His cross can be yours...take it.

That I may know Him,
   and the power of His resurrection,
   and the fellowship of His sufferings,
   being made conformable unto His death;
If by any means I might attain
   unto the resurrection of the dead.   Philippians 3:10-11 KJV

Ever wonder why the cross is the symbol of Christianity instead of the empty tomb?  In a certain style of thinking, the cross is a done deal that has put down the forces of evil.  The devil doesn't matter anymore because he is a defeated foe and cannot harm those who claim to be the pre-selected self proclaimed perfected.  The cross, according to the foolishness of this world, is a "negative" ideal and positive thinking people should be looking forward to the perfection of their souls in the resurrection; at home in infinite bliss ("infinite" is a mathematical fantasy and is not a worthy description of God).

Paul reminds us that the cross is the beginning point for salvation.  The picture established in these verses is of the old apostle continuing to work with his back firmly pressed against the cross of Jesus.  The resurrection is certainly in his sights as the goal and desire of his heart, but to abandon the cross is to abandon his hope in the power of the resurrection of Jesus.  In fact, Paul models the most important anti-calvinist ideal when he says, "forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,  I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." Philippians 3:13-14.  What lies behind?  Whatever happened in the eternal realm (that you cannot prove biblically) before God created the heavens and the earth.  Whatever circumstances brought you into this life and to the place where you now stand.  For the calvinist, as well as for all others, the emphasis should be, "Get over yourself and your vain imagination and get your back up against the cross of Jesus."  The view ahead is clear from there.

The devil may well be characterized as a defeated foe in relation to the eternal plan of God Himself but he is still a devastating force upon this earth (1 Peter 5:8).  His most important aim is to keep humans from learning the power of the cross of Jesus; the power of forgiveness from sins.  The best weapon in the arsenal of the devil is to make Christians into thorough going idiots that trust in legalism and politics and vain ideas about the perfecting of this world instead of evangelists with a passion for lost people.  Lost people = individuals.  One sinner at a time.

Sinner?
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Weary? Come home.

Having predestinated us
   unto the adoption of children
by Jesus Christ
   to himself,
according to the good pleasure of his will    Ephesians 1:5 KJV

When anyone who reads these words with a heart for home tries to picture the place that truly fits, the startling offer that God is making is that we can be His children.  Not merely outsiders that are ok to wander around on the grounds so long as we behave ourselves; we are truly children.  Children that can come in from outside: torn and bloody, or dirty, or thirsty, or missing our tennis shoes, or tired and hungry, or holding a handful of flowers.  Too many people get the wrong idea about the word "predestinated" because it has been taken over by the overthinking theologians.  Every human is shaped so that he or she can be adopted as a child of God through Jesus Christ.  That is what humans were predestined to be.  Jesus (Jesus was fully human) proved the truth of that fact (Acts 13:33).

There are many people that don't want certain kinds of children in the house.  For some reason, they think that they have to protect the house from the really nasty kids.  Reprobate kids.  The calvinist imagination invents a brand of humans that never could be adopted.  In this imagination, they pridefully picture themselves as adults in the House of God and able to explain to potential children how everything in the house works.  Try an experiment: ask a 3 year old to explain how different household appliances work.  The accuracy of those descriptions is as accurate as the calvinist explanation of how God did things in the eternal realm before mankind was created.  As a matter of fact, Calvin stupidly taught that the yard dog had the same predestined capabilities as humans. 

The only "adult" of God is Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son.  The Father does not bypass Jesus in order to accomplish something that involves humans.  Jesus is the Creator.  Jesus establishes all that is right and good for humans.  No human does what is right and good.  Jesus inserted Himself into creation as one of us (Jesus is still God) and became sin for us.  Taking sin upon Himself, He died, was buried and arose on the third day...just as He and the Father had worked out in the plan that was written up in advance.  Having returned to the land of the dead as the Living One, He set the foundation for the orphanage that He had always planned to build...making Himself a permanent part of the house. 

The child, outside, where serpents prowl, that needs to come into the house, does not need to have a special injection of super courage or understanding or "saving faith." (If your formula for "salvation" is too complicated for an 8 year old boy, then your formula is wrong -- who cares how smart you are or how well you think you have things figured out.  Where the Kingdom is concerned, you are worthless.)  All he or she needs to know is that the house is the place of safety and the owner of the house loves children.  Any child is welcome.  The safety of the house is a gift to be accepted by wretched children.  All humans other than Jesus are children. 

