evidence that God has already worked in their life.

Now, I want to read one more quote out of here, out of my journal, and then I'm going to jump back into Brother Gowen's article.

Elder Wilson Thompson, a printed Baptist minister of old, long since dead in the 1800s, and I think I quoted part of this Sunday.

Elder Wilson Thompson had convictions about the means questioned during the time, because it was debated during his time, as follows.

In regard to the use and effect of the preached gospel, Elder Thompson held with a majority of old school Baptists that it is not the means of imparting spiritual life to the dead sinner.

The preached gospel.

It is not the means of imparting spiritual life to the dead sinner.

That as no means can be used to give eternal life to one literally dead, that man is spiritually dead, even so no means can be used to give life to those who are dead in sins.

That is all temporal means, that is, that as all temporal or temporary means are used to feed, nourish, and strengthen living subjects and not dead ones.

Stop.

Why am I here?

Why is the preacher here?

Why is the witness here?

Why is Mama and Daddy here?

For this reason.

That is, all temporal means are used to do what?

To feed, nourish, and strengthen living subjects.

In other words, when I preach, who hears the preaching?

Spiritually alive folks, right?

When I preach, or when any man preaches, truly preaches, who is the only people that are truly fed by the preaching of the word?

Somebody who is already spiritually alive, right?

They're the only ones who can hear and respond.

They're the only ones who can take food from that and nourishment from that and be strengthened by that, grow in knowledge by that, be encouraged by that.

You know, and what that is, is the preacher is coming along as a discipler, one who is helping you or pointing you to be more like Christ.

He's feeding, strengthening, nourishing, bandaging, helping all along the way.

But this only, this feeding and nourishing only applies to those who are already spiritually alive.

Because the spiritually dead will take no nourishment from this because they're dead.

I mean, let me go take a, you know, let me go take a four-course meal prepared by the best chefs, it's organic, and go to the graveyard and try to feed it to a dead man.

It doesn't benefit him at all.

He can't eat, he doesn't want it.

He doesn't even know it's a thing.

But to the living, it's food, it's nourishment, it's strengthening.

So that's what we're doing here.

So the preaching of the gospel is the medium.

Notice this the preaching of the gospel is the medium through which God is pleased to instruct, feed, and comfort his renewed children, and not by which he gives life to the dead sinner, whom the Holy Spirit alone can quicken.

God alone, brothers and sisters, is the one who born again the dead alien sinner.

That the gospel is the proclamation of good tidings of great joy to those who have a hearing ear and an understanding heart to receive it, and to these it is the power of God and the salvation, saving them from the false doctrines of men and feeding and making them strong in the truth.

Now, I'm going to get in directly to Brother Michael Gowens' article here very quickly.

We're going to move through this quickly, but these are some of the statements, brothers and sisters, that I just was blown away by that Brother Gowens was just so very clear.

So Brother Gowens writes, today, primitive Baptists are virtually a lone voice in their insistence that the eternal means of grace, I'm sorry, the external, I'm sorry, the external means of grace position is fraught with inconsistencies.

In other words, somebody outside of God facilitating being born again.

Do we deny that the Bible teaches means for discipleship?

No.

We affirm that it does, but deny that it teaches that grace, i.e., the salvific benefits of redemption, is communicated to individual sinners by any other agency other than the direct work of the Holy Spirit.

What do Prairie Baptists believe regarding the means of salvation?

We believe that Christ Himself, through His work on the cross, is the mediator between God and men.

Salvation is mediated through Christ alone.

Now, so the Lord laid down his life on the cross.

He fully secured the salvation of the elect.

It is finished with a triumphant cry, John 19, 30.

He did not merely make men savable in lieu of the individual's subsequent response to the gospel or participation in the ordinances of the church.

Instead, he actually procured release from divine wrath on behalf of all his people.

In other words, Christ actually saved his people.

He didn't try to save them.

Christ, through his sufferings and death, obtained eternal redemption for us.

Hebrews 9.12.

The legal benefits of his atoning death are then personally and vitally applied to every elect in regeneration by the sovereign and direct work of the Holy Spirit.

Stop.

