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It might be defined as the maturing of one's experience with God, which is evidenced by

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the manner in which one responds to trials.

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Growth is maturing.

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It is maturing in our experience with God.

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Growth is not merely learning theological facts or quoting Bible verses as helpful as

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those things might be in themselves.

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But real growth is maturing in our experience with God.

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And it's evidenced by the way that we respond to the trials of life.

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Warren Wiersbe said spiritual growth is not by addition, but by nutrition.

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Spiritual growth is not like adding blocks to a wall.

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It's more like a tree.

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As we saw last week, there is a root to spiritual growth, and that root is genuine salvation.

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And we saw in verses 1 through 3 that this root of genuine salvation involves a faith

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which God gives to us.

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It involves a knowledge of God, an experiential knowledge of God.

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It involves a call from God, for God called us by His own glory and excellence.

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And this genuine salvation, this root of growth, involves a grant, for God has granted or freely

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given to us everything pertaining to life and godliness.

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Where there is no growth over the long term, one must seriously question whether there

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is the root to begin with.

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Because Christian growth takes place.

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There is a root, and that root goes down and the fruit goes up.

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And though there may be periods of stagnation, though growth may occur at a different pace

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for different people, just as plants mature at a different rate, nonetheless there will

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eventually, inevitably be growth where there is a root of genuine salvation.

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That growth is not only the expectation of God, but it is also the provision of God.

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Growth is not something that we have to work at in the sense that we have to create it.

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We certainly have to be disciplined and diligent on our part to grow.

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But what I'm trying to say is that growth is not something that we create from the inside.

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It's God's work.

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God is the one who provides for us to grow.

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Have you ever gone out to an apple orchard this time of year when those apples are beginning

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to swell and hear the apple trees going grunting and groaning and trying?

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No, of course not, because those apples just come naturally.

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That's the nature of an apple tree, and so it is with the Christian life.

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Growth occurs.

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We certainly have a responsibility, and we're going to get to that particularly next week

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as we think about the pattern that we're to follow.

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But growth is something that God has provided for.

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God's provision for our growth is in His promises.

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Notice what it says in verse 4, for by these, His glory and excellence, He has granted to

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us His precious and magnificent promises, in order that by them you might become partakers

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of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.

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God's provision for our growth is found in His promises.

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These promises are public announcements that God has made.

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God has not made His promises in some little corner of the universe, so that if somehow

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they don't come about, not too many people are going to know, God has publicly declared

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His promises.

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They are commitments that He has made before the whole universe, in His eternal Word.

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These promises provide for our growth.

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They rest upon the trustworthiness of the One who is making them, and that is of course

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God.

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It seems to me that these promises mentioned in verse 4 are really the heart or the core

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or the focus of the all things or everything back in verse 3.

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When it says He's granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, the everything

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there really focuses on, it brings its weight to bear upon the promises in verse 4.

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That's where it rests.

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I'd like for you to think with me about the character of these promises that God has given

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to us that we might grow.

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In the first place, they are freely given to us.

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You'll notice that He uses the word grant again in verse 4, just as He did in verse

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3.

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The same word.

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It means to be freely given as a gift.

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No strings attached to this.

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By these, He has freely given to us His promises.

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So God's promises are granted to us freely.

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They are not associated with any merit on our part, or they are not given because God

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is responding to something of our effort toward Him.

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These promises are given to us by grace, freely, unchangeably granted that we might enjoy them.

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Secondly, I want you to notice that these promises He talks about rest upon the person

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of Jesus Christ.

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That person of Christ is mentioned in verse 3 where He talks about His own glory and excellence

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by these.

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The glory and the excellence of Christ He has granted to us these promises.

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These promises rest upon who Jesus Christ is and what He can do.

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They rest upon His glory.

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His glory might point toward His greatness or His majesty.

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His glory is what He is able to do.

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His glory was manifested in the miracles that He did.

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That first miracle, what was the first miracle that Jesus performed?

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Does anybody remember?

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Changing the water to wine at the wedding feast of Canaan in Galilee.

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It says that by doing that miracle He began to show forth or to manifest His glory.

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You see, His glory is what He can do.

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As Peter writes these words, he may have had in mind that event that occurred on the Mount

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of Transfiguration when he, along with James and John, were with Jesus and the majesty

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of Jesus became visibly apparent in His body.

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The glory that was intrinsic, the majesty that was veiled by His humanity, including

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His flesh, came through His skin and it was made visible for them to see.

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He says the promises that God has given to us rest upon what Jesus Christ is able to

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do, His glory.

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But also, they rest upon His virtue or His excellence.

