ROMANS 3:9\u201320<\/b><\/p>\n
There is no one who understands; no one who seeks God<\/i><\/p>\n
(Romans 3:11).<\/i><\/p>\n
A person either is regenerated and belongs to God or he is not. There is no middle ground from an eternal standpoint. From a human standpoint, however, within history we do see some people move into the kingdom of God by stages. The Puritans devoted a great deal of attention to this phenomenon, and it is our purpose today to address it briefly.<\/p>\n
The Puritans distinguished between an awakening and a conversion. A person who has been awakened is someone who not only hears the facts of the Christian message but comes to believe that he is indeed a sinner and that he desperately needs some kind of salvation. Sometimes awakened people become Christians, but sometimes they don\u2019t. Sometimes they move into a cult or get into some kind of self-help program, or in some other way undergo a moral renovation that takes care of their felt need. That a person is \u201cunder conviction of sin\u201d does not mean that God is at work on that person\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n
The Puritans encouraged people who had been awakened to become what they called seekers<\/i>. Christians, of course, are to seek God at all times, but this is not what the Puritans meant. Rather, a seeker is someone who sees that his only hope is in the Gospel but who does not believe he truly loves God and has been converted. The Puritans encouraged such a person to \u201cput himself in the way of the Gospel\u201d by reading the Bible, obeying God\u2019s law, attending worship, fellowshipping with God\u2019s people, and the like. In time, they believed, such a person would become a true believer, if he wasn\u2019t one already.<\/p>\n
We cannot read the heart. A man may say, \u201cWhen I look inside myself, I don\u2019t see any real love for God.\u201d But that man may be wrong. If he loves the Bible, the Law, the church, God\u2019s people, and does good to them, he in fact loves God. We are not to base our faith on what we see inside ourselves but in the promises of the written Word of God. On the other hand, a person may feel gushes of love for \u201cGod\u201d but be a stranger to the God who really exists. Thus, we must always come back to faith in the promises of God and not rely on our own feelings.<\/p>\n
CORAM DEO<\/b><\/p>\n
Psalms 70\u201371; 86<\/p>\n
Becoming a Christian by the stages of awakening and seeking is not by any means the only way a person can be converted. Some are brought up in the faith. Some are converted instantly. Beware of taking one pattern of conversion and making it the norm for everyone.<\/p>\n
For further study: Deut. 4:25\u201331 \u2022 Isa. 55 \u2022 Acts 17:24\u201328<\/i><\/p>\n
thursday<\/p>\n
april<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ROMANS 3:9\u201320 There is no one who understands; no one who seeks God (Romans 3:11). A person either is regenerated and belongs to God or he is not. There is no middle ground from an eternal standpoint. From a human standpoint, however, within history we do see some people move into the kingdom of God … Continue reading “SEEKING THE LORD”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}