Reformed Baptist Congregation Exaltation | Edification | Evangelism
2 things:
a) the dying of the old man
b) the coming to life of the new man
This is by God’s Sovereign work alone through the saving instrumentality of the gift of grace & faith.
To die to self – is to be genuinely sorry for my sin, to hate it more and more & to run away from it.
To come to life – is to receive wholeheartedly with joy Christ Jesus, and to have a desire to do every kind of good work as God desires of me
“The floods have lifted up,
O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice;
the floods lift up their roaring.
Mightier than the thunders of many waters,
mightier than the waves of the sea,
the Lord on high is mighty”
Psalm 93:3, 4
There was an earthquake at Calvary (Matt. 27:54) & there was an earthquake at the Resurrection (Matt. 28:2) – They came from God. What other conclusion can there be? The one prompted a confession: “truly this man was the Son of God”; the other saw a stone rolled away.
The catastrophe in Japan should remind us that God rules the raging of the sea & when its waves rise he stills them – Ps. 89:9. Though Satan would throw the nations into despair – God will do his work simply because he is God. May the Gospel do great things in Japan.
We should be satisfied with the benefits of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that when we are grafted into his body and made one with him by belief of the gospel, then we may assure ourselves that he is the fountain which never dries up, nor can ever become exhausted, and that in him we have all variety of good things, and all perfection.
John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (trans. A. Golding; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1973), 355.