Class Notes: 9/11/2016

Heb 12:2; Rev 2:7; The doctrine of the winner part 7

Lam 3:21-23; I recall this to my mind, and it gives me confidence. Because The Lord's mercy never fails; His grace provisions never cease, they are renewed every morning; Great is Your faithfulness.

In our study of the doctrine of the winner believer. Heb 12:2; Rev 2:7; We noted that winner believers are the unknown, unsung heroes of history. 2Cor 6:9;

The winners are those who are not considered by the world to be wise or noble 1Cor 1:26-29; but they are the crisis personalities who stand in the spiritual gap and preserve the nation during the course of human history. Ezek 22:30-31;

We have noted that the individual who becomes a winner exploits God's grace to the maximum so we have taken up a study of grace in the context of being a winner.

We are presently looking at the mechanics of the common grace ministry of God the Holy Spirit that Jesus prophesied about in John 16:8-11;

Positive volition accepts God's grace; negative volition rejects God's grace. Winners are those who consistently accept God's grace and keep advancing. 2Pet 3:18; Titus 2:11-13;

Mankind is alive on this earth for the purpose of empirically demonstrating that God's judgment and sentence of the devil and his angels to the lake of fire for their rebellion was righteous, just and perfect.

Common grace is a technical theological term for the ministry of the Holy Spirit in evangelism or the presentation of the Gospel. This is the invisible work of the Holy Spirit that is required for the Gospel to be understood that is not felt or experienced.

The Gospel message is presented or recalled, but because of spiritual death at birth and the total depravity of mankind, plus the dichotomous state of the unbeliever, mankind cannot understand or comprehend the Gospel because it is spiritual information.

1Cor 2:11, "For what man understands the things of man except the spirit of life (frame of reference) which is in him, even so the things of God (gospel doctrine) no one (unbeliever) has known except the Spirit of God."

If the unbeliever has enough vocabulary and enough motivation they have the capacity to think within their frame of reference but the absolutes of God's Word are inconsistent with their human viewpoint thinking so they cannot believe it.

Since the unbeliever does not believe in absolute truth to them everything is relative so there are no absolutes. The reason the unbeliever does not accept God and His absolute perfection is because they are deceived by satan's relativistic system of good and evil.

The unbeliever is locked into this system of thinking Rom 7:14; The only way to recover is to believe in Jesus Christ and learn how to think the information contained in God's Word of truth under the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit.

This explains why our nation and for that matter the entire world is going insane. The majority in the ruling class comprised of the politicians, the media, and the academy has not only rejected every category of God's Word of truth but they actually presently functioning in active opposition to it.

No matter how smart the unbeliever is they cannot accept the concept of absolute truth. The natural human I.Q. is not an issue in understanding the Gospel, because everyone is spiritually dead from birth.

The common grace ministry of God the Holy Spirit overcomes the lowest and the highest I.Q. No one regardless of I.Q. can or could ever have responded to the Gospel without the Holy Spirit's ministry of common grace.

This is the enabling power of the Spirit is required to comprehend the Gospel because the unbeliever has no human spirit and therefore no frame of reference for spiritual information so God the Holy Spirit must provide it.

One of the 40 things that that God the Holy Spirit does is to regenerate the human spirit and impute eternal life to it. God the Holy Spirit's ministry of grace continues into the Christian life under the grace category of the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit. Rom 8:16;

After salvation, the Holy Spirit's teaching ministry to the human spirit after is an extension of pre-salvation common grace in the sense that it only occurs when the believer is filled with the Holy Spirit.

In every case God the Holy Spirit is always the exclusive teacher of God's Word of truth.

This is why it is imperative for the believer to be filled with the Spirit after they have believed in Christ. The believer can never learn anything apart from the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit. The filling of the Spirit enables the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit.

God the Holy Spirit teaches God's Word to your human spirit when your right pastor communicates it to you. John 14:26, John 16:12-16; 1John 2:27;

This means that everything we have ever learned from God's Word after salvation is courtesy of the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit.

1Cor 2:12; "For we have not received the world's frame of reference, but the human spirit from God, that we might know the things that God has given us under his grace policy."

We have the entire realm of the mystery doctrine for the Church Age that we are to master and to deploy in the grace advance of our spiritual life.

The last two words of the verse that are translated "By God" are "hupo" plus the ablative of agency from "Theos."

The ablative of agency that is being expressed is a very unusual grammatical construction that means that were it not for the Holy Spirit, we would never understand these things. It means that all absolute truth has its exclusive source in eternal infinite immutable God.

This also explains the historical downtrends from negative volition that we see in client nation USA and the entire world at this time.

Because of their union with Jesus Christ the eternal destiny of the loser believer is the opposite of the unbeliever but when a believer is not filled with the Holy Spirit and functioning under the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit in the devil's world they live their lives in the same power that an unbeliever does.

This means that In the devils' world the experiential thinking of a believer out of fellowship is no different that the thinking of an unbeliever.

We see the consequences of this in our nation today under the principle of as goes the thinking of the believer so goes the destiny of the client nation because bad decisions limit future options.

It the poor choices of the believers who are out of fellowship that are destroying the client nation.

A succinct exegetical presentation of human volition in the doctrine of common grace is found in Eph 1:13; "In Whom you also (as an unbeliever), when you heard the message of truth (under common grace), the Gospel of your salvation, in whom also when you believed, you were sealed by the Holy Spirit..."

There are two acts of human volition that function under the common grace ministry of God the Holy Spirit: the choice to hear the Gospel and the choice to believe in Jesus Christ.

The unbeliever has to want to hear the Gospel and concentrate on its presentation. God the Holy Spirit then makes that Gospel information real in the soul so that the information on which to make a decision is available.

God the Holy Spirit in common grace makes Gospel information comprehensible to the unbeliever who has no capacity to understand it on his own because of spiritual death.

Common grace addresses the potential God's imputation of human life and Adam's original sin the genetically formed old sin nature at physical birth that can be expressed in the first equation of hope for the winner:
[ HL + AOS = P1 + D = H1 ] +

HL: Imputation of human life at physical birth.
AOS: Imputation of Adam's original sin to the sinful nature.
P1: Potential for salvation.
D: The Gospel that is the pertinent doctrine in this case.
H1: Confident expectation of eternal life

This brings us to the doctrine of efficacious Grace where God the Holy Spirit takes the non-meritious faith of the unbeliever and makes it effective for salvation when the Gospel message is understood and believed.
This is represented by "H1" in the "X" radical of the equation of hope.

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