Christian, be assured: our sovereign God will accomplish all he has promised in Christ

# 1 . . .through the means of his people’s prayers (12-14).

• The promises of God are incentives to prayerful intercession.
• God uses our prayers as the foreordained means to his foreordained end.
• “The fuel of intercessory prayer . . . are the promises of God.”

# 2 . . .in accordance with what must be fulfilled in scripture (15-20).

• The advance of the gospel was not halted by Judas’ disobedience.
• Jesus was not mistaken when he picked Judas as an apostle.

# 3 . . .through his ordering of all things; events in this world never happen “by chance” (21-26).

• With the inclusion of Matthias, the newly reconstituted apostles continued faithfully all their lives as Jesus’ witnesses to the ends of the earth.

Compatibilism (both of the following propositions are true at the same time)

• God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in such a way that human responsibility is curtailed, minimized or mitigated.

Human beings are morally responsible creatures – they significantly choose, rebel, obey, believe, defy, make decisions and so forth, and they are rightly held accountable for such actions; but this characteristic never functions so as to make God absolutely contingent (secondary, a responder, a reactor, dependent upon us in some sense).