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Know Hope Stamp

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Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
~ John 14:6


For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.
~ John 3:16


---

Applying Faith
Jesus said to him, "Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
— John 20:29


Some people say they cannot have faith because they are practical. They need to know something is true before they can believe it.

But we all apply faith every day. When you go to a restaurant, order a meal, and eat what they bring, that is faith. You are not sure if they followed all the sanitary guidelines they are supposed to follow. You don't know whether the waiter might be a little ticked off at you and has thrown a few little surprises into your entree. You don't know. So you apply faith.

When you go down to the pharmacy to fill your prescription, you assume the little pills the pharmacist gave you are actually the ones you ordered and not a placebo, or even worse, another kind of medication that could be harmful to you. You apply faith.

When you have surgery and are put under anesthesia, you must put complete faith in the anesthesiologist, surgeons, and nurses. Or how about when you board a plane and taxi down the runway in that 747? Do you understand aerodynamics? Most of us wouldn't. Yet we believe those pilots in the cockpit are hopefully not drunk or distracted. We hope they will get us safely to our destination.

My point is this: we apply faith each and every day. Faith is belief plus action. It is what we apply when we initially come to Jesus Christ. We acted on something that we accepted as true. The Bible says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith" (Ephesians 2:8).

So when someone refuses to put their faith in God, it leaves me wondering. They can put faith in a waiter, in a pharmacist, in a surgeon, and in a pilot, but they won't put their faith in God Almighty.

~Greg Laurie

--

-God's Plan of Salvation:


1 John 5:11-12
And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.
The one who has the Son has this eternal life; the one who does not have the Son of God does not have this eternal life.

This passage tells us that God has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son, Jesus Christ.
In other words, the way to possess eternal life is to possess God’s Son. The question is, how can a person have the Son of God?
Man’s Problem is Separation From God

Isaiah 59:2 But your sinful acts have alienated you from your God; your sins have caused him to
reject you and not listen to your prayers.

Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

According to Romans 5:8, God demonstrated His love for us through the death of His Son.
Why did Christ have to die for us? Because Scripture declares all men to be sinful. To “sin” means to miss the mark.
The Bible declares “all have sinned and fall short of the glory (the perfect holiness) of God” (Rom. 3:23).
In other words, our sin separates us from God who is perfect holiness (righteousness and justice) and
God must therefore judge sinful man.

Habakkuk 1:13a You God are too just to tolerate evil; you are unable to condone wrongdoing.

-God's Plan of Salvation
and The Futility of Our Works:

Scripture also teaches that no amount of human goodness, human works, human morality,
or religious activity can gain acceptance with God or get anyone into heaven.
The moral man, the religious man, and the immoral and non-religious are all in the same boat.
They all fall short of God’s perfect righteousness. After discussing the immoral man, the moral man,
and the religious man in Romans 1:18-3:8, the Apostle Paul declares that both Jews and Gentiles are under sin,
that “there is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:9-10). Added to this are the declarations of the
following verses of Scripture:

Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves,
it is the gift of God; it is not of works, so that no one can boast.

Titus 3:5-7 He saved us, not by works of righteousness that we have done but on the basis
of his mercy, through the washing of the new birth and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us in
full measure through Jesus Christ our Savior. And so, since we have been justified by his grace, we become heirs
with the confident expectation of eternal life.

Romans 4:1-5 What then shall we say that Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh,
has discovered regarding this matter? For if Abraham was declared righteous by the works of the law,
he has something to boast about (but not before God). For what does the scripture say?
“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works,
his pay is not credited due to grace but due to obligation. But to the one who does not work,
but believes in the one who declares the ungodly righteous, his faith is credited as righteousness.

No amount of human goodness is as good as God. God is perfect righteousness.
Because of this, Habakkuk 1:13 tells us God cannot have fellowship with anyone who does not have
perfect righteousness. In order to be accepted by God, we must be as good as God is. Before God,
we all stand naked, helpless, and hopeless in ourselves. No amount of good living will get us to
heaven or give us eternal life. What then is the solution?
God’s Solution

God is not only perfect holiness (whose holy character we can never attain to on our own or
by our works of righteousness) but He is also perfect love and full of grace and mercy.
Because of His love and grace, He has not left us without hope and a solution.

Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This is the good news of the Bible, the message of the gospel.
It’s the message of the gift of God’s own Son who became man (the God-man),
lived a sinless life, died on the cross for our sin, and was raised from the
grave proving both the fact He is God’s Son and the value of His death for us
as our substitute.

Romans 1:4 who was appointed the Son-of-God-in-power according to the
Holy Spirit by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 4:25 He was given over because of our transgressions and was raised for the sake of our justification.

2 Corinthians 5:21 God made the one who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would
become the righteousness of God.

1 Peter 3:18 Because Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust,
to bring you to God, by being put to death in the flesh but by being made alive in the spirit.

How Do We Receive God’s Son?

Because of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us on the cross, the Bible states “He that has the Son has life.”
We can receive the Son, Jesus Christ, as our Savior by personal faith, by trusting in the person of Christ and
His death for our sins.

John 1:12 But to all who have received him--those who believe in his name--he has given the right to become God's children

John 3:16-18 For this is the way God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son that everyone
who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into
the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him.
The one who believes in Him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already,
because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.

This means we must each come to God the same way:
(1) as a sinner who recognizes his sinfulness,
(2) realizes no human works can result in salvation,
(3) relies totally on Christ alone by faith alone for our salvation.

If you would like to receive and trust Christ as your personal Savior,
you may want to express your faith in Christ by a simple prayer acknowledging your sinfulness,
accepting His forgiveness and putting your faith in Christ for your salvation.
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