This is the eighth and final installment of my 1997 Sovereignty Series. Originally recorded on audio cassette tapes, these messages have been re-mastered and set to video by Rodney Paris of Texas.
Having received the truth of God's complete control over His universe (including the realm of humanity), the listener/viewer is now asked, "What are you going to do about this?" This is no time for sitting on the fence. I have always tried to write and teach in a way so as to never be asked, "I wonder what that guy was trying to say?" Mine is a "get the hell off the fence" ministry,
and I'm glad of it. The sovereignty of God is one of the most important truth one can grasp because, apart from it, one essentially offers divine service to the creature rather than to the Creator (Romans 1:25) and can never honestly conclude that salvation from Sin is of Christ.
This message was recorded three years before I came to realize that a belief in Human Free Will (a false teaching that opposes the sovereignty of God) makes salvation from sin the result of human willpower rather than the act of Christ on the cross. Toward the end, you will hear me consider Human Free Will as more of a doctrinal flaw potentially held by believers rather than a
demonic teaching making belief in the sufficiency of Christ impossible. (For an updated understanding on my current teaching of this important matter, see my series, "What is a Believer?") Since 2000, I have consistently taught that no one can hold to Human Free Will and simultaneously grasp Paul's gospel—especially not the premier element, "Christ died for our sin."
This is the only installment of the 8-part series not recorded in front of a live audience. I recorded this message from the desktop of my Greenwich, Ohio, downtown office on May 8, 1997.
Thanks again to Rodney Paris of Texas who labors tirelessly to bring these timeless messages home. Rodney adds video and text frames to the raw audio for a multi-dimensional presentation that not only serves auditory learners, but visual and verbal/reading learners as well.
I will at last thank the late Louis Abbot for the Marantz tape deck on which every one of these messages (and many more, from 1994 to 2008) were recorded. Abbot, a recognized Greek scholar and the foremost authority on the Greek word AION, had contracted terminal stomach cancer and invited Gary Amirault (Tentmaker), Dean Hough, Phil Scranton, and myself to his little quonset hut in
Stover, Missouri to assure that his many Bibles and study tools got into the hands of worthy teachers before he died. This was the fall/winter of 1993. It was my good fortune be able to take this professional tape deck as well as several Bibles and Concordant teaching books back to Ohio with me.
Incidentally, on the day that Dean and Phil and I arrived in Stover, Gary Amirault was filming a biographical documentary of Louis Abbot. Here is a link to the first part of that documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJoNxjUAAi8
Grace and peace to you all from the edge of the bottom of the Floridan peninsula,
—Martin
P.S. Next up (starting next Sunday), the 8-part Sin Series recorded in 1996.