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That means His credibility, His trustworthiness, the high moral quality that is in Christ,

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unsurpassed moral quality.

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It refers to the fact that He will do what He says.

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The promises of God rest upon the person of Jesus Christ, what He is able to do, and the

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fact that He will do what He says He will do.

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When he speaks about the excellence of Christ, remember, here is a man who walked with Christ

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for about three years, who saw Him in every conceivable circumstance, and who at the end

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of that time says regarding Him, He was a virtuous man.

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He was excellent.

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There was no flaw found in Him.

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Peter says, if you want to talk about the promises of God, remember that they rest upon

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what this one can do and the fact that He will do what He says, for He is excellent.

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As we think about the character of the promises, we not only want to think about the fact that

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they are freely given to us by the grace of God, the fact that they rest upon the person

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of Christ, but thirdly, that they are without equal.

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Notice how He defines them.

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His precious and magnificent promises.

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Precious means that they are valuable.

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There is no way to calculate the worth of these promises.

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Peter likes this word.

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He speaks, for example, in 1 Peter 2, 7, of precious faith.

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In fact, he says the same thing back here in verse 1 in some translations.

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In the NASV it says, a faith of the same kind as ours.

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The idea is that it is precious.

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It is valuable.

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He also speaks in 1 Peter 1, 19 of precious blood.

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We are redeemed not by the blood of animals, but by the precious blood of Christ.

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It is without price.

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There is no way to value something like this.

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I read in the paper today that someone in Oklahoma City had come across a medallion

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from the 1886 Winter Carnival in St. Paul.

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Did you read about that?

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A little tiny medallion that is smaller than a dime and it is corroded so much that it

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is hardly visible to read.

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But tests have proven that it is one of the original medallions, as far as they know,

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one of only three that exist.

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And when asked what the price of it would be, they said there is no way to tell what

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the price would be.

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There are collectors who would die for it.

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Well, for a little piece of metal.

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I suppose I am not putting collectors down.

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If you are a collector, I do collect things, but it is much more valuable than that.

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And if you want to come to my basement sometime, I will show it to you.

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You can go through the boxes and see it.

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I don't go for these little things.

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I got to get going here.

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Valuable.

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I will just tell you this.

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When we moved, I packed up my, my wife calls it junk, but my collectibles from my past

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life, put it in boxes and to market, we chose the words, I think she joined me in choosing

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the words, we chose the words on the outside of the box, precious and historical items.

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Isn't that wonderful?

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Precious and historical items.

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You can come to my basement, you will see the boxes still there.

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Precious and historical items.

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They are not worth anything to anybody else.

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But I wouldn't trade them.

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I wouldn't trade them.

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I did throw away my old work shoes though.

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The work shoes I wore on the farm in Kansas.

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I hadn't worn them in 20 years and the leather had become almost crusty.

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I did throw those away, but not the precious stuff.

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Precious.

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It's stuff you wouldn't part with.

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It's just invaluable to you.

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And what's precious to you might not be precious to somebody else.

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But Peter points out something here that is very precious.

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You can't get along without this.

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You just can't make it in the world and certainly into a heavenly eternity without this.

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The promise of God.

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He says these are precious.

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Not only that, he says they are magnificent.

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The word he writes here is the word megastas.

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Megastas.

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You see mega?

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Mega?

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What it means is it's very great.

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These promises are very great.

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There's hardly any way to calculate the greatness of these promises.

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Right now people are waiting for an explosion of a volcano in the Philippines.

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Seems to be simmering down now, but still tens of thousands of people are trying to

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get away from the thing.

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They are expecting a mega explosion of this mountaintop.

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Getting bigger apparently than the Mount St. Helens 10 years ago.

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Mega.

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Difficult to even put a tape measure around this.

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You can't put a scale under it.

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Mega.

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He says the promises of God are megastas.

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They are magnificent and invaluable.

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That's what they're like.

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They're without equal.

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Job recognized this thousands of years before Peter.

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He said, I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my necessary food.

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That's how he put it.

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Somebody says, wait a minute.

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You're telling me that God's provided us promises.

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What good are promises?

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Do you realize how much we live on promises right now?

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Have you ever thought about that?

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You write a check for something that you buy.

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What good is that piece of paper to the store owner?

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It's absolutely no good except that by that piece of paper you are promising that there's

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money in the bank.

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And if there's not, it'll be 15 bucks extra when the check's returned, right?

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We live on promises.

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You sign your name on the credit card.

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You are promising that you're going to pay out of your account for what you have just

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purchased.

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The utility pipes electricity into your home and gas into your home.

