July 19-22, 2012
SOVEREIGN GRACE BAPTIST
CHURCH
LOCATION
Rocky Hill Firehouse, 2nd
Floor
150 Washington Street
Rocky Hill, New Jersey, 08553
Telephone: 615-513-4464
Schedule of Services
Sunday 10: 15 AM Bible Class
Sunday 11:00 AM Morning Service
Thursday 7: 30 PM Midweek Service
We are thankful our Lord God has
brought to us one of his chosen messengers with the gospel of Christ, Pastor
Don Fortner from Grace Baptist Church of Danville, Kentucky. If this is your first time visiting us we
welcome you. As a reminder, Friday night
services begin at 7:30pm and Saturday morning services begin at 10:00 am. We hope you will stay for ice cream after the
services Friday night and for lunch after the services on Saturday. For those with children 3 and under we have
someone available to keep the little ones in the back. Our Sunday service will begin this week at
11:00 am.
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Food Convenient for Us
Brethren, as we feasted together
Wednesday night, in anticipation of this week’s gospel feast, these thoughts
came to my heart. “Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty
nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee,
and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the
name of my God in vain.” (Proverbs 30: 8-9) This is what the Lord does when he assembles
a local body of believers. Do you see
that this is what our Redeemer has graciously done for us in this place? We are not rich or poor temporally, but we
have all things, for we have food convenient for us in Christ through his
gospel. I am thankful for each of you
and for what God has done for us!
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Walk by Faith
Believers ought to be as afraid of the
mountain heights of self-sufficiency as we are of the valleys of self-doubt.
Why? In both, we often stray into
crooked ways and find ourselves in very rough places. But walking by faith in Christ “Every valley
shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the
crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain and the glory of the
LORD shall be revealed…”(Is 40: 4-5)
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Is Salvation in
Christ in Anyway Conditioned Upon Our Personal Obedience To The Law Of God?
Romans 3:28
Without question, salvation is conditioned
upon obedience to and the satisfaction of the law (Matt. 5:20; Ezek. 18:4; I Cor. 6:9-10). The law of
God must be perfectly obeyed. Sin must be thoroughly punished. Justice must be
completely satisfied. Without perfect righteousness, complete expiation, and
full satisfaction no sinner could ever be saved. That is what the Lord Jesus
Christ has done for all God's elect, as our Mediator, Representative, and
Substitute. The salvation of God's elect was conditioned entirely upon his
obedience. But it is not, in anyway whatsoever, conditioned upon our personal
obedience. Insofar as we are concerned, salvation in its entirety is totally
free, without any cause in us. It is the work and gift of God's free grace in
Christ Jesus, without the works of the law. This is clearly the doctrine of
Holy Scripture (Rom. 3:20-28;
4:3-5; 11:6; Gal. 2:16,
21; Eph. 2:8-9; II Tim. 1:9). Every aspect of salvation (Election, Redemption,
Justification, Regeneration, Sanctification, Conversion, Repentance, Faith,
Preservation, Perseverance, Glorification, and everything else necessary for
eternal glory) is totally the work of God's free grace. Neither the grace of
God toward us, nor the grace of God in us, is conditioned upon anything we do.
Grace
devised the way of salvation. And grace puts us in the way. Grace accomplished
salvation. And grace applies salvation. Grace preserves us in grace. And grace
causes us to persevere in grace. Grace completes salvation. And grace crowns
salvation with eternal glory. We do nothing to earn, merit, or even influence
the grace of God toward us. We simply receive what God has done by faith in
Christ. And even that faith, by which we receive God's salvation, is the gift
and work of his almighty grace. To make any part of salvation dependent upon
man is to make the whole work of salvation dependent upon man. Then "is
the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt"(Rom.4:4). It is evident,
then, that salvation is not in anyway conditioned upon our personal obedience
to the law of God. Don Fortner
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Learning Christ
Ephesians 4: 20: “But ye have not so learned
Christ…”
When you are a student you listen to
the teacher, take notes, study and prepare for the big test. Then test day comes. You look at the questions and are
confused. The questions are not worded
in the way you studied them. They appear
strange. What happened? You learned the
answers in your head but you really did not know the answers in the heart. When we have the answers in our head, we can
answer as long as the question is worded exactly the way we learned it because
we recognize the letter. When we have
the answer in our heart, the question can come in various forms yet we know the
answer because we know it in our heart.
There is a difference between learning Christ in the head in the letter
and having Christ formed in the heart.
It is easy to learn the words “depraved”, “sovereign”, “grace”, “faith”,
to learn a system of doctrine intellectually or to copy a form of religion. But when God sends his gospel in
demonstration of the Spirit and power, Christ is formed in us so that we truly
learn Christ. When the trial comes in
the form of an assembly of saints with no form to attract the flesh, when the
trial involves daily affairs we must work out amongst ourselves as the family
of God, or when persecution arises because of the word then we learn that
depravity is not a doctrine it is what we are in our flesh. In our various
trials the Spirit teaches us the experience of sovereign grace, not as a letter,
but as the living reality of God sweetly forcing his child to walk by faith in
Christ rather than sight. When a student
fails a test in the classroom the teacher gives a review then tests the student
again. If ever we think we have passed
so that we need not be taught the gospel then we have not only failed we have
dropped out of school altogether. But through
the gospel and these trials, our Prophet, Priest and King continually makes us learn
that his gospel is more than a system of letters or a few hours of “church”
each week. By his sovereign, redeeming,
regenerating, preserving grace, Christ is made unto us Life. More and more we learn that Christ is the only
anchor of our souls in all aspects of daily life in this world. A sinner may mold himself to some heady
idealist form, but only God molds the heart to Christ.