Out Of The Iron Smelting Furnace 1 Kings 8:46-51 Romans 1:28-32 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 Romans 5:6-11 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 07.24.20

OUT OF THE IRON SMELTING FURNACE

BREAD

⁴⁶ “When they sin against you--for there is no one who does not sin--and you become angry with them and give them over to the enemy, who takes them captive to his own land, far away or near; ⁴⁷ and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’; ⁴⁸ and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies who took them captive, and pray to you toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you have chosen and the temple I have built for your Name; ⁴⁹ then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their plea, and uphold their cause. ⁵⁰ And forgive your people, who have sinned against you; forgive all the offenses they have committed against you, and cause their conquerors to show them mercy; ⁵¹ for they are your people and your inheritance, whom you brought out of Egypt, out of that iron-smelting furnace.”  1 Kings 8:46-51 (NIV)

²⁸ Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹ they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³² Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.  Romans 1:28-32 (NIV)

⁹ Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders ¹⁰ nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹ And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NIV)

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ⁹ Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! ¹⁰ For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! ¹¹ Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.  Romans 5:6-11 (NIV)

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! ¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. ²⁰ We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. ²¹ God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.  2 Corinthians 5:17-21 (NIV)

BUTTER

“We are able to think, choose, create, love and worship; but we are also able to hate, covet, fight and kill.   Human beings are the inventors of hospitals for the care of the sick, of universities for the acquisition of wisdom, and of churches for the worship of God.  But they have also invented torture chambers, concentration camps, and nuclear arsenals.  This is the paradox of our humanness.  We are both noble and ignoble, both rational and irrational, both moral and immoral, both creative and destructive, both loving and selfish, both Godlike and bestial.”   John Stott

“Sin is the sickness of the soul.  It is deforming, weakening, disturbing, wasting, and killing, but, we bless God, not incurable.  Jesus Christ is the great Physician of souls.  Wise and good people should be like physicians to everyone around them; Christ was so.  Souls that are sick with sin need this Physician, for their disease is dangerous; nature will not help itself.  No mortal can help us; we have such need of Christ that we are eternally ruined without Him.”  Matthew Henry

“The only ground on which God can forgive our sin and reinstate us to His favor is through the Cross of Christ.  There is no other way!  Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony at Calvary.  We should never take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our sanctification in simple faith, and then forget the enormous cost to God that made all of this ours.  Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace.  The cost to God was the Cross of Christ.  To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid.  Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement.  The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive – He would contradict His nature if He did.  The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross.  God’s forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm……Once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vise, constrained by the love of God.”  Oswald Chambers

“Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”   John Owen

“When captivity is led captive, the Eternal God is the refuge of his people...Our sins which pursued us so hotly have been drowned in the depths of the Savior's Blood. They sank to the bottom like stones, the depths have covered them, there is not one, no, not one of them left, and we, standing upon the shore in safety, can shout in triumph over our drowned sins, 'Sing unto the Lord for he hath triumphed gloriously, and all our iniquities hath he cast into the midst of the sea.”  Charles Spurgeon

“No sin is small.”   Jeremy Taylor

“Measure your growth in grace by your sensitiveness to sin.”   Oswald Chambers

“God looked on Christ as if Christ had been sin; not as if He had taken up the sins of His people, or as if they were laid on Him, though that were true, but as if He Himself had positively been that noxious—that God-hating—that soul-damning thing, called sin. When the Judge of all the earth said, ‘Where is Sin?’ Christ presented himself…what a grim picture that is, to conceive of sin gathered up into one mass—murder, lust and stealing, and adultery…and the Father looked on Christ as if He were that mass of sin. He was not sin, but the Father looked on upon Him as made sin for us. Christ stands in our place, assumes our guilt, takes on our iniquity and God treats Him as if He had been sin…How can any punishment fall on that man who ceases to possess sin, because his sin was cast upon Christ and Christ has suffered in his place? Oh, glorious triumph of faith to be able to say, whenever I feel the guilt of sin, whenever conscience pricks me, ‘Yes, it is true but my Lord is answerable for it all, for He has taken it all upon Himself and suffered in my place.”  Charles Spurgeon, The King’s Highway

“What if believing meant there’s no way you could stop telling the Good News because it’s more sensational than gossip that parades as news?  What if shying away from the word sin so as not to offend, offends a Holy God — and what if being culturally correct leads a whole generation a wrong shy of heaven? What if breaking this addiction of talking about problems could break new ground of talking about our Provider?  That we couldn’t stop sharing about how we’ve been saved, rescued, redeemed, revived?”   Ann Voskamp

“If we know what redemption means, let us not withhold our hymns of thanksgiving. We have been redeemed from the power of our corruptions, lifted from the depth of sin in which we were naturally plunged. We have been led to the cross of Christ—our shackles of guilt have been removed. We are no longer slaves, but children of the living God, and can anticipate the time when we will be presented before the throne without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.”  C. H. Spurgeon revised by Alistair Begg

“It is by grace that we are saved.  It is by this same grace that we are sanctified.  It is all Jesus.  It is always all Jesus.  Nothing to the cross I bring only to the cross I cling.”  BHY

HEART SAVOR

·         We are all born sinners in need of a Savior and praise Jesus we have One.

·         Jesus took us out of the iron smelting furnace of sin and bondage and liberated us – we are no longer slaves but free.

·         Christ did for us what we were powerless to do for ourselves.