Sovereignty Of God In Salvation
(John McCarty)

  Somewhere the church in America has drifted from salvation by grace alone to a synergistic gospel.  Or what I call decisional regeneration.  In fact it has gotten so bad that some churches teach and preach that God has to have our permission to save us or to even rule and reign in His own creation.  You even mention that God is Sovereign and that He does everything for His own good pleasure and that His good pleasure is to bring glory to Himself as the scriptures teach and people freak out.  They look at you as if you have lost your mind. The scriptures teach that all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing and that God does according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.  Daniel 4:34-35 points out that  … “no one can restrain His hand.” If decisional regeneration is true that means we will have something to boast of before God because we allowed Him to raise us from spiritual death, we allowed Him to give us life, we allowed Him to change our hearts, and we are allowing Him to work in our lives.  Some even go so far as to say that God cannot do anything in His own creation without Satan’s permission.  In other words the God of the universe is so powerless, that He need’s Satan, as well as fallen, finite, unregenerate men and woman’s permission to do anything.   If it were not so sad, it would almost be laughable. 

  Thank God, that the God of the Bible and the God of all creation is supreme and needs nothing from man. God is self-sufficient and if He were not He would not be God.  God is not the greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist.  God would still be God. God does not need us, we need Him and He has condescended in order to redeem those whom He has chosen in eternity past in the council of the Godhead to believe unto salvation.  There is not one thing going on in HIS universe that He is not acutely aware of.  God is not bound by time or space and He is present in all places at all times in all His fullness.  There is not a bird that falls from the sky or a hair from your head that He doesn’t know about.  He uses all things, including our sin and the fallen angel Satan to accomplish all His good pleasure.   God is never taken by surprise.  God is not limited to just using righteous things to accomplish His desired ends.

  The gospel has been watered down to a man centered, synergistic gospel that has a high view of man and a low view of God and until it gets turned around the church will continue to be like the world; full of the world’s sin. At Foothills Fellowship Bible Church we teach that God is supreme, not man, that all things, ALL THINGS, work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.  (Romans 8:28)

  In His love & grace,
John McCarty/John Waldrup
Pastors/FFBC