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And you use that day after day after day.

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You're living on promises.

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They promise to send that to you.

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Do you think when you get up in the morning and before you turn the light switch on, I

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sure hope they keep their promise today.

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I sure hope the lights come on.

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No, of course not, because you're counting on it.

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You live on that promise.

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And for that matter, they're sending it out to you before you've paid for it.

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They're planning on you paying.

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They're counting on you to keep your promise.

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You go into a grocery store and you buy food.

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And on this can, it says, this is green beans.

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You're counting on the fact that somebody back there at the factory put green beans

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in that can.

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It's a promise.

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Have you ever gotten anything else in a can besides what was labeled there?

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Yeah, I have.

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It doesn't happen very often.

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It's a collectible when that happens, see?

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That goes to the basement, no.

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You're counting on that label being correct.

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You're promising that it's right and that it has been packaged properly and that it

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is good to eat and nutritious for you.

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We live on promises every day of our lives.

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So what is the big deal when we say that when we're going to grow as Christians, God gives

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us promises to live on.

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He's simply giving us what we live on already except that they're precious and magnificent

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and they don't rest upon some factory worker.

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They rest upon the glory and the excellence of Christ.

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God has given us promises.

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That's the design of the promises.

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Just to put it quickly, the design of the promises of God are that we might grow.

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That's the purpose.

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That's the design behind them.

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He puts it two ways.

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One's kind of positive, we might say, and the other is a negative expression.

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He says on the one hand, he puts it this way.

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He says, in order that by them these promises of God that are precious and magnificent that

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are rest upon Christ that are freely given to us, that by them you might become partakers

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of the divine nature.

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Positive.

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Partakers of the divine nature.

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That does not mean in the New Age sense that we are somehow deity or we're absorbed into

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deity but that we become sharers and partners in God's nature, God's holiness.

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We become sharers and partners in this.

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This comes by our union with Jesus Christ.

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This morning the young man read from Romans chapter 6 about our union with Jesus Christ.

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By the promises of God, we become sharers in God's holiness so that we can live above

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the pull of sin.

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We can live above its defilement.

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By this union with Christ, we can share and do share in Christ's moral victory over sin,

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even as one day we shall share in his final victory over death and the grave.

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There are two ways that God makes this real to us.

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We try to understand it but there are two ways that God grinds it right into our lives

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so that it becomes real.

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One of them is chastisement and the other is enlightenment.

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Turn over to Hebrews 12-10 for just a quick look.

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At the back a few pages.

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He's talking here about the discipline of our earthly fathers and comparing that to

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God's discipline of us.

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In Hebrews 12-10 he says, for they, our earthly fathers, disciplined us for a short time as

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seemed best to them.

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That's good for children to remember.

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Your parents are disciplining you boys and girls as seems best to them.

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They do make mistakes.

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They aren't perfect.

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There are times when they really don't understand but it seems best to them at that moment.

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That goes on to say here, he, God, disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness.

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God brings chastisement to our lives, instruction, difficult times, discipline, so that by going

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through that experience that's difficult, we might learn to partake of his holiness.

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It changes us.

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There's something about chastisement that changes us from the inside out.

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But the second thing that God does to grind this truth into our lives is to enlighten

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us by the Holy Spirit.

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There's something about the promises themselves as we begin to meditate upon them and to

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believe them and to act upon them, to act them out in our lives that it changes us.

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They become real to us that way.

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Frankly, it's a whole lot better to learn this through enlightenment than it is chastisement,

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though we all experience both.

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How much better that we spend time in the promises of God, the word of God, and we allow

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the Holy Spirit to enlighten us and to teach us and to put into practice in our lives so

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that we don't have to get over here in the woodshed side of things quite so often.

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The design of the promises is that we might be partakers of his divine nature.

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We become partakers of his divine nature as God chastens us as he teaches us from the

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promises.

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But he puts it negatively here at the end of the verse.

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He says, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.

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Now on the one hand, I think this is a very positive statement.

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But it's negative in the sense that we escape something here.

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He speaks about the world.

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Let's remind ourselves that the world, in the sense it's used here, is a system of disguised

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evil.

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Now I put it that way because the world system very often is not evil on its surface.

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In fact, it even glitters a little bit.

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The devil, it's like a corpse that the devil just keeps making up.

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You know, puts fresh lipstick on it and all the powders and everything and perfume, and

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he keeps trying to make it acceptable.

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John says, however, the world system is decaying right before our eyes.

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It's just passing away.

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It's becoming putrid and rotten, really comparing it to a corpse.

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But it doesn't often seem that way.

