Podcasts about it's jesus

Losing my religion pt 1 - It's Jesus!

I'm in a pit. I've been in this pit for days and now, all the screams have gone out of me and all the calls for help has faded away with my voice. I'm starving, I'm lonely and I'm cold. I'm losing hope & I have no more fight left in me. All my efforts to climb out has proved abortive. Then all of a sudden, I lift up my eyes and see a figure. So bright is this figure that I cover my eyes which refused to accomodate the Brightness that came through. Then this figure says to me, take my Hand and immediately, I reached up and He grabbed me out of that filthy, reptile infested pit. He carried me in His hands and brought me home. That is the end of my story.

This is a podcast of our radio program, Rejoicing Heart and teaches about the Truth (The Word of God) setting you free from the lies and deception of the devil. /// If you have any questions, or you would like to share how our teachings have affected your life, please email us or visit us at www.rejoicingheart.net God bless you! Rob and Donna Rejoice In You From the Integrity Music Release One, featuring Planetshakers Ministries Int'l ©2009 Planetshakers Publishing (APRA) (admin. By Music Services, www.musicservices.org) All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

Thank You Jesus Every good and perfect gift comes from The LORD THE FATHER gave us His Son Jesus over 2000 years ago and today, we're still celebrating that wonder that brought to nought, the stranglehold of the devil on the sons and daughters of men. We are now called blessed because of This Holy Child. I love Him more than I love anyone else unapologetically and you should follow suit dear. Let's celebrate Jesus everyday. Thank You Jesus

What if It's Jesus? by Charissa Clark Howe

This teaching is taken from Mark 5:25-29 and teaches you about Faith and how you can use it to move mountains in your life. // If you have any questions, or you would like to share how our teachings have affected your life, please email us or visit us at www.rejoicingheart.net God bless you! Rob and Donna /// Rejoice In You From the Integrity Music Release One, featuring Planetshakers Ministries Int'l ©2009 Planetshakers Publishing (APRA) (admin. By Music Services, www.musicservices.org) All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

DATE: October 25, 2020 SERIES: Amplifying Shalom TEACHER: Chad Schepers

Jesus is the message, the central focus of the Bible and our universe.

"Peace" is a word often associated with seasons like Christmas, or a general lack of conflict with others. But when it seems like the world is trying to burn itself down, what do we look to for a real idea of peace? Jarod and Dave dig into the biblical idea of peace and how it really holds us accountable to lay our lives down the way Christ did. Listen in and let us know your thoughts. http://kingswaytalk.com/ https://www.patreon.com/kingswaytalk

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Please ignore any speech-to-text errors) [00:00:04] All right. Well, hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Penny and we're so glad that you're here with us today for this next session of Get Sellers Calling You. Beatty Carmichael is the CEO of Master Grabber, the creator of Agent Dominator and one of the top marketing experts in the real estate field. Beatty, I'm really excited about our call today. What do you have for us? [00:00:27] Well, I'm excited, too. And for those listening, this a quick disclaimer and heads up, we do two types of calls. One focused on growing a real estate business. By the way, we'll be doing more on that in the commercial sector as well. So you have commercial business. We got some really cool things on that. But the other type of topic we cover is on a spiritual nature. We call it radical faith. And it's where we talk about Jesus talking about Jesus offense. You you don't want to listen. Then you are forewarned and you can turn off this episode and come back to the next one. So that's what we're going to be talking about. [00:01:10] Awesome. I'm so excited. [00:01:12] Yes. Well, I'm kind of excited about this on this call, too, because this is, again, one of those studies I've done that I thought I'm going down this path and I know the answer. And then I start to search scriptures and I go, Huh? That's not the answer I was really expecting. [00:01:31] So kind of as a way of an intro, things are not always as they may seem. Okay, well, let me ask you a question. Jesus is up on the cross. [00:01:44] You remember that. You remember Jesus Christ. Just making sure that Jesus is up on the cross. And the question is, did God forsake him while he was there? [00:01:57] What do you think? No. No. [00:02:04] Yes. Yes. Well, yes, because I know that God turned his back on the thing. He wasn't turning his back on Jesus. [00:02:14] He was turning his back on the sin that was upon Jesus. And Jesus cried out, Why have you forsaken me? [00:02:23] So I could be both of you. You may be right, because a lot of times there's multiple dimensions and God's kingdom. [00:02:37] So it's not always linear and black and white. But for the sake of discussion, just kind of go down this path. [00:02:45] If you had to choose one or the other. Most likely. Did God forsake Jesus while he was on the cross or did God not forsake him? He did not. [00:02:59] Okay, give me your reasoning behind it. Do you have any scripture to back that up? [00:03:06] I can't think of any off the top of my head. I'm basing it on just what I know to be the nature and character of God. [00:03:14] Okay, great. Good God. Good woman. All right. So now Jesus does say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So does that mean that Jesus was wrong? [00:03:30] No. [00:03:32] Jesus was right. [00:03:34] If that's what he was feeling in the moment. We know that Jesus was perfect. So even though sometimes our feelings can lie to us. [00:03:46] That's a good question. That's a good question. [00:03:50] It is because a lot of people say, well, God, obviously for Jesus on the cross because Jesus said he did. You actually have a more accurate answer in reasoning behind it than you may realize. So this is where things are not always as they seem. You have to really look deeper underneath the surface and try to understand what's going on. So let me get you real quickly to turn to Psalm 22. [00:04:22] Let me give you a little background on Psalm 22. This is David in the Spirit, writing about the crucifixion. This is David watching. I'm assuming he's seen it take place or it's a vision, but he is see, he is writing down what the Lord has shown him. Just start reading the beginning of Psalm 22. And I just want to set the stage of what's going on here. [00:04:54] My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me so far from my cries of anguish? Oh, my God. Okay. [00:05:06] So Jesus is quoting Psalm 22? Actually, no. David is writing what Jesus says. And so David is actually quoting Jesus as opposed to Jesus quoting David. Does that make sense? Mm hmm. So here we have Jesus saying, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As you read through Song 22, you see all the things about the crucifixion. You see them. They take my clothes. They cast lot from my clothes. They split them among I am pierced my my ribs, stand out, all these things that happen in crucifixion. So we know very clearly this is the crucifixion. But down real quickly to verse 24 and tell me. But first, 24 says was 24. [00:05:58] He has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help. [00:06:09] So this is talking about God. And it says that he has not hidden his face from him. Jesus says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [00:06:19] And down here, it says that God never forsook and he never hid his face. [00:06:27] What in the world could be going on in this interesting. Fascinating. Thanks are not always as they seem, are they? [00:06:36] No, definitely not. [00:06:37] You got to dig a little bit deeper, especially when you want to really understand what's really going on and how to apply it in your life, how to live in a way that the Lord called us to live and what actually is going on. You've got to dig deeper to tap into a session we just recently did on when bad things happen. Is it God's will? Got some interesting observations there. So let me share it, because this is not the focus of the call. But I thought this was an interesting way to start it. Let me share kind of what's going on. [00:07:10] Have you ever heard the top concept that thin blinds you from the truth? Scene creates a veil over our eyes. And this is the whole idea of the wedding ceremony. The bride wears a veil and the bridegroom takes the veil off. And now she can see clearly as a as a foreshadowing of the spiritual. Ceremony with Jesus. And where the bride takes the veil of sin that blocks our vision. So when Jesus is on the cross, he became sin. And as soon as he became sin, a veil came over his eyes and he could no longer see the father. My God, my God, why do you forsaken me? David is saying, I'm right here. God never first took you sin blocks. Okay. So a lot of times we all believe what we've been told. But sometimes we don't really know why we believe it. Other times we believe a certain way because we read God's word and it says this and someone else reads that word and they get something totally different out of it. And the question is kind of flood what's right. So I want to move into the topic now because it's a bigger topic. Here's a question. [00:08:49] Does everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven? In other words, once you've accepted Christ, can you lose that salvation? [00:09:00] Oh, gosh, that's one of those questions that just gets so there's so much controversy. [00:09:09] Let's go. Let's go back. Let's go back to the root of the question. Does everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven? [00:09:16] Yes. [00:09:18] Why do you believe that? [00:09:23] Because the Bible says. [00:09:28] It says, if you believe in the Lord Jesus, he will be saved. [00:09:34] Is that accepting or believing or are those the same? [00:09:39] Well, maybe