Children are lost and in danger and need a home.  They are trapped outside because sin has made them unqualified to go into the house.  They don't know that Jesus became sin for them and knows how to clean them up.  He needs for us to call out to them and tell them that the house is not just for us. 

Sinner.
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Gift in the present.

Who gave Himself for our sins,
that He might deliver us
     from this present evil world,
according to the will
     of God and our Father:    Galatians 1:4 KJV

Notice that the Apostle (someone with authority to write the Bible) is not talking about evil outside the realm of creation.  Notice that he is not trying to construct a theology of how the sins of angels are or will be handled.  He is not discussing the imaginary notions of calvinists and others who claim to know what happened in "eternity past."  No one who is human is being delivered from the predestined sins of "eternity past."  When Calvin (not an apostle and not invited to write the Bible) dreamed up his lying doctrines about the reprobation of humans from before creation, he didn't bother to ponder the truth that is being taught by this verse. 

Jesus Christ (Jesus is God) gave Himself for our sins.  We learned last week that "He became sin for us."  Jesus did not do all of this in some secret ceremony before Adam was created and, then, dole out some 'spark of infinite goodness' to lucky recipients throughout history.  The Bible (written by Prophets and Apostles, not calvin or calvinists) tells the story of sin and evil in "this present world."  Present tense, measurable and recordable, much of this painful story is available in the Bible.  The personal component of this story is available in every human heart (Romans 1:18).

Jesus was crucified on a cross in the realm of time and place that He had constructed.  His death, burial, and resurrection happened at a time and in a place where human eye witnesses could observe it and report to the rest of humanity how it happened.  It may be interesting or even exciting to imagine what happened in the eternal realm before God created "this world that is presently evil," but there is no authoritative report of what happened that is available to man.  This lack of evidence should be like the shout of a father to a bad boy who wants to shirk at doing his chores by asking what his older brothers are doing, "That is none of your business! Get busy doing what you have been told to do!"

The New Testament gives us our marching orders.  Tell sinners about Jesus.  The ways by which this task may be accomplished are as varied as the number of people to whom the Holy Spirit has access through the Blood of Jesus.  Stop speculating about junk above your intelligence and pay grade (1 Timothy 1:6-7) and tell people that Jesus loves them and has provided a gift for them.  The command is the same.  The outline is the same.

Sinner.
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Smuggling nonsense.

For He has made Him to be sin for us,
Who knew no sin;
that we might be made the righteousness of God
in Him.       2 Corinthians 5:21 KJV

How difficult is it to understand the clear message about when things happened to those involved in the process talked about here? 

The calvinist formula cannot correspond with what is being said in this verse.  The calvinist formula claims that God chose them (what they call, "the elect") before the world was made.  They point to the logic of their imaginary system to claim that, while the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were discussing how creation would be accomplished, "the elect" were sitting quietly nearby.  When creation had been worked out, individual "elect" people were injected into the time stream in some way that the Bible doesn't describe.  Eventually, God will get tired of all the reprobate trash He made that resembles "the elect" and will sweep them all away into hell.  Why Jesus (Jesus is God) had to come into this picture makes no sense.

The calvinist doesn't immediately accept the picture that has been developed above.  It grows like a fungus in the background of their hearts.  They smuggle in nonsense by wanting to be superior and powerful and important.  They read verses like Romans 8:29 (For whom He did foreknow He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son...) and fail to see that humans - all of them - are made according to a recipe that can fit into God's plan for them in Jesus.  IN Jesus.  Not INdividually.  You have to get here before God can have a plan for your life that you will invariably resist, mess up, depart from and miss the mark if you do make an effort to please Him.  When the calvinist clings foolishly to the notion of individual predestination, he inadvertently smuggles into his psychology a sense of superiority that replays in his mind like bad elevator music; "God had to save me! Thank God I am not like OTHER men...especially my brothers (Luke 18:10-14)."