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It seems alluring.

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It seems attractive.

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But it is a system of disguised evil.

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And it is headed by Satan.

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And it is opposed to God.

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And it is that which controls all of those outside of Jesus Christ.

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That's the world system.

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Now he mentions here the corruption that is in the world.

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This word means a decay that is being produced by disillusion.

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It is a rottenness.

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It is a steady, inevitable process of just falling apart.

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And it says that it's in the world by lust.

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The strong desires which are potent and active in causing this corruption to take place.

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Now I say this is a very positive statement in one way that you look at it, because by

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these promises of God that we learn to live by, we not only become partakers of the holiness

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of God, we learn to become like Jesus Christ in our thoughts and actions, but we also escape

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what is taking place in the world around us.

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This degeneration, this decay, this corruption that is taking place by reason of the lusts

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that control the people in the world system.

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That's the design of God's promises.

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All of the resources of Jesus Christ are made available to the believer to enable him to

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arrive at his ultimate destiny, which is to be like Jesus Christ.

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Both as a Christian is a step by step process in this life toward that destiny.

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That's what it is.

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God's divine power enables us to be partakers of the divine nature.

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He has given us promises and we live on them.

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We learn to live on them.

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Are you living by promises?

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Or are you living by what you've got in your hand?

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Or what you can see?

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Or are you allowing yourself to be enticed by a world system that is absolutely corrupt

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by its lusts?

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Beware of that.

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If there is any danger to us, especially in our day, it is this world that is so disguised,

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so cleverly disguised, and we just kind of follow it along and we're alert by it and

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we think it's wonderful and it glitters and it's popular and that's where the stars are.

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And the fact is it's corrupt.

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Through and through just corrupt.

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Partake of the promises.

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God has given us what we need so that we can grow.

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Scott Simpson who is tied, I understand it, after 18 holes at the US Open today, tied

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for first place, gave four passes to the US Open to one of the members of our church,

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Jeff Hagen, who works with Scott in Athletes in Action.

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Scott Simpson is a very fine Christian, by the way.

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Took at a recent event for Athletes in Action here locally.

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And Jeff Hagen, being the generous sort that he is, couldn't use those passes and so he

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gave them to one of our elders who invited his brother and a friend and because he couldn't

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get rid of the other one, invited me to come along.

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And so yesterday I got to go out to the US Open and watch Scott Simpson, Jack Nicholas

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and the others.

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We had to wear a pass that was given to us.

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It didn't cost me anything.

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I don't know what it was worth.

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It's worth more than I was willing to pay for it, I'm quite sure.

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We had to show that pass everywhere we went.

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In fact we had two different kinds of passes.

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On two of them it said gallery.

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That's like peanut gallery, you know.

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But on the one that was handed to me it said clubhouse.

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Clubhouse.

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So we walked by the clubhouse and there it was and they were checking all the passes,

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people going in.

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We went out and walked our legs off trying to keep up with the golfers and the people

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watching them.

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And just before it was time to go we thought, let's see if these things will get us into

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the clubhouse, see what it looks like.

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So turn it around and make sure clubhouse was showing.

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Walked up and the two people checking the passes looked and motioned me on through.

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No big deal to them.

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They've seen thousands of these things.

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Big deal to me.

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We walk into the clubhouse and here's a buffet laid out there.

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Unfortunately the price of the buffet was not included in the pass.

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But up to that point everything was provided for us.

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It was wonderful to be able, I enjoyed that so much.

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Isn't it great to know that God has provided for us everything we need.

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He's given to us the promises and by those promises not only are we going to enter heaven,

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but everything we need in this world, everything pertaining to life and godliness is there.

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What we need to do is use the pass.

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We need to use those promises, learn to live by them just like we live every day of our

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lives except we believe God's promises as well as some of those that mere men give to

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us.

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I'd like for you to take your hymnal and for us to sing something in closing.

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And it is 124 where we sing about the Bible, God's promises, God's magnificent and precious

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promises.

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Would you stand with me please as we sing 124.

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I want you to take it in both hands as we close our service in prayer.

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Our loving Father, we thank you for this precious book of promises.

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Promises that are invaluable and incalculably great.

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Forgive us for living on the promises of men every day and failing to read and to meditate

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upon and to act upon the promises of this book.

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Oh Lord forgive us.

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And this week may the promises of the word become freshly precious to us.

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We pray that you will teach us by enlightenment and by chastisement if necessary how to become

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partakers of the divine nature and to escape the corruption that is in the world around

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us by lust.

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Thank you again for these promises that we hold.

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In Jesus' name, Amen.