that's the translation I learned. [00:09:43] So let me let me ask you. Are you absolutely positive? That everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven. [00:09:56] I have to be honest, I'm not actually positive now that we're doing this call and I'll catch you on a number of things in the past, you're starting to think Beatty may know something. I don't. I'm not going to be quite so positive. Right. Right. Okay. Well, good job. Don't be positive. Okay. Okay. [00:10:19] So the topic of this series that we're going to do, and it's going to be multi part because it's really threw out all scripture, especially New Testament. And that is the question does do all who accept Christ go to heaven? [00:10:35] This call is going to be part number one. We're going to lay the foundation and then we're going to start to dissect it. And this isn't for just simply an intellectual pursuit of just saying, here's what scripture say. But really to try to understand. What is God calling us to do and why? And as I've gone through this myself, here's the net result. I've changed my perspective of what's most important. It's really amazing. Okay, just a quick disclaimer. I don't have all the answers. This is one of those topics that you mentioned. Everyone has all kinds of different opinions. Scripture is constantly, consistently true is the question of what are we and how we interpreting and why. So we don't want to share is is what I believe the Lord is directing me in understanding. So I want to talk about some of the controversial versus real quickly. So this kind of tees up why this is such a difficult topic. So let's go to Matthew ten, verse 22. [00:11:39] Okay. All right. [00:11:43] By the way, this is this is all these things we're going to go through for passages. And they're all Jesus talking. So go ahead, Matthew, 10 22. [00:11:52] You will be hated by everyone because of all. But the one who stands firm to the end will be saved, stands firm to the end. [00:12:02] Okay, that's interesting. Let's use also ESV translation on these. Let's now go to Matthew 24 and we're going to read verses 10 and 13, 10 and 13. [00:12:21] 24, verse 10 and 13 percent says and then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And then verse 13 says, But the one who endures to the end will be saved. [00:12:37] And they translates that first verse. And then many will fall away from the face. Okay, here we see. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. Let's now go to mark 13. [00:12:53] Martin, 13 versus 12 and 13. Let's see what that says. [00:12:58] All right. Verse twelve. And brother will deliver brother over to death. And the father, his child and the children will rise against parents and have them put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. [00:13:17] We see that again. The one who endures to the end. Makes you wonder, well, does that mean not all people who accept Christ? Go to heaven because why would Jesus keep talking about enduring to the end? Let's look at one more loop, 21, 17 through 19. [00:13:42] All right, 17 to 19 says you will be hated by all for my name's sake, but not a hair of your head will perish by your endurance. You will gain your lives. [00:13:56] There we have it again. Here's the question. When Jesus teaches that you must endure to the end to be saved. Does that mean that some people don't endure to the end? [00:14:09] Yes, I could see how some people probably give up or decide that I'm done with this. Okay, okay. [00:14:17] But the fact that Jesus is teaching that you had to endure to the end indicates that there are obviously those who don't endure to the end. Does that make sense? Yes. By the way, here's something else interesting. This was so important, apparently, that God put it in. The scriptures four separate times just by Jesus. We're going to say that this concept is pervasive. [00:14:43] But four separate times by Jesus. [00:14:45] If people don't endure to the end, then does that mean that they don't go to heaven? [00:14:53] I'd like to investigate that a little further. [00:14:56] Okay, so let me ask this question. Does being Sayed. [00:15:00] Does that. Men going to heaven. Do you think? [00:15:05] According to what we just read. No. [00:15:09] Okay, can you give me some scripture to back up? We're saved in heaven. Don't necessarily go together. [00:15:18] Well, the ones we just read, Jesus was speaking in reference to being saved and said those who Indore to the end. So three times we read that right. [00:15:30] So those who who endure to the end will be saved. Can we probably transliterate that? Those who endured to the end will make it to heaven. Probably is just kind of lame, the fact that Jesus is talking about being saved. Going to what we talk about going to heaven. Probably one in the same with that. Would you agree with that? [00:15:52] Yes, I would. [00:15:54] Okay. So if Jesus is saying. Or so is Jesus saying that whether or not they endure determines whether or not they are saved? [00:16:11] That's a very deep thought. I think so. I think that would go hand in hand. Okay, one influences the other. [00:16:24] Right. So what we're going to find out as we go through it, it's either a determining factor or an indicative factor. It's either the evidence had been saved or they determine that they are to be saved. So we're going to see what the scripture talks about a little bit more. So when Jesus came to Earth, here's another question. What was the main message that he preached? In other words, why did he come to Earth? [00:16:50] He preached the kingdom of heaven is near. He preached to be safe so that you could go to heaven. That was his message, to believe him to get right there. [00:17:02] So true. So he never really preaches forgiveness. [00:17:07] Have you ever noticed that he didn't have to come to Earth for forgiveness because God gave people all through the Old Testament. [00:17:16] He didn't come to Earth specifically for salvation. You said that on. He came to preach the kingdom of heaven. In fact, this is his common theme. If you can finish the sentence, repent for the kingdom of heaven is near or near here at hand. It's right here in our midst. Okay, so we had this thing called repentance and forgiveness, salvation going to have been saved. All these things are part of the kingdom of God. But what Jesus came to do was much more holistic than just being saved or forgiven. And I think that if we start to then understand what the kingdom of God really means. And understand more about that make more sense. Why? What Jesus talking about enduring to the end really means if we want to understand what Jesus means, the one who endures to the end. We have to go back to his core message that he's always teaching repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. And if we understand the kingdom of God, then we can then figure out what he really means about enduring to the end. Does that hurt? So with that then the question is. When Jesus taught on the kingdom of God, because that's most of what he taught on what was his primary method of teaching about the kingdom of God. [00:18:52] Do you recall the parable parables? Good job. Okay. So if we want to understand the kingdom of God, let's look at some of the parables, because that's what he teaches through which other parables is the most important in understanding. [00:19:11] All of the parables. Do you recall which one? [00:19:15] Oh, gosh. He had so many. The one that's popping out is the seed and the sower. But that might not be the one you're thinking of. [00:19:28] Did many good jobs go to Mark for verse 13? This is a commentary of Jesus on the parable of the seed in the summer. [00:19:41] Okay. [00:19:42] Four, verse 13. And he said to them, do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? [00:19:53] So here's something here's something real interesting. The parable of the seat in the Sower, I believe I'm correct, is the only parable in all three of the synoptic gospels. That's the same. And it's the only one where Jesus gives a parable and gives the interpretation. In fact, I think it's the only one that he gives the interpretation on. And he says here that if you don't understand this parable, you cannot understand any of the parables because this parable unlocks all the other parable. So this is a pretty important message on understanding the kingdom of God. Makes sense. Yes. Okay, so now let's read into this. Let's go read the parable of the Sower, and we're going to do this in Matthew. Okay. Okay. So, Matthew, 13 versus three through eight. [00:20:53] All right. And he told them many things in parables saying a sower went out to sow as he sowed some seeds, fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they did not have much soil. And immediately they sprang up since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain. Some 100 fold. Some 60, some 30. He who has ears let them hear. [00:21:37] Very good. So now we have the soil where the seed goes out. And now we're going to replay what Jesus says this means. That's going to be verses 18 through 23. [00:21:53] Here, then, the parable of the sower, when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it. The evil one comes and snatches away what has been found in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was shown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately received it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while. And when tribulation or persecutions persecution arises on account of the word immediately, he falls away. As for what was sown amongst thorns, this is the one who hears the word. But the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word. And it proves unfruitful. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands that he indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold and another 60 in another 30. [00:22:51] All right, great. So now we're going back to the Requestion. Does everyone who accept Christ go to heaven? We say that Jesus says only the one who endures to the end will be saved. [00:23:05] We now go into this parable. He starts to describe it. So now let's get an understanding of this parable as we go in. So there are several parts about this parable that we need to break down first just to really kind of understand a little bit more. The first one is the seed. Okay, this is the seed and the seed is a key part. Here's the question. What is the seed? [00:23:33] The word. [00:23:34] Okay, so, Jesus, the seed is the word, the word of the kingdom. And what is the word Jesus? [00:23:45] Yeah. Okay, John, one one in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. [00:23:52] So the seed is Jesus. Right. Okay. Very interesting. So then we have the next. Let's look at the four soils. Okay. What did the soils represent? [00:24:07] The beginning part where he described it, yes. [00:24:12] When he's throwing when you're trying to sort out what do the soils represent, there are four types of soil. So what what did they representative of? [00:24:21] A person's heart, a person's heart. Okay, so four types of heart, four types of people, right. What separates one heart from another? What separates one group of people versus the other group of people? [00:24:39] The state or the beating of their heart? The state of their heart. [00:24:45] But less and less narrowed a little bit more. Okay. Okay. I'd like to suggest the stewardship of the seed, which is it represents, to say, the heart, but the state of heart is exemplified and evidenced by how its stewards see. Does that make sense? Okay, so what differentiates one soil from another, one type of person from another is stewardship of the seed. And then if the seed is Jesus and the soil represents the different types of people. What does that mean, that all people receive Jesus? [00:25:27] No. [00:25:33] Goes out, the soda goes out and sows the seed. Jesus. Yes. And does the same get sewn on all four soils? [00:25:47] Yes. [00:25:49] All four soils receive the seed sown. [00:25:55] Correct. [00:25:56] Okay. [00:25:58] So let me ask the question again. If they did this soil, it's not a trick question. It's a question that. [00:26:06] We usually don't consider because it doesn't make sense based on what we've been taught. But we have to do is we have to dig deeper than what we've been taught and see what the word says. Because what we've been taught may not be. What the world says, it may be something slightly different. So here's the question at the seat is Jesus and the soul represents people then does that mean that all people receive Jesus? Yes, it does. In fact, Romans, what does it Romans one tells us that everyone has the heart of the law of the Lord written on their hearts already. They see God's law in the skies and in everything. So everyone has received the truth. Jesus says the high priest prayer when he's praying to the Lord of the tables. He says, Die word is truth. God's word is truth. Jesus is the word. Jesus is the seed. And we see truth everywhere in nature that that proclaims God. So everyone has received that seed. But that doesn't mean they've done anything with it. That's the key. So now we've got the seed. We've got the soils. Now we have. Fruit, fruit is really the key message that Jesus is teaching about. And he basically basically says that here's my way of just kind of transliterating a little bit. Only those who produce fruit or are going to be. [00:27:46] Right, that's basically what we can start to see in his message, and I want to unpack that with fruit. [00:27:55] Fruit is the key to this parable. Fruit is only found in one soil. Soil is that good soil, the good soil. Okay, great. [00:28:05] And I want it just for sake of purpose. I'm going to label these soils as soil one, two, three and four soil. One is the path to the rocky soil soil. Three is the thorns and soil for the good soil. And then that way we can just kind of keep keep it simple. [00:28:23] Okay, so what we had to do is understand what is fruit. So if I were to ask you, what is fruit? This is the kid. This is the key to understanding everything is this fruit? What is it? [00:28:40] Fruit is what is produced from the seed. [00:28:47] Very good. [00:28:49] But what is it that's the prize? What can we call it the result? The seed managed and held and cared for properly. [00:29:08] All right. All right. We're gonna get there. Let me back up and just kind of bring us into this, because I think this is kind of fun. So seed one of the times another sessions. I was talking about the Bible has been written by one author. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay. Now, that author inspired many men to actually pen that one author's thoughts, but it's all one author, which is God himself. Exactly. So anytime you have a book, you have characters in the book and those characters keep coming up and they always are the characters that they were. [00:29:54] In other words, if I'm reading a book and let's say, say, a Tom Clancy novel, I used to read those years back and he introduces a guy named Gosh, I forget the guy, but he introduces a couple of guys up front in the novel. [00:30:13] Then throughout the novel, every time he calls that person up by name. John did this or John did that. [00:30:19] It's always that person that he introduced and described at the beginning. Does that make sense? Yes. So the character goes throughout. So we see that same thing in the scriptures. [00:30:31] We see it with fig trees, olive trees. We see it with light, darkness. We see it with soils. We see it with seed. We see all kinds of thing. So the question is, what does seed represent? What is the character of seed? I like to show you something because this is really cool. [00:30:46] Where does God first introduce his character seed? [00:30:54] In the Garden of Eden, if I'm not mistaken, a little bit before. [00:31:00] Oh, you'll have to tell me. [00:31:05] Let's go to Genesis 111. [00:31:10] During creation, now, Save was obviously present in the Garden of Eden, but he introduces what it is. [00:31:19] During creation, Genesis one 11 with 11 and God said, let the earth sprout vegetation plants yielding seeds and fruit trees bearing fruit and which is their seed, each according to its own kind on the earth. [00:31:36] And it was so seed reproduces after its own time. We used today's technology words that carries all the DNA to reproduce an exact replica of whatever it is, whatever it came from. Does that make sense? Yeah. And then where is seed formed? [00:32:03] Well. See, far and within the fruit. [00:32:08] The fruit is the womb of the seed. Interesting, isn't it? [00:32:15] I mean, we know that it is insane to think of it that way. [00:32:18] Okay, so this makes sense. A seed is planted. It has to die. Once it dies. It's burst again. Into a new plant after its own kind, as that plant matures, it produces fruit. And inside, the fruit seed is created so that the plant through the fruit can reproduce itself again. Does that. Soun. [00:33:00] Similar to something else that we would think about in Christian terms. And that's just what Jesus did. He came as a seed of God. Right. The exact replica. He dies and he's planted into the ground, right into the temple. And then when he dies, he becomes born again into a exact replica. And he produces through. Okay. So we see this this pattern of the seed. And the fruit is the womb that causes that seed to produce fruit is in the process of where seed has been reproduced. Making sense? Yes. Okay, so then why does the characteristic of the seed. What is the characteristic of the fruit? It's kind of an aside, but it kind of ties into this. If I were to say, what is the fruit of? Can you finish that sentence? [00:34:13] What's it called fruit of? Prudent spirit. [00:34:19] So let's look at that real quick. This is Galatians five. 22, 23. But I want you to do it in The Passion translation on this one, because I think this song articulates what it's really saying. [00:34:33] And you said the Galicians five, five, 22 and 23. [00:34:50] All right, here we go. 22 and 23 says the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you is Divine Love in all its varied expressions. [00:35:04] Such a perfect moment. [00:35:07] A lot of times people say the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace. [00:35:12] But I think what the term love is, the fruit of the spirit is singular, not plural. There's not multiple fruits. There's one. That's why I love this translation that the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you. Is Divine Love in all its varied expressions. So now we're talking about love. Where else do you recall what the Bible says about love? We're talking about. This is Paul talking about different things and he said about love. [00:35:43] First Corinthians 13, I think. Yeah. The love. We call it the love chapter in our house. [00:35:49] Okay, good. All right. And it says that above all. [00:35:54] First, love is, love is, and in fact, there's here's something else, it says Faith, hope and love abide. But the greatest of these is love. What are you saying? There is that of everything he's been talking about, faith, hope and love. By that means that they are eternal. [00:36:17] They never go away. Gifts go away. But faith, hope and love abide. But of all of those, the greatest of them is love. This is what Jimmy. This is who God is, representative. Mostly by the character. Bye bye, love. That's what this is talking about. The fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you is Divine Love in all its varied expressions. Okay, so now I'll let you finish the passage from there. It's now going to define and describe what that Divine Love, how that Divine Love manifests itself. [00:36:55] Okay, joy that overflows peace, that some patience that endures kindness and action, a life full of virtue, faith that prevails, gentleness of heart and strength of spirit never set the law above these qualities. They are meant to be limitless. [00:37:18] All right. So now let's go back. See this Jesus? That's what Jesus says is the word of God, right in the. Fruit is where the seed is formed. And that means really that seed, the fruit, is Jesus being formed in you and producing through you. Does that make sense? Yes. OK. So that's really what I believe the fruit is talking about, is that Jesus has been formed in you. So