That's what Jesus is talking about with Nicodemus in John chapter 3, that ye must be born again, that ye might enter the kingdom of God or see the kingdom of God.

John 3 · chapter mention

The wind bloweth where it listeth.

In other words, Jesus is telling Nicodemus that this eternal salvation is not of men.

It is of God.

It is God who is the one who does it.

He's the one who purchased it.

He's the one who applies it to the life of a human being.

And nobody else does.

No, a preacher doesn't do it.

The church doesn't do it.

A missionary doesn't do it.

A man listening to the radio and having uh, let's let's say there is a man who's listening to the radio and hears a gospel sermon and pulls off on the side of the road and he prays a sinner's prayer and he wants to be a Christian.

Lord, I love you and I want to be saved by you.

Well, what just happened there if he did that in genuineness and truth?

Did that man save himself by listening to the gospel preacher on the radio?

No.

If that man responded in genuineness and truth, that meant that the Holy Ghost had already applied salvation to that man's heart, born him again, given a mind to see, you know, and to understand.

And then when he heard the gospel preaching, the call of the preached word, then that man's spiritual heart could hear that and could respond to that.

And then now, so the man is already born again.

He's already bound for heaven before he ever says a word.

Now, does the Lord want him to grow in grace and become spiritually mature and not a Christian or an electrician that'll die on the job site or burn his hand in a panel box?

No.

The Lord wants him to grow up.

He wants him to be baptized and become a member of a church and to be a witness himself and so on and so forth.

But all of those other things is not what eternally saved the man, you understand.

We're talking about two different things.

One is salvation and one is discipleship, or again, uh growing in the Lord.

So Christ alone is the one who applied redemption.

The legal benefits of his atoning death are then personally and vitally applied to every elect in regeneration by the sovereign and direct work of the Holy Spirit.

All for whom Christ died will be effectually called from death in sin to life in Christ, being drawn to him in vital union.

In other words, if God purposed to save a man, that man will be saved.

No questions asked.

God is going to born again that man sometime between birth and death.

Now, were there some children that were born again, you know, stillborn?

Absolutely.

Were there some men who were born again on their last day on this earth?

Absolutely.

You know, everywhere in between.

The bridge between God and man then is the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

It is not, is it not truth about Christ or concerning his death that bridges the gap between an offending God, sorry, an offended God and offending sinners?

But his actual work on the cross, that's what makes the difference.

Christianity is not the one mediator between God and man, rather the man Christ Jesus is.

Do y'all know that I could preach for a hundred years and never save a single soul to hell?

And Christ has never lost one that He attempted to save, that He set out to save.

Real quick.

What initial thought suggests itself to your mind when you hear this verse?

This is the record that God hath given us eternal life.

And this is life in his son.

He that hath the Son hath life.

And he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.

That is 1 John 5, 11, and 12.

What does it mean to have the Son?

I suppose that when many Bible interpreters hear this verse, they automatically assume that the condition described as having the Son means having the truth about the Son.

But the text does not say that.

It does not even imply the idea of possessing Christian orthodoxy.

It's not what it's saying.

The subject under consideration is the possession of Christ, not the possession of Christianity.

I assert the text means that every person who possesses the Son, in other words, someone who's been born again, vitally, i.e.

in terms of relational union with Christ, is in possession of eternal life.

In other words, well, Brother Josh, these things seem so nuanced.

You know, the man that's in the church, the man, do y'all know that I had a professor in college who uh he was a history professor, I'm not going to name his name, but uh he was a very well-educated man.

And uh when he he moved here from out of state, he was an older gentleman, and when he moved to Mississippi, he got very involved in the Presbyterian church because he was an intellectual, and in his mind, well, this is the most intellectual disciplined church, blah, blah, blah.

And he was a member of the Presbyterian church for about 15 or 20 years.

And then he got tired of it and he left.

And then he didn't go to church anymore.

And by the time I was being taught at college, he was out of church.

He didn't go to church anymore.

And, you know, he had quote-unquote tried church for a while.

And he had gone through the catechisms and he had studied all, and they believe in predestination election, like we do in a similar manner.

Not exactly, but they're Calvinistic.

But the point is, brothers and sisters, he was heavily, intellectually involved with Christianity for two decades and was a ridiculously smart man.

