Sermon Tone Analysis
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We’re going to be talking about God’s sovereignty tonight over everything.
We’ve talked about his wrath and how we shouldn’t be numb to it, how God’s wrath over sin is what makes salvation necessary in the first place.
We’ve talked about God’s love, both in a general sense of compassion towards all humanity and a specific intimate love for His people.
Now, we’re going to talk about God’s sovereignty over everything, from the natural world to human life to history to the minutest details in life to even our very salvation.
We’re going to talk about how salvation is not finally in the hands of man to determine.
Humanity’s choices do have consequences and people do have responsibility, but they are not the final, decisive power in salvation.
God’s sovereign grace is.
But first we’re going to talk about this attribute in general:
We’re going to be talking about God’s sovereign choice in salvation tonight.
We’ve talked about why His wrath is what makes salvation necessary, and how His love is why He chooses to save, but now we’re going to talk about how God’s sovereignty plays a part in the salvation process.
We’re going to talk about how salvation is not finally in the hands of man to determine.
Humanity’s choices do have consequences and people do have responsibility, but they are not the final, decisive power in salvation.
God’s sovereign grace is.
But first we’re going to
Sovereignty of God
The fact that God is free and able to do all that he wills; that he reigns over all creation and that his will is the final cause of all things.
This is often expressed in the language of kingship.
creation and that his will is the final cause of all things.
This is often expressed in
the language of kingship.
Those two parts are very important—God is FREE and he is ABLE.
He has the
Those first two parts are very important—God is FREE and he is ABLE.
He has the freedom of will to do whatever he wants, and he has the power to do whatever he wants, the ability.
If God had the freedom to do whatever he willed, but no the power, he wouldn't be God.
If God had the power to do whatever he willed, but didn’t have the freedom of will, he wouldn’t be God.
This is what separates us from God—we don’t have the freedom of will to do whatever we want, and we don’t have the power to do whatever we want.
We’ll discuss all of these topics in depth later.
freedom of will to do whatever he wants, and he has the power to do whatever
The fact that God is free and able to do all that he wills; that he reigns over all creation and that his will is the final cause of all things.
This is often expressed in the language of kingship.
he wants, the ability.
If God had the freedom to do whatever he willed, but no the
power, he woudn’t be God.
If God had the power to do whatever he willed, but
didn’t have the freedom of will, he wouldn’t be God.
This is what separates us
The Freedom of God
from God—we don’t have the freedom of will to do whatever we want, and we
We’ll come back to the idea in verse 4, of God choosing Israel.
Psalm 135:
don’t have the power to do whatever we want.
We’ll discuss all of these topics in
Isaiah 46:8-13
depth later.
God has the freedom to do what He wills, and He does so, declaring the end from the beginning and accomplishing everything He wants to do.
No one can hold God accountable.
No one can stop Him.
He does whatever He wants, whenever He wants.
No one can say to Him “this isn’t a good thing that you did” Why?
Because He’s God.
Whatever He does and says, that is what is right and what is true, and for no other reason than he did it or said it.
God has the absolute right of a creator to create whatever He wants, however He wants.
One last point I want to bring up about God’s freedom—the fact that He is not
Our Lack of Freedom
Unlike God, we do not have free will.
I’ll pause there for a minute for everyone to be like “wait, what?
what do you mean we don’t have free will?
can’t we choose to do what we want to do?” Well, yes, but there are a couple of limitations that we have on our will that God doesn’t.
Let’s dig into them.
Here we have our first limitation.
With our fallen minds, we can’t choose to follow God’s law.
We are hostile to God, His enemies, and so we sin.
We don’t have free will because in our fallen state, we don’t have the ability to do good things.
But wait, we do good things all the time, you say!
Little old lady across the street.
So, we can’t choose to do good things.
What can we choose to do?
Well, like I said earlier, we can do whatever we want to do.
But unlike, God, the “whatever we want to do” is severely limited.
Why?
Because we are enslaved to sin.
These verses mean that in our fallen state, we are slaves to sin.
Sin has enslaved our mind, body, and soul.
Does this mean that when we were an enemy of God, we were struggling against sin, like a rebellious slave against their master?
No, there are no slave rebellions amongst sinners.
The insidiousness of sin is so great that even as we’re slaves to sin, we WANT to be slaves to sin.
Unlike God, the “whatever we want to do” is enslaved by sin.
The only thing we want to do as fallen human beings is to sin.
So we don’t have the freedom to follow the Law of God, as was saying.
We don’t have free will.
We have free agency.
A free will means you can choose anything.
A free agency means you can choose to do whatever you want, but ONLY whatever you want.
The Ability of God
Now we get to the second aspect of God’s sovereignty.
God has the power to do whatever He wants.
Not only is His will not enslaved to sin or any other outside force, but He has the power to do anything He puts His mind to.
We serve a God who is so powerful that He can breathe galaxies out of His mouth.
That’s why Jesus can say “with God all things are possible.”
This goes into more detail about God’s sovereign will.
Not only does He have the power to do whatever He wants, but no one else has the power to stop Him.
If God decides to rule over the nations, they can’t just decide they don’t want to be ruled by Him.
We serve a God who made everything, which gives him the right and the power to do whatever he pleases with it.
Our Lack of Power
Let’s go back to that passage in Matthew:
Matthew
This gets to the heart of the salvation issue.
This is why we need a savior.
We can’t save ourselves.
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