Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall June 11/2023



 

 But it is not only these spectacular men who have been blessed with common grace.  God has given gifts to all men.  There is something that you can do better than anybody else.  If you are not a Christian today, I want you to hear this: there is something you can do better than anybody else, and God gave you that.  God has given us doctors, nurses, hospitals, God has given us policemen;  He has given us Scotland Yard;  He has given us government, law, order, decency - these are the virtues of common grace.  You see, God through common grace supplies these things.  This is what Calvin called 'special grace within nature.'


Moreover, such a person visited with this kind of grace may or may not have the gift of saving grace, and more often than not he does not have saving grace.  Yet it is a gift of God. You should be thankful for such common grace if you need to have surgery or you need to have an operation on your brain for a tumour.  You are not going to lok in the realm of saving grace for a man to perform that operation and I suspect you are not going to be too concerned whether the man is even a Christian.  If you were God to hear there are two doctors, one who has performed a thousand operations successfully but is an atheist, and the other who has just started but is a Christian, whom would you pick?  The chances are you would be thankful for the man tha God use in the past.  
We should be aware of this - God's work in nature.  And so, as I say, we have what is sometimes called the sacred and the secular.  I am not happy with this language but I put it before you so that you will know what I am talking about.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall May 31/2023.

Image
  I once knew some Dutch people very well.  And they told me that for a long time they sincerely believed that God spoke Dutch.  Since I have been in this country I have found out that some think God speaks English, with an English accent!  Jonah thought that God spoke Hebrew and Nineveh was hardly on Jonah's prayer list.  But God's prerogative to do what He wills with whom He wills the way He wills is something that we need to learn.  And after all, God can do it differently from the way He has done it in the past.  Peter was told by Jesus on one occasion how he was going to die.  You know what Peter's question was immediately:  What about John here? (John 21:21).  And it could be that God will want to do something in the world with a nation that you had not thought of, or with an individual you would not suspect.  And God may actually want to do something through you, and you ask:  Why me?  Why not this other person?  Why not that one?  You see God may deal with you in a
Read more

Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall June 16/2023

Image
 Are you here this morning and you have been running from God?  Could I be talking to somebody like that?  Well, maybe not in the explicit way like Jonah.  Perhaps you are not aware of what you are doing.  Are there sins you have been nurturing that nobody knows about but you?  The word of the Lord has come to you and has said one thing and you have been doing another.  You are running; you are in retreat and you think nobody knows about it.  Let me remind you that if you are running from God you are doing something that cannot be done.  Very well, then, Jonah's retreat brought him more noticeably into this realm of common grace.  But God manifested special love and mercy by sending the wind.  This wind we may call the chastening of the Lord.  God's chastening maybe defined as His simultaneous wrath and mercy.  Now, Habakkuk the p0rophet prayed: 'O Lord, revive they work in the midst of the years, in wrath remember mercy.'  How can this be?  You may be angry with them a
Read more

Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall June 6/2023

Image
J   Jesus said that we must be like children (Matt.  18 :3).  Children take things at face value, and we as mature Christians must accept the simple promises of God's Word;  such things as "Preach the Gospel to every creature' (Mark 16:15) and "holiness without which no man shall see the Lord" (Heb. 12 :14).  It doesn't surprise me one bit that God is using Pentecostals today and passing up most of us.  It doesn't surprise me.  God honours those who believe in the simplicity of His word.  Perhaps the reason God is withholding some of the deep things of His word from the church is because of what it has done to some.  So, I suggest to you, Jonah was a victim of the folly of over-familiarity with holy things. Jonah was also a victim of the folly of ingratitude.  Jonah should have been thankful that God gave the commandment to go to Nineveh.  He should have been thankful that God saw the sins of Nineveh and was going to discover them, and there were a hundre
Read more