This verse says that, before God could save anyone, Jesus had to come into the world and become sin for us.  No one is saved before Jesus comes into the world as part of his creation; fully God and man.  This is the event that is spoken of whenever "predestined" is talked about in the New Testament.  The Father, Son and Holy Spirit planned it all in advance.  No one is saved before Jesus became sin for us.  Jesus was not a sinner and never sinned.  He took sin upon Himself.  He did this in time.  He did not take sin upon Himself for a few people in advance...they did not exist.  He took up the burden of sin at the cross.  The cross happened at a specific place and a specific time.  This history is written up for humans to read in the New Testament.

The obvious result of Jesus being made sin for us is that the righteousness of God is now available to humans.  That righteousness is available now but can only be found in Jesus.  It has always been found in Jesus but was not made available before the cross.  There is not a special class of humans who automatically get in on the righteousness of God in Jesus.  All have sinned (Romans 3:23) and Jesus, who knows how to handle sin, can save any sinner.

Sinner.
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

When good sense is deadly.

For Christ sent me not to baptize,
but to preach the gospel:
not with wisdom of words,
lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. 
For the preaching of the cross
is to them that perish foolishness;
but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.   1 Corinthians 1:17-18 KJV

The Apostle Paul was a very intelligent man who could possibly have sat for years in a safe haven synagogue and had long discussions about Christian Philosophy, Christian Politics and the future of the church planting movement.  Surely a man like him would have been a greater asset to the kingdom as the founder of the original seminary and someone who could sign his name to documents of protest against the extreme godlessness of the Roman system.  It seems reasonable that he could have been a master politician and an advocate for moving the Christian agenda onto the floor of the Roman Senate and into the politics of the entire world.  What great benefit there would have been for all the ages of Christianity from a perfect, Holy Spirit inspired systematic theology.  Instead, Christianity has had to endure the nonsense inflicted upon it by the "brilliance" of Augustine and Calvin...vain janglers who imagined things in the eternal realm that Paul was not allowed to discuss (2 Corinthians 12:4). 

The Holy Spirit's program for the life of Paul as a Christian leader was not a life of comfortable ease and scholarly repose.  The Holy Spirit directed the missionary apostle from city to city with the almost invariable result of his being beaten for preaching about Jesus.  Paul's strategy was to enter the local synagogue and preach "Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2).  The controversy would often stir to the point where the religious leaders, who knew that their power over people was threatened, would become maniacal in their rage and accuse Paul of all sorts of outrageous lies.  The beatings would commence as the name of Jesus and the preaching of the cross could not be shouted down by the loud mouth, self-appointed sophisticates attempting to impress someone that was considered an important leader in the religious community (John 12:4).  Quite often the letters of Paul, wherein he worked through practical and theological issues on behalf of church leaders, were written from jails where he suffered from wounds and bruises and broken bones.  It is clear why he needed to have Luke, the former Roman army physician, along for the journey.

Thankfully, cowardly compromisers like Calvin were not asked to write the Bible from their comfortable cloisters; speculating on how God should have worked out salvation if He had only asked for the advice of human wisdom.  Thankfully, the real reformation that came in the 15th and 16th centuries involved the bravery of men who translated the Word into other languages so that the foolishness of calvinist dogma could be refuted by those who prefer to read what God has to say to them.  The continuity between apostles who were thrashed and trashed along with translators who were beaten and burned points to a Holy Spirit movement that promotes the truth about the Cross of Jesus.

Sinner.
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Sin on the books.

For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. Romans 7:9 KJV.

In case anyone is misinformed, these words were written by the Apostle Paul (a person who was given the responsibility of speaking for God) and endorsed by the Holy Spirit (the Holy Spirit is God!).  Notice that he does not say of his own personal condition, "I was a sinner and dead because of Adam's sin in the garden." Paul is not claiming Adam's sin or sin condition as his own.  Augustine and Calvin (neither of whom were asked by Jesus to write the Bible) may have imagined that Paul should have been a sinner because of what Adam did, but Paul -- APOSTLE Paul -- claims that he was an adult before he became a sinner.  He was a sinner when the application of the law was a part of who he was; not before. 

The calvinist likes to imagine that he understands spiritual reality based on the foolish formula of the TULIP.  The "T" that represents "Total Depravity" is a nonsensical idea that is obviously not based on the Bible: certainly not based on the Holy Spirit inspired writings of Paul.  "Total Depravity" is a ridiculous and confusing contradiction even for the calvinist.  How can they be truly depraved when they claim that they were pre-selected to be good and perfect before they ever came to be.  It is as silly as saying that reasoning can come from the random movement of matter in a discrete state universe - aka, evolutionary doctrine.  The sinful condition of a human being is accounted to him/her when that person has 1) done something sinful, and 2) come to the place in life where the understanding of the mind and heart agrees with God's evaluation of sin.  We Baptists call this the "age of accountability."

