All Things Are Possible With God

Introduction

The Gospel is the story of God breaking into the human experience. God indwells human flesh in Christ. He indwells human history – making His will known and actuated – most notably through the Church but He is at work in all peoples, nations, tribes, and tongues. The mission of the Church is not to sit back and wait for God to work. It is to bring about the transformation of society through the means of the Gospel. We are the Lord’s workman in our society. (My Work Crew)

*My mission this morning is not to influence you toward any particular social or political worldview.* Rather, to highlight to the highest principals upon which this great land was founded and point the workman courageously in the direction of the battles for the cause of Liberty that wage in our day.

Transition

We are a nation with a unique promise. We are a nation with a unique blessing. We are a nation with a unique responsibility. In what follows it is my desire is highlight the beauty and worth of our national heritage. Yes.

But even more so, my goal is to encourage you and point you to the mortar that binds the highest ideals of this nation together; the cement upon which this oft drifting nation finds its surest footing. That footing is a fundamental faith in the Lord of all glory, the God of the Bible, from which every notion of the principal of essential liberty which is our highest virtue springs.

These are uncertain times but (CIT / CIS) nothing is impossible with God. These are times of great questioning but we serve a God of great assurance.

Exposition

Textual Context: The specific context of Mark 10:27 is salvation in Jesus Christ. In fact, it is Jesus response to a rich young man whom Jesus is speaking to about the great difficulty of those with great material possession in entering the kingdom.

Jesus is specifically saying that salvation is impossible with man but not with God. Surely though the same broad principal applies to all of the revelation of God in the Bible and to the life of faith for every believer. God knows no boundaries.

The essential contextual meaning of the passage is that God is the Lord of redemptive history in the lives of people individually and in the broader sense of the destiny of all nations. Salvation in Christ and the exaltation of the worth of Christ is the ultimate aim of God in my life, your life, and in the entire world.

God is the Lord of all human history. Whether my personal life and history or the history and life of nations. What about the history and life of our nation? The only thing that is worse than living in the past is ignorance of it.

Historical (Topical) Context: We are a nation uniquely guided. As I wrote in a recent column in the Suffolk News Herald, “The story of America is the story of courage, conflict, and liberty. In a famous sermon in 1630, John Winthrop spoke of the pilgrim’s hope to establish “a city upon a hill.” The hope of their hearts was the establishment of a place peace, security, and liberty. Leaving behind state established religion and monarch rule, they cast sail into unknown waters in more ways than one. What would freedom of religion look like? What would a society built primarily upon the good will of a man’s neighbors be like? That free society has taken many forms and in many ways is still being shaped. American liberty, as embodied in the Constitution, is more of a promise of liberty than a guarantee. Every generation has had to battle to secure and promote liberty. Whether it was slavery, women’s rights, child labor, state and national power, prohibition and temperance, or wars abroad liberty has not come without courage and conflict. Its dream must be constantly brought into reality.”

Even for the casual observer there is no question that the birth and burgeoning of this great nation is peculiar. For religious observers, it seems obvious that God had His hand upon it. The founders and framers of our nation had more in mind than simply the security of freedoms in general.

Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush wrote that “Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.”

That is what we have in our streets today. Liberty, freedom, free from virtue, common ethics and morality, is no blessing to us at all. Its byproduct is crime, destruction of the family, and the denigration of society.

Thomas Jefferson said, “Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.” As a society we have bitten the bait of pleasure, mistaking Liberty for license. As a result, as a people, so many are not free but enslaved to dependence upon government institutions; looking to man as though he were God; trusting in man for provision and sustenance rather than the Lord and the gifts he gives born of hard work, perseverance, and faith.