So he was in possession of Christianity, of theology, of its teachings, of its understanding.

He had read the Bible multiple times, but you know what he didn't have?

Christ.

He didn't know him personally.

He didn't have a vital, born-again relationship with the Lord.

He did not possess the Son or have the Son.

He had Christianity, and he had a very disciplined form of Christianity, and he himself was a very disciplined man.

So to outwardly look at him, well, sure, that man's a Christian.

He goes to church every Sunday, he goes to Bible study every week.

He he has a very commanding knowledge of a lot of the things that the Bible teaches, of the history of the Bible, but he didn't know Christ.

Many, however, cannot conceive of any way that a person may possess Christ apart from intellectual or creedal sense, so far as they are concerned, only the person whose thinking is orthodox and whose creed is correct is truly in possession of eternal life.

Well, then that would have kicked the thief of the cross out of heaven.

Was the thief on the cross a good church-going Bible-believing Christian?

No.

But was the thief on the cross in possession of Christ by God's saving grace?

Yes, he was.

So you have one hand, on the one hand, an intellectual man who's been a member of the church, a card-carrying member of a gospel-believing church, preaching church, who's very well educated, who doesn't know Christ, not a Christian.

Then you have a man who's a heathen that God shows grace and burns him again on his last day on earth, and he knows Christ and he's bound for heaven.

In the world's eyes, that doesn't make any sense.

But that's absolutely true.

The failure to distinguish between what is vital and relational, i.e., that pertains to life, and an academic creed that things that pertain to knowledge inevitably compromises this issue.

In other words, people think that you need to know all this stuff about the Lord to be saved.

Y'all tell me was the woman at the well, you know, the heathen woman who had had multiple husbands, and the man that she was currently shacking up with, that she wasn't even married to.

Y'all think she was a good Bible-believing church-going Christian?

No.

She lived a terrible lifestyle.

But you know what?

After she met Christ, he born her again and saved her.

And then she wanted to go tell everybody about the Lord.

And you know, here they're now they're hearing the gospel out of the mouth of a lady who almost is akin to a heart.

And she's born again.

We're almost done.

Our insistence that the saving work of Jesus Christ is directly applied by the sovereign and immediate work of the Holy Spirit begs the question.

How then should such passages that speak of human instrumentality and the use of means be interpreted?

I answer, they should be interpreted in terms of means by which the child of God is equipped to live the life of Christian discipleship.

Allow me to explain.

Scripture plainly teaches that people are brought to believe in Christ through the agency of gospel, the agency of gospel preaching.

Who then is Paul, who then is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believe?

In other words, they heard from the preacher.

Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.

We do not deny that the child of God is brought to an evangelical faith in the Lord Jesus Christ by the means of the preaching of the gospel.

Stop.

Did you hear what he said?

We do not deny, notice the language, that the child of God is brought to an evangelical faith in the Lord Jesus Christ by the means of the preaching of the gospel.

In other words, what's the gospel for?

So that the child of God can hear it and then want to actively follow Christ, right?

Doesn't save him to heaven.

We're just telling him where to go from here.

Hey man, if you're born again, if you can hear what we're saying, I'm preaching the gospel, I'm proclaiming life and immortality, and if that makes good sense to you, then you need to follow him.

And you're able to follow him because you can actually hear what I'm saying.

We don't deny that the preaching of the gospel is the means by which a person can be drawn to an actual understanding faith here in time, right?

To be able to follow God better.

But that's discipleship.

That's not the preacher or the missionary making somebody a son of God.

It's a preacher or a missionary preaching to a son or daughter of God who actually hears and says, Yes, that makes sense to me.

I want to get on that bandwagon because that sounds like my father talking.

And then you have lost people in the world that say, I don't know who you're talking about because that's not my father.

See that?

But this is the very distinction between what you and I believe and what other faith and orders believe.

Other faith and orders believe that they're actually making sons and daughters of God by the preaching of the word and then by their response of faith.

We don't believe that at all.

We believe instead that we should evangelize and proclaim the gospel and do all these things, but to what end?

It is to help the sons and daughters of God become more obedient sons and daughters of God.