Salvation belongs to those who are lost in sin and estranged from the living God.  Jesus Christ took sin upon Himself and made salvation a gift -- ultimately it is the free gift of Himself.  The place and time where this salvation became available was the Cross of Calvary.  If you are old enough to understand that you are a sinner, then you should have sense enough to know the truth of God's plan of salvation through the blood of Jesus...the blood that He made available at the Cross. 

Sinner.
There is forgiveness of sins at the Cross.
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.

Uncommon Love for the Unclean.

^{There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of what was called the Italian Regiment, a devout man and one who feared God with all his household, who gave alms generously to the people, and prayed to God always. About the ninth hour of the day he saw clearly in a vision an angel of God coming in and saying to him, "Cornelius!" And when he observed him, he was afraid, and said, "What is it, lord?" So he said to him, "Your prayers and your alms have come up for a memorial before God. "Now send men to Joppa, and send for Simon whose surname is Peter. "He is lodging with Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the sea. He will tell you what you must do." And when the angel who spoke to him had departed, Cornelius called two of his household servants and a devout soldier from among those who waited on him continually. So when he had explained all these things to them, he sent them to Joppa. The next day, as they went on their journey and drew near the city, Peter went up on the housetop to pray, about the sixth hour. Then he became very hungry and wanted to eat; but while they made ready, he fell into a trance and saw heaven opened and an object like a great sheet bound at the four corners, descending to him and let down to the earth. In it were all kinds of four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, creeping things, and birds of the air. And a voice came to him, "Rise, Peter; kill and eat." But Peter said, "Not so, Lord! For I have never eaten anything common or unclean." And a voice spoke to him again the second time, "What God has cleansed you must not call common." This was done three times. And the object was taken up into heaven again. ........ Later, on the next day ....... As Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him. But Peter lifted him up, saying, "Stand up; I myself am also a man." And as he talked with him, he went in and found many who had come together. Then he said to them, "You know how unlawful it is for a Jewish man to keep company with or go to one of another nation. But God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean." Acts 10:1-16 & 25-28 NKJV.}

This story from the Bible is about Peter.  Peter is an Apostle - someone to whom Jesus has granted special permission to speak and act on His behalf.  Peter clearly states that he was given to understand by God that it was improper for him to speak of humans as being "common or unclean."  At the risk of overstating the obvious, Peter, the man appointed by direct authority of Jesus, learns that the people he had always considered to be reprobate, worthless, vile, unclean, impossible to include in salvation and permanent outsiders, were now to be considered as candidates for God's grace through Jesus blood.

1500 years later, Calvin, a man with no direct revelation from Jesus and operating under his own foolish imagination, decides to ignore Peter's quote and constructs a teaching about "reprobates."  According to Calvin, God preprogrammed some humans to be unclean and worthless and never intended to save them.  In direct contrast to the teaching of God to Peter, calvinists believe heartily in the worthlessness of most humans.  Instead of following the clear teaching of the Bible that Jesus loves sinners, the calvinist maneuvers against the Word of God by trusting a 16th century bigot.

One thing to note against those who like to say that the prayers of unbelievers are never heard by God is that Cornelius was honored by God for His prayers.  For those people who like to say that all human works amount to nothing of value, God honored the heathen Cornelius for the good works that he had done...the report of those works having come into the very throne room of the Father Himself.  Perhaps the works were recorded in a book in the heavenly realm before Cornelius name was written in the Lamb's Book of Life (Revelation 20:12).  Notice that Peter was not instructed by the Holy Spirit to explain to Cornelius that he had been preselected before the foundation of the world.  Peter preached Jesus and the cross and, before he could finish preaching, the Holy Spirit endorsed the faith of these "outcasts" (Acts 10:34-44).

Salvation still works in the same way.  The faith that God has built into mankind can reach out to trust in Jesus Christ, His death on the cross, His burial and resurrection and the offer of forgiveness of sins through His blood.  The cross happened in time and, while there is still time, Jesus continues to offer salvation to all who believe.

Sinner.
Come to Jesus.
Come to the Cross.