The gospel that spells out the details of our Lord's identity as the Son of God, his incarnation, his virgin birth, his vicarious death, his bodily resurrection, his glorious ascension, his heavenly session, the triumphal return, these great facts are not known apart from God's special revelation of the gospel.

In other words, Brother Joshua, you telling me that there have been men and women that have been born and died in this world who never heard the gospel and went to heaven?

Yes, absolutely they have been, because God's hand is not too short to save.

But those people were also at a disadvantage because they didn't get to hear about all of this knowledge that you and I have out of the scriptures and out of preaching, right?

And aren't we blessed to have this knowledge and this preaching and this understanding and some folks to come alongside of us and to disciple us and to help us serve and understand the Lord better?

These people were serving the Lord in a more form of ignorance.

Now they were still serving the Lord because the Lord had already written his laws in their hearts and in their minds.

But not only has he written them in your hearts and in your minds, and now you hear a further explanation of what he's already done, then it blesses you and benefits you and helps you grow up in the Lord and helps you become mature in Christ and no longer babes in Christ.

The gospel proclamation, moreover, corresponds with the law written in our hearts of the child of God.

The gospel corresponds.

Why does the gospel make sense to some and not to others?

Because it's already been written in some folks' heart, right?

So therefore, when they hear the call of the gospel preacher or missionary, that makes sense.

I literally had a man this week that uh I was uh working uh with some, uh we were trying to order some walnut slabs from this man out of Portland, Oregon, halfway across the country.

And I was trying to facilitate the buying of this wood.

And I've done this long enough that I knew kind of the stuff that he needed.

So I took literally a sheet of paper and literally pictorially drew out on the paper the width, the length, the thickness of all these wood.

I labeled them all so that he had, and so anyway, I sent this to him and showed him this is what we need, this is what we're looking for, this is a species of wood.

And his response was, he said, This makes good sense to me.

A man who saws lumber for a living, and in other words, he can see right there in living color, this is what I'm trying to convey to him.

Well, the point is that gospel preaching and witnessing does not make good sense to the lost person.

But the gospel absolutely pricks the heart of someone who is alive because it's spiritual calling to spiritual, it's faith calling to faith, it's the Holy Spirit calling to the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It's connecting with that person.

See that?

But you understand that the things that I'm talking about tonight, there's not a lot of people in the world that believe this way.

They believe that the preacher is actually saving somebody to heaven, but we're not.

He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself.

He that believeth not God hath made him a liar because he believeth not the record that God gave him.

In other words, only the people that have the Lord in them can believe.

This is the last statement, and we're done.

But this gospel and man's believing response to it is not the means by which an individual becomes a child of God.

Stop.

That one singular statement right there is the difference between what print badists believe and what other faiths and orders believe.

This gospel and man's believing response to it is not the means by which an individual becomes a child of God.

It's not.

It is the means by which a child of God becomes a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The gospel, as Paul asserts in 2 Timothy 1.10, brings life and immortality to light, to a person's attention.

It doesn't bring it to reality in that person's life, it brings it to their attention.

The gospel is designed as the means of information and education, not the means of saving grace.

It is the means of turning men from darkness to light.

Biblical metaphors employed to represent the concept of ignorance and understanding, respectively, not death to life.

Yes, God's word, that is his verbal revelation, is able to make men wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus, so that we can say without equivocation that it is the means of wisdom concerning salvation, but not the means of salvation itself.

So all of this goes back to Brother Gowen's initial point.

1 Timothy 2, 5.

For there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

The Bible, Sunday school, the missionary, the witness, mom and dad, the preacher on the radio, the gospel choir, is not the means by which people are saved to heaven.

Not even the Bible, not even the scripture itself is the mean by which people are saved to heaven.

It is the man Christ Jesus.

He is the one who purchased it, and then God Himself directly applies it to every child of God.

And then after it's been applied, after they've been born again, that's when my work and your work and this work of the Bible kicks in.

Amen?

But God is the one who does all the saving.

That's why our salvation is secure.

I'm so sorry I ran long.

But Brother Gowen's article just I I probably made it less clear than his was, but God saves, man doesn't save.

God be the glory for that.

Let's close in a word of prayer.