here's a question. If Jesus is formed in you, would you act like Jesus? We should be informed and you are going to carry the characteristics and the more he's formed and living through, you carry those characteristics. What are some of the things that Jesus did that maybe if he was formed in you, you would likely do to. [00:38:14] Oh, gosh. I mean, just naming things he did heal the sick, raise the dead. He helped all those that were oppressed. He lost. I mean, he loved first. And everything else was just an overflow of the love. [00:38:33] He went preaching the message, the kingdom of God. Okay. Yeah. All this. [00:38:38] All these things. Peace, patience, kindness. [00:38:43] So that is evidence of the fruit. The fruit is Jesus being formed. But evidence of the fruit being formed into you is a manifestation of all these things that Jesus did. Bring a little bit more clarity, right? OK. So here's the big question. If Jesus has never formed Inju, are you born again and go to heaven? [00:39:12] Tom. [00:39:15] According to all this. No. [00:39:21] It's not us that are righteous. It's Jesus, in a sense, righteous, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. [00:39:29] Romans side, I think, says that the righteous fulfillment of the law, the righteous requirement of the law has been fulfilled. And you. [00:39:36] And then we can connect the dots because Christ is in you. [00:39:41] Who would it be safe to say that only those in soil number four. Hey, bear fruit. Which has been formed in them are the ones who are truly born again, are saved and go to heaven. Does that make sense, do you say? Yes. So now let's look at the four soils. Real quick. No one is the past. This is verse four, so read that again. Let's talk about that. [00:40:16] And that was go back to that book when we were in Matthew 20. [00:40:26] Excuse me, Matthew, 13, 13. [00:40:33] I'm going to switch translations. I'll go back to that. [00:40:35] I actually actually I got. I think this is versus it's not verse four that I want you to read is going to be verse probably 18 or 19. [00:40:45] Let me go back. Yes. [00:40:47] Okay. 18 and 19. Okay. So 19, when anyone hears the word of the kingdom does not understand it. The evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. [00:41:02] I know that. [00:41:03] So that's the one that's sown along the path. [00:41:06] Okay, let's see. [00:41:13] So that person has heard the word of the kingdom. And they do not understand it. [00:41:18] Right. So how did they steward the seed? Or did they stay where the stayed at all? [00:41:26] They didn't. They didn't do it because it just says that they did not understand it. And then the evil one came and snatched it away. So that leads me to believe they didn't pursue understanding what had been spoken to them. [00:41:40] Got you. So no wonder the path does not seem see deceit at all. It's rejected. Correct. Since it doesn't stay where the seed. Does the soil accept the seed? So there are two things you've got to accept it and you, Stuart. So did the soil ever accept the seed? [00:42:07] No. [00:42:08] No. Since the seed represents Christ, does that mean that this person did not accept Christ? That's correct. And is this person born again? No. No. And how do we know that? [00:42:26] Because it says. [00:42:29] The evil one snatched it away. What was sewn in their heart? So Jesus was taken out from their heart. They can't be born again. [00:42:38] That's right. Okay, perfect. So now we have soul. No one does not accept the seed, does not therefore steward the seed. The say never forms itself in them through fruit. They are not born again. They don't go to heaven. Okay, so now let's look at soil number two, the rocky ground. This is going to be versus 20 through 21. [00:43:02] As for what was sown on Iraqi ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately received it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself but indoors for a while. And when tribulation or persecution persecution arises on account of the word, he immediately falls away. [00:43:24] So does the soil accept the seed? [00:43:32] A little bit, right? It tries to, but actually I think it's a little bit a little bit deeper. Let's go back to it and look and says yet he has no root in himself. Do you see that? If there is no. [00:43:50] Yes, go ahead. [00:43:51] If there's if there's no route, then did the soil ever accept it? [00:43:58] Go in the soil, right? [00:44:00] Yes. One head down. [00:44:04] Have you ever seen trees or plants grow on the side of a cliff where it's just wrong? Yes. Yes. Is there any. There's no soil, but they can still grow by putting roots down a little bit around the rocks. Does that make sense? So the soil does accept the seed. And we know that because there's no root and with no root, there's no acceptance. How does the soil steward the seed? [00:44:36] Well, it says as soon as he heard it, he received it with joy. Right. But because there's no route. There's nothing to anchor it when the hard things come, he falls away. He gives up. [00:44:52] Notice it says that he has no root in himself, but endures for a while. What are those passages that Jesus says? [00:45:00] What does it say about endurance to endure until the end? [00:45:05] So this guy only endures for a while, but not to the end. [00:45:09] Okay. So the soil doesn't accept the seed. The soil stewards, the seed only poorly. It's enough that it grew up, got excited. But it did not endure to the end. Here's the question. Is this person born again? [00:45:30] Now, how do we know that? [00:45:35] Well, because they had no route. And because they chose to give up almost OK. [00:45:42] So those are part of it. But the ultimate technical answers because there's no fruit. [00:45:50] Because fruit is where Christ is formed in you. And there's no fruit. Therefore, there is no Christ formed in you. And only of Christ is formed. And you are truly born again. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So no one. Not a Christian. So, number two, they receive it with joy. A lot of people you share the gospel. They immediately pray the center's prayer type of thing. And you may see some life change. They're all excited, but they don't endure. [00:46:21] That wasn't a what we would call in our Christian, these terms a true salvation. Christ was never formed in them. Now let's look at soil number three. This is the one with the thorns. And this is going to be verse 22. [00:46:35] As for what was done along with thorns, this is the one who hears the word. But the cares of the world and deceitfulness of riches choke the word. And it proved unfruitful. [00:46:49] Turn also real quick, I want to show you one other passage on this that it gives a little bit more information. Luke Eighty-seven. It's the same Jesus describing this, but he gives Luke eight, seven, gives one more piece of information. Let's see if you can find that piece of information. [00:47:06] And some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. So this one. Thorns are growing up with the. [00:47:17] Which means the seed is growing. Right. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. So now let's ask our questions, our diagnostic questions on this. Does the soil accept the seed? [00:47:30] Yes. Yes. [00:47:32] Okay. Now, remember, the soil represents people, represents your heart. The seed represents Jesus. So this soil accepts Jesus. [00:47:44] Yes. [00:47:45] Follow me. Okay. Okay, so the soil accepts Jesus because the soil accepts the seed. [00:47:56] How does the soil steward the seed? How well is that seed stewarded? Well, it does it does the soil steward the seat at all. Let's start with their. [00:48:15] No. [00:48:17] Maybe a little bit in the beginning, because it says when the cares of the world and deceitfulness come and you choke it. [00:48:26] Okay, okay. Go back to Luke eight, seven. [00:48:32] And some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up with it. Grew up with a plant that the seed produced but choked it. So this means that. They grew up means that it actually grew into a plant, which means that the soil did steward the seed enough to produce a plant. Okay, so here soil number three, except the seed. If we put this in human terms, someone accepts Jesus. It's two words. [00:49:03] The seed enough that it forms a plant. And that plan looks exactly like the replica of what the seed was reproducing, because it is. But is this person born again? [00:49:22] No, because they do not endure to the end almost. [00:49:27] Not that they don't endure it to the end. There's the key element. What's the defining moment of whether someone's born again? [00:49:37] They don't produce fruit. [00:49:38] It's Christ in you. Right. And the only way to have Christ in you that you have fruit. Where the seed is produced. [00:49:51] You say that it was unfruitful. [00:49:53] That's right. There was no fruit. And now here's a person who accepts Christ. Who manifest Christian type of behavior? Because the fruit grows up. But produces no fruit, which is evidence that Christ was never formed in them. [00:50:17] They did not endure to the end. You had to endure longer for the verb to be formed, that may be one way to describe it. I don't think that's really an accurate statement. But there's something else here. Why was fruit never produced? [00:50:32] Because of the sarin. [00:50:35] What are the odds? Come check it out. What do Soren's come from? [00:50:42] We the ground. [00:50:48] All blind reproduces after its own time. [00:50:51] What is blind going? I'll see. There you go. Okay. [00:50:58] There you go. So here here we have a number three person receives and accepts the seed of the word. But they're also accepting all kinds of other seed and they stoo or the other seed more diligently than they steward the Christ seed. [00:51:19] And by stewarding other seeds, Jesus calls them the cares of the world. There's this staple ness of riches by stewarding those seeds more. This all number three person allows that stewardship to choke out the Christ. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, that's really good. So is it possible to accept Christ? Had the appearance of growing as a Christian. And yet not actually being born again, having Christ formed into you and ultimately going to heaven. Yes, it is. And this is startling and this interesting. [00:52:05] Oh, it's going to get a whole lot better. This is setting the stage. [00:52:12] Now, let's go to soil number four. This is the good soil. This is verse 23. [00:52:19] As for what was done on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands that he indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold and another 60 in another 30. [00:52:36] All right, great. So does the soil accept the seed? How is the seed stewarded? Very well, very well. Is this person first off, what happens with the sea? [00:52:55] Cared for. It's your word. It's helped nurture so that it can grow. [00:53:02] All right. Is this person born again? Yes. And how do we know? Because they bear fruit. Okay. In terms of fruit. Some hundred, some 60, some 30. Notice also. It's not the soil that bears fruit. What bears fruit? The seed is the seed that bears the fruit, not the soil. The soil is merely the womb in which the fruit is produced that produces more seed. The seed producing the fruit. In other words, it's not us, it's the Lord. [00:53:52] Now, we've already been to always been taught. It's Christ living through us. There's nothing we can do of our own. The fruit of the spirit is not what we do. It's Christ in us. This is what's going on. It's the sea that reproduces the fruit. [00:54:06] It's not the soil. We're just the container. [00:54:12] So now as we start to wrap up, I wanted to talk on two things. The first one is Convert's versus Disciple's, because I think this is what is this is kind of where where a lot of this starts to focus in on. I want to set the definition first off, let me ask you if I were to ask you to define the difference between a convert and a disciple, what would you tell me? [00:54:40] A disciple to me is one who has a desire and longing for teaching. [00:54:46] And then. [00:54:48] Finding someone else and seeing that same quality in someone else. [00:54:53] Kind of like a leader, a good leader is going to look for someone who also wants to be a leader. And they're going to raise up that leader. [00:55:01] Right. Let me. [00:55:08] Give a simple definition that that I like to include a convert is going to be someone who accepts Christ right. [00:55:21] But a disciple is going to be someone who follows Christ. And I think there's a difference. [00:55:29] Does that make sense? Absolutely. I was watching this great documentary on the underground Iranian church and they had people from the church talking and everything and sharing, and it was really cool. But one of the guys made a really interesting comment, Converts versus Disciple's. Here's what he says. Disciples for the world and cling to Jesus till he comes. [00:55:57] Converts don't. Disciples are not engage in a culture war. Converts are disciples. Cherish, obey and share the word of God. Converts don't. Disciples choose Jesus over anything and everything else. Converts don't. Converts run when the fire comes, disciples don't mean that cool. So can you see a difference between merely accepting Christ, which is a convert, versus following Christ? Can you see that difference in the four soils? [00:56:35] Sure. Absolutely. Okay. [00:56:38] So the obvious question, but which of those soils are the disciples? [00:56:45] The last one. [00:56:46] Number four, which went to their convert's. [00:56:57] I would say probably number two. It could be three or four years. [00:57:06] So technically, I guess you could say was two, three and four. The converse, because they all accept Christ to a degree. They all received the word with joy, but only soil for is the disciple who actually pursues Christ. So back to my original question. Does everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven? No. Okay, so you change your answer now, right? [00:57:35] Okay. So wrapping up. Let me share what this parable I think teaches us. No one's really kind of cool. [00:57:43] I think there shows that to a degree. Now, these aren't exactly accurate. But we can kind of pull some some things out of this parable shows that there are actually two stages of obtaining eternal life, two stages of the kingdom of heaven within us. [00:58:02] First is the seed is sown and the soul has to accept it. But second, after accepting the soul has to steward, it produces Morsey. And without that stewarding and without the production of fruit. [00:58:21] Which is the seed being reformed in you then? Then your you haven't gone that second stage of stewarding it. Let me show you this also turned to Matthew three eight two three eight. This is John the Baptist. He's talking the Pharisees. And if you remember, John the Baptist comes baptizing with water for forgiveness, basically repentance leading toward forgiveness. A little bit different type baptism than baptism as a new believer. But reading Matthew three eight. [00:58:59] Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. [00:59:03] So now we have fruit again. Do you think this fruit might be similar to the fruit that Jesus is talking about? [00:59:09] Yes. [00:59:11] And then you have bear fruit in keeping with what? [00:59:14] Repentance. [00:59:16] And what was the key message that Jesus came preaching or intent for the Kingdom of God is near. [00:59:23] So we see all these all these same characters keep coming back up and cycling around. [00:59:27] Does that make sense? Yeah. So if we have repented. We will bear fruit if we have not repented. We won't bear fruit. Repentance is a key to bearing fruit. I would say repentance is a key to stewarding the sea. [00:59:47] Right. So when I started this study, I was kind of amazing what I found. And as I started to pursue it further, what's really cool is I start to see this pattern throughout all of scripture, but specifically in the New Testament where this is highlighted. So what we're going to do not on today's call is because we're at the end of the time. But as we go through, I want to start to dissect and open up a lot of these not only the parables, but the epistles and some more things that Jesus says and just kind of show this whole picture of what's going on. And here's to value. So the question is, well, what's so important about this? [01:00:28] Well, obviously, it's important if God puts it in there, but how does it change what we do not want to share? Kind of how it changed for me. But first, let me ask you, do you remember there is a section in the Bible that is called the Great Commission. You remember the great commission. Do you remember the first you know where it is? [01:00:48] I feel like it's. Go go to Matthew. 28 a day. [01:00:58] Well, it is the very end, Matthew, in Revelations is the end of God's word. So you could have the end, right. [01:01:06] The great commission, verse sixteen through twenty. [01:01:11] Looks like somewhere in there. Let's begin with all the authority has been. [01:01:20] Jesus came and said to the disciples, all authority and heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I had commanded you. And they hold. I am with you always to the very end of the age. [01:01:41] Great. So where did go out and share the gospel. Is that right? Go out and evangelize. Yeah. Okay. Now that's different than sharing the gospel. [01:01:56] Make disciples go therefore make disciple. [01:01:59] Yeah. Okay. So you're going to heaven. Is not the reason Jesus came. But it's a part of the kingdom of God. Sharing the gospel is not the great commission, but it's part. Of making disciples. You got to share the gospel to make a disciple. Yeah, that's true. So this is the focus. This is the thing that really hit me as I've come through here. Our focus isn't let's go evangelize. That's important. It's not the focus of what the Lord is called us to do is to make disciples. And the reason it's so important is only the disciples are the ones for Christ has formed in them. It's not enough just to go share the gospel. It's not enough just to quote unquote live as a Christian. We've got to help those people that we are around to steward the seed well, and we have to be careful that we steward the seed well as well. And if we're stewarding our say, well, it will produce fruit and fruit will manifest itself by the fruit dropping off a tree, say, going back in the ground and reproducing. So we're going to see more of this. But anyway, we'll stop there. But before we wrap up the call, any thoughts or observations that are hitting you? [01:03:26] Gosh, as always, just eye opening to see scriptures revealed in a way that you don't necessarily ponder and consider on a regular basis. [01:03:39] I thought it was great. I love the just the analogies between the seed and Jesus and the fruit. And it was really good. It was really good. I enjoyed it. Great. All right. Thank you so much for today. Thank you so much for your expertise. The time again that you put into studying and preparing this message for the listeners. Anything else that you want to share with our listeners before we say goodbye? [01:04:09] Just make sure you listen to. If you're not listening to our podcast, but you're just kind of get this on the Web site. Go to depending on which podcast you're on. Get cellar's calling you what we do for real estate or we have get radical faith, which is just the radical faith podcast by himself. Go back. There's a lot of great content there. And the other thing I would really encourage is there's a lot of stuff here. Don't listen to one time and say, I got it. Go back and really absorb it. Take some time. Pull out your Bible, read and see what you can see the words in print as you go through this and you'll get a lot more out of it. [01:04:49] Yes. Such great wisdom. Such great wisdom. Well, thank you. And we thank you to all of you who are listening. And we hope you all have a blessed day. And we'll see you next time. [01:04:59] Thanks, Beatty. Thank you. Be blessed. Thanks. P066 [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Transcription (was completed by automated process. Please ignore any speech-to-text errors)   [00:00:04] All right. Well, hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Penny and we're so glad that you're here with us today for this next session of Get Sellers Calling You. Beatty Carmichael is the CEO of Master Grabber, the creator of Agent Dominator and one of the top marketing experts in the real estate field. Beatty, I'm really excited about our call today. What do you have for us?   [00:00:27] Well, I'm excited, too. And for those listening, this a quick disclaimer and heads up, we do two types of calls. One focused on growing a real estate business. By the way, we'll be doing more on that in the commercial sector as well. So you have commercial business. We got some really cool things on that. But the other type of topic we cover is on a spiritual nature. We call it radical faith. And it's where we talk about Jesus talking about Jesus offense. You you don't want to listen. Then you are forewarned and you can turn off this episode and come back to the next one. So that's what we're going to be talking about.   [00:01:10] Awesome. I'm so excited.   [00:01:12] Yes. Well, I'm kind of excited about this on this call, too, because this is, again, one of those studies I've done that I thought I'm going down this path and I know the answer. And then I start to search scriptures and I go, Huh? That's not the answer I was really expecting.   [00:01:31] So kind of as a way of an intro, things are not always as they may seem. Okay, well, let me ask you a question. Jesus is up on the cross.   [00:01:44] You remember that. You remember Jesus Christ. Just making sure that Jesus is up on the cross. And the question is, did God forsake him while he was there?   [00:01:57] What do you think? No. No.   [00:02:04] Yes. Yes. Well, yes, because I know that God turned his back on the thing. He wasn't turning his back on Jesus.   [00:02:14] He was turning his back on the sin that was upon Jesus. And Jesus cried out, Why have you forsaken me?   [00:02:23] So I could be both of you. You may be right, because a lot of times there's multiple dimensions and God's kingdom.   [00:02:37] So it's not always linear and black and white. But for the sake of discussion, just kind of go down this path.   [00:02:45] If you had to choose one or the other. Most likely. Did God forsake Jesus while he was on the cross or did God not forsake him? He did not.   [00:02:59] Okay, give me your reasoning behind it. Do you have any scripture to back that up?   [00:03:06] I can't think of any off the top of my head. I'm basing it on just what I know to be the nature and character of God.   [00:03:14] Okay, great. Good God. Good woman. All right. So now Jesus does say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So does that mean that Jesus was wrong?   [00:03:30] No.   [00:03:32] Jesus was right.   [00:03:34] If that's what he was feeling in the moment. We know that Jesus was perfect. So even though sometimes our feelings can lie to us.   [00:03:46] That's a good question. That's a good question.   [00:03:50] It is because a lot of people say, well, God, obviously for Jesus on the cross because Jesus said he did. You actually have a more accurate answer in reasoning behind it than you may realize. So this is where things are not always as they seem. You have to really look deeper underneath the surface and try to understand what's going on. So let me get you real quickly to turn to Psalm 22.   [00:04:22] Let me give you a little background on Psalm 22. This is David in the Spirit, writing about the crucifixion. This is David watching. I'm assuming he's seen it take place or it's a vision, but he is see, he is writing down what the Lord has shown him. Just start reading the beginning of Psalm 22. And I just want to set the stage of what's going on here.   [00:04:54] My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me so far from my cries of anguish? Oh, my God. Okay.   [00:05:06] So Jesus is quoting Psalm 22? Actually, no. David is writing what Jesus says. And so David is actually quoting Jesus as opposed to Jesus quoting David. Does that make sense? Mm hmm. So here we have Jesus saying, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As you read through Song 22, you see all the things about the crucifixion. You see them. They take my clothes. They cast lot from my clothes. They split them among I am pierced my my ribs, stand out, all these things that happen in crucifixion. So we know very clearly this is the crucifixion. But down real quickly to verse 24 and tell me. But first, 24 says was 24.   [00:05:58] He has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help.   [00:06:09] So this is talking about God. And it says that he has not hidden his face from him. Jesus says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?   [00:06:19] And down here, it says that God never forsook and he never hid his face.   [00:06:27] What in the world could be going on in this interesting. Fascinating. Thanks are not always as they seem, are they?   [00:06:36] No, definitely not.   [00:06:37] You got to dig a little bit deeper, especially when you want to really understand what's really going on and how to apply it in your life, how to live in a way that the Lord called us to live and what actually is going on. You've got to dig deeper to tap into a session we just recently did on when bad things happen. Is it God's will? Got some interesting observations there. So let me share it, because this is not the focus of the call. But I thought this was an interesting way to start it. Let me share kind of what's going on.   [00:07:10] Have you ever heard the top concept that thin blinds you from the truth? Scene creates a veil over our eyes. And this is the whole idea of the wedding ceremony. The bride wears a veil and the bridegroom takes the veil off. And now she can see clearly as a as a foreshadowing of the spiritual. Ceremony with Jesus. And where the bride takes the veil of sin that blocks our vision. So when Jesus is on the cross, he became sin. And as soon as he became sin, a veil came over his eyes and he could no longer see the father. My God, my God, why do you forsaken me? David is saying, I'm right here. God never first took you sin blocks. Okay. So a lot of times we all believe what we've been told. But sometimes we don't really know why we believe it. Other times we believe a certain way because we read God's word and it says this and someone else reads that word and they get something totally different out of it. And the question is kind of flood what's right. So I want to move into the topic now because it's a bigger topic. Here's a question.   [00:08:49] Does everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven? In other words, once you've accepted Christ, can you lose that salvation?   [00:09:00] Oh, gosh, that's one of those questions that just gets so there's so much controversy.   [00:09:09] Let's go. Let's go back. Let's go back to the root of the question. Does everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven?   [00:09:16] Yes.   [00:09:18] Why do you believe that?   [00:09:23] Because the Bible says.   [00:09:28] It says, if you believe in the Lord Jesus, he will be saved.   [00:09:34] Is that accepting or believing or are those the same?   [00:09:39] Well, maybe that's the translation I learned.   [00:09:43] So let me let me ask you. Are you absolutely positive? That everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven.   [00:09:56] I have to be honest, I'm not actually positive now that we're doing this call and I'll catch you on a number of things in the past, you're starting to think Beatty may know something. I don't. I'm not going to be quite so positive. Right. Right. Okay. Well, good job. Don't be positive. Okay. Okay.   [00:10:19] So the topic of this series that we're going to do, and it's going to be multi part because it's really threw out all scripture, especially New Testament. And that is the question does do all who accept Christ go to heaven?   [00:10:35] This call is going to be part number one. We're going to lay the foundation and then we're going to start to dissect it. And this isn't for just simply an intellectual pursuit of just saying, here's what scripture say. But really to try to understand. What is God calling us to do and why? And as I've gone through this myself, here's the net result. I've changed my perspective of what's most important. It's really amazing. Okay, just a quick disclaimer. I don't have all the answers. This is one of those topics that you mentioned. Everyone has all kinds of different opinions. Scripture is constantly, consistently true is the question of what are we and how we interpreting and why. So we don't want to share is is what I believe the Lord is directing me in understanding. So I want to talk about some of the controversial versus real quickly. So this kind of tees up why this is such a difficult topic. So let's go to Matthew ten, verse 22.   [00:11:39] Okay. All right.   [00:11:43] By the way, this is this is all these things we're going to go through for passages. And they're all Jesus talking. So go ahead, Matthew, 10 22.   [00:11:52] You will be hated by everyone because of all. But the one who stands firm to the end will be saved, stands firm to the end.   [00:12:02] Okay, that's interesting. Let's use also ESV translation on these. Let's now go to Matthew 24 and we're going to read verses 10 and 13, 10 and 13.   [00:12:21] 24, verse 10 and 13 percent says and then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And then verse 13 says, But the one who endures to the end will be saved.   [00:12:37] And they translates that first verse. And then many will fall away from the face. Okay, here we see. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. Let's now go to mark 13.   [00:12:53] Martin, 13 versus 12 and 13. Let's see what that says.   [00:12:58] All right. Verse twelve. And brother will deliver brother over to death. And the father, his child and the children will rise against parents and have them put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.   [00:13:17] We see that again. The one who endures to the end. Makes you wonder, well, does that mean not all people who accept Christ? Go to heaven because why would Jesus keep talking about enduring to the end? Let's look at one more loop, 21, 17 through 19.   [00:13:42] All right, 17 to 19 says you will be hated by all for my name's sake, but not a hair of your head will perish by your endurance. You will gain your lives.   [00:13:56] There we have it again. Here's the question. When Jesus teaches that you must endure to the end to be saved. Does that mean that some people don't endure to the end?   [00:14:09] Yes, I could see how some people probably give up or decide that I'm done with this. Okay, okay.   [00:14:17] But the fact that Jesus is teaching that you had to endure to the end indicates that there are obviously those who don't endure to the end. Does that make sense? Yes. By the way, here's something else interesting. This was so important, apparently, that God put it in. The scriptures four separate times just by Jesus. We're going to say that this concept is pervasive.   [00:14:43] But four separate times by Jesus.   [00:14:45] If people don't endure to the end, then does that mean that they don't go to heaven?   [00:14:53] I'd like to investigate that a little further.   [00:14:56] Okay, so let me ask this question. Does being Sayed.   [00:15:00] Does that. Men going to heaven. Do you think?   [00:15:05] According to what we just read. No.   [00:15:09] Okay, can you give me some scripture to back up? We're saved in heaven. Don't necessarily go together.   [00:15:18] Well, the ones we just read, Jesus was speaking in reference to being saved and said those who Indore to the end. So three times we read that right.   [00:15:30] So those who who endure to the end will be saved. Can we probably transliterate that? Those who endured to the end will make it to heaven. Probably is just kind of lame, the fact that Jesus is talking about being saved. Going to what we talk about going to heaven. Probably one in the same with that. Would you agree with that?   [00:15:52] Yes, I would.   [00:15:54] Okay. So if Jesus is saying. Or so is Jesus saying that whether or not they endure determines whether or not they are saved?   [00:16:11] That's a very deep thought. I think so. I think that would go hand in hand. Okay, one influences the other.   [00:16:24] Right. So what we're going to find out as we go through it, it's either a determining factor or an indicative factor. It's either the evidence had been saved or they determine that they are to be saved. So we're going to see what the scripture talks about a little bit more. So when Jesus came to Earth, here's another question. What was the main message that he preached? In other words, why did he come to Earth?   [00:16:50] He preached the kingdom of heaven is near. He preached to be safe so that you could go to heaven. That was his message, to believe him to get right there.   [00:17:02] So true. So he never really preaches forgiveness.   [00:17:07] Have you ever noticed that he didn't have to come to Earth for forgiveness because God gave people all through the Old Testament.   [00:17:16] He didn't come to Earth specifically for salvation. You said that on. He came to preach the kingdom of heaven. In fact, this is his common theme. If you can finish the sentence, repent for the kingdom of heaven is near or near here at hand. It's right here in our midst. Okay, so we had this thing called repentance and forgiveness, salvation going to have been saved. All these things are part of the kingdom of God. But what Jesus came to do was much more holistic than just being saved or forgiven. And I think that if we start to then understand what the kingdom of God really means. And understand more about that make more sense. Why? What Jesus talking about enduring to the end really means if we want to understand what Jesus means, the one who endures to the end. We have to go back to his core message that he's always teaching repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. And if we understand the kingdom of God, then we can then figure out what he really means about enduring to the end. Does that hurt? So with that then the question is. When Jesus taught on the kingdom of God, because that's most of what he taught on what was his primary method of teaching about the kingdom of God.   [00:18:52] Do you recall the parable parables? Good job. Okay. So if we want to understand the kingdom of God, let's look at some of the parables, because that's what he teaches through which other parables is the most important in understanding.   [00:19:11] All of the parables. Do you recall which one?   [00:19:15] Oh, gosh. He had so many. The one that's popping out is the seed and the sower. But that might not be the one you're thinking of.   [00:19:28] Did many good jobs go to Mark for verse 13? This is a commentary of Jesus on the parable of the seed in the summer.   [00:19:41] Okay.   [00:19:42] Four, verse 13. And he said to them, do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?   [00:19:53] So here's something here's something real interesting. The parable of the seat in the Sower, I believe I'm correct, is the only parable in all three of the synoptic gospels. That's the same. And it's the only one where Jesus gives a parable and gives the interpretation. In fact, I think it's the only one that he gives the interpretation on. And he says here that if you don't understand this parable, you cannot understand any of the parables because this parable unlocks all the other parable. So this is a pretty important message on understanding the kingdom of God. Makes sense. Yes. Okay, so now let's read into this. Let's go read the parable of the Sower, and we're going to do this in Matthew. Okay. Okay. So, Matthew, 13 versus three through eight.   [00:20:53] All right. And he told them many things in parables saying a sower went out to sow as he sowed some seeds, fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground where they did not have much soil. And immediately they sprang up since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain. Some 100 fold. Some 60, some 30. He who has ears let them hear.   [00:21:37] Very good. So now we have the soil where the seed goes out. And now we're going to replay what Jesus says this means. That's going to be verses 18 through 23.   [00:21:53] Here, then, the parable of the sower, when anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it. The evil one comes and snatches away what has been found in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was shown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately received it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while. And when tribulation or persecutions persecution arises on account of the word immediately, he falls away. As for what was sown amongst thorns, this is the one who hears the word. But the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word. And it proves unfruitful. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands that he indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold and another 60 in another 30.   [00:22:51] All right, great. So now we're going back to the Requestion. Does everyone who accept Christ go to heaven? We say that Jesus says only the one who endures to the end will be saved.   [00:23:05] We now go into this parable. He starts to describe it. So now let's get an understanding of this parable as we go in. So there are several parts about this parable that we need to break down first just to really kind of understand a little bit more. The first one is the seed. Okay, this is the seed and the seed is a key part. Here's the question. What is the seed?   [00:23:33] The word.   [00:23:34] Okay, so, Jesus, the seed is the word, the word of the kingdom. And what is the word Jesus?   [00:23:45] Yeah. Okay, John, one one in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.   [00:23:52] So the seed is Jesus. Right. Okay. Very interesting. So then we have the next. Let's look at the four soils. Okay. What did the soils represent?   [00:24:07] The beginning part where he described it, yes.   [00:24:12] When he's throwing when you're trying to sort out what do the soils represent, there are four types of soil. So what what did they representative of?   [00:24:21] A person's heart, a person's heart. Okay, so four types of heart, four types of people, right. What separates one heart from another? What separates one group of people versus the other group of people?   [00:24:39] The state or the beating of their heart? The state of their heart.   [00:24:45] But less and less narrowed a little bit more. Okay. Okay. I'd like to suggest the stewardship of the seed, which is it represents, to say, the heart, but the state of heart is exemplified and evidenced by how its stewards see. Does that make sense? Okay, so what differentiates one soil from another, one type of person from another is stewardship of the seed. And then if the seed is Jesus and the soil represents the different types of people. What does that mean, that all people receive Jesus?   [00:25:27] No.   [00:25:33] Goes out, the soda goes out and sows the seed. Jesus. Yes. And does the same get sewn on all four soils?   [00:25:47] Yes.   [00:25:49] All four soils receive the seed sown.   [00:25:55] Correct.   [00:25:56] Okay.   [00:25:58] So let me ask the question again. If they did this soil, it's not a trick question. It's a question that.   [00:26:06] We usually don't consider because it doesn't make sense based on what we've been taught. But we have to do is we have to dig deeper than what we've been taught and see what the word says. Because what we've been taught may not be. What the world says, it may be something slightly different. So here's the question at the seat is Jesus and the soul represents people then does that mean that all people receive Jesus? Yes, it does. In fact, Romans, what does it Romans one tells us that everyone has the heart of the law of the Lord written on their hearts already. They see God's law in the skies and in everything. So everyone has received the truth. Jesus says the high priest prayer when he's praying to the Lord of the tables. He says, Die word is truth. God's word is truth. Jesus is the word. Jesus is the seed. And we see truth everywhere in nature that that proclaims God. So everyone has received that seed. But that doesn't mean they've done anything with it. That's the key. So now we've got the seed. We've got the soils. Now we have. Fruit, fruit is really the key message that Jesus is teaching about. And he basically basically says that here's my way of just kind of transliterating a little bit. Only those who produce fruit or are going to be.   [00:27:46] Right, that's basically what we can start to see in his message, and I want to unpack that with fruit.   [00:27:55] Fruit is the key to this parable. Fruit is only found in one soil. Soil is that good soil, the good soil. Okay, great.   [00:28:05] And I want it just for sake of purpose. I'm going to label these soils as soil one, two, three and four soil. One is the path to the rocky soil soil. Three is the thorns and soil for the good soil. And then that way we can just kind of keep keep it simple.   [00:28:23] Okay, so what we had to do is understand what is fruit. So if I were to ask you, what is fruit? This is the kid. This is the key to understanding everything is this fruit? What is it?   [00:28:40] Fruit is what is produced from the seed.   [00:28:47] Very good.   [00:28:49] But what is it that's the prize? What can we call it the result? The seed managed and held and cared for properly.   [00:29:08] All right. All right. We're gonna get there. Let me back up and just kind of bring us into this, because I think this is kind of fun. So seed one of the times another sessions. I was talking about the Bible has been written by one author. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay. Now, that author inspired many men to actually pen that one author's thoughts, but it's all one author, which is God himself. Exactly. So anytime you have a book, you have characters in the book and those characters keep coming up and they always are the characters that they were.   [00:29:54] In other words, if I'm reading a book and let's say, say, a Tom Clancy novel, I used to read those years back and he introduces a guy named Gosh, I forget the guy, but he introduces a couple of guys up front in the novel.   [00:30:13] Then throughout the novel, every time he calls that person up by name. John did this or John did that.   [00:30:19] It's always that person that he introduced and described at the beginning. Does that make sense? Yes. So the character goes throughout. So we see that same thing in the scriptures.   [00:30:31] We see it with fig trees, olive trees. We see it with light, darkness. We see it with soils. We see it with seed. We see all kinds of thing. So the question is, what does seed represent? What is the character of seed? I like to show you something because this is really cool.   [00:30:46] Where does God first introduce his character seed?   [00:30:54] In the Garden of Eden, if I'm not mistaken, a little bit before.   [00:31:00] Oh, you'll have to tell me.   [00:31:05] Let's go to Genesis 111.   [00:31:10] During creation, now, Save was obviously present in the Garden of Eden, but he introduces what it is.   [00:31:19] During creation, Genesis one 11 with 11 and God said, let the earth sprout vegetation plants yielding seeds and fruit trees bearing fruit and which is their seed, each according to its own kind on the earth.   [00:31:36] And it was so seed reproduces after its own time. We used today's technology words that carries all the DNA to reproduce an exact replica of whatever it is, whatever it came from. Does that make sense? Yeah. And then where is seed formed?   [00:32:03] Well. See, far and within the fruit.   [00:32:08] The fruit is the womb of the seed. Interesting, isn't it?   [00:32:15] I mean, we know that it is insane to think of it that way.   [00:32:18] Okay, so this makes sense. A seed is planted. It has to die. Once it dies. It's burst again. Into a new plant after its own kind, as that plant matures, it produces fruit. And inside, the fruit seed is created so that the plant through the fruit can reproduce itself again. Does that. Soun.   [00:33:00] Similar to something else that we would think about in Christian terms. And that's just what Jesus did. He came as a seed of God. Right. The exact replica. He dies and he's planted into the ground, right into the temple. And then when he dies, he becomes born again into a exact replica. And he produces through. Okay. So we see this this pattern of the seed. And the fruit is the womb that causes that seed to produce fruit is in the process of where seed has been reproduced. Making sense? Yes. Okay, so then why does the characteristic of the seed. What is the characteristic of the fruit? It's kind of an aside, but it kind of ties into this. If I were to say, what is the fruit of? Can you finish that sentence?   [00:34:13] What's it called fruit of? Prudent spirit.   [00:34:19] So let's look at that real quick. This is Galatians five. 22, 23. But I want you to do it in The Passion translation on this one, because I think this song articulates what it's really saying.   [00:34:33] And you said the Galicians five, five, 22 and 23.   [00:34:50] All right, here we go. 22 and 23 says the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you is Divine Love in all its varied expressions.   [00:35:04] Such a perfect moment.   [00:35:07] A lot of times people say the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace.   [00:35:12] But I think what the term love is, the fruit of the spirit is singular, not plural. There's not multiple fruits. There's one. That's why I love this translation that the fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you. Is Divine Love in all its varied expressions. So now we're talking about love. Where else do you recall what the Bible says about love? We're talking about. This is Paul talking about different things and he said about love.   [00:35:43] First Corinthians 13, I think. Yeah. The love. We call it the love chapter in our house.   [00:35:49] Okay, good. All right. And it says that above all.   [00:35:54] First, love is, love is, and in fact, there's here's something else, it says Faith, hope and love abide. But the greatest of these is love. What are you saying? There is that of everything he's been talking about, faith, hope and love. By that means that they are eternal.   [00:36:17] They never go away. Gifts go away. But faith, hope and love abide. But of all of those, the greatest of them is love. This is what Jimmy. This is who God is, representative. Mostly by the character. Bye bye, love. That's what this is talking about. The fruit produced by the Holy Spirit within you is Divine Love in all its varied expressions. Okay, so now I'll let you finish the passage from there. It's now going to define and describe what that Divine Love, how that Divine Love manifests itself.   [00:36:55] Okay, joy that overflows peace, that some patience that endures kindness and action, a life full of virtue, faith that prevails, gentleness of heart and strength of spirit never set the law above these qualities. They are meant to be limitless.   [00:37:18] All right. So now let's go back. See this Jesus? That's what Jesus says is the word of God, right in the. Fruit is where the seed is formed. And that means really that seed, the fruit, is Jesus being formed in you and producing through you. Does that make sense? Yes. OK. So that's really what I believe the fruit is talking about, is that Jesus has been formed in you. So here's a question. If Jesus is formed in you, would you act like Jesus? We should be informed and you are going to carry the characteristics and the more he's formed and living through, you carry those characteristics. What are some of the things that Jesus did that maybe if he was formed in you, you would likely do to.   [00:38:14] Oh, gosh. I mean, just naming things he did heal the sick, raise the dead. He helped all those that were oppressed. He lost. I mean, he loved first. And everything else was just an overflow of the love.   [00:38:33] He went preaching the message, the kingdom of God. Okay. Yeah. All this.   [00:38:38] All these things. Peace, patience, kindness.   [00:38:43] So that is evidence of the fruit. The fruit is Jesus being formed. But evidence of the fruit being formed into you is a manifestation of all these things that Jesus did. Bring a little bit more clarity, right? OK. So here's the big question. If Jesus has never formed Inju, are you born again and go to heaven?   [00:39:12] Tom.   [00:39:15] According to all this. No.   [00:39:21] It's not us that are righteous. It's Jesus, in a sense, righteous, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay.   [00:39:29] Romans side, I think, says that the righteous fulfillment of the law, the righteous requirement of the law has been fulfilled. And you.   [00:39:36] And then we can connect the dots because Christ is in you.   [00:39:41] Who would it be safe to say that only those in soil number four. Hey, bear fruit. Which has been formed in them are the ones who are truly born again, are saved and go to heaven. Does that make sense, do you say? Yes. So now let's look at the four soils. Real quick. No one is the past. This is verse four, so read that again. Let's talk about that.   [00:40:16] And that was go back to that book when we were in Matthew 20.   [00:40:26] Excuse me, Matthew, 13, 13.   [00:40:33] I'm going to switch translations. I'll go back to that.   [00:40:35] I actually actually I got. I think this is versus it's not verse four that I want you to read is going to be verse probably 18 or 19.   [00:40:45] Let me go back. Yes.   [00:40:47] Okay. 18 and 19. Okay. So 19, when anyone hears the word of the kingdom does not understand it. The evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path.   [00:41:02] I know that.   [00:41:03] So that's the one that's sown along the path.   [00:41:06] Okay, let's see.   [00:41:13] So that person has heard the word of the kingdom. And they do not understand it.   [00:41:18] Right. So how did they steward the seed? Or did they stay where the stayed at all?   [00:41:26] They didn't. They didn't do it because it just says that they did not understand it. And then the evil one came and snatched it away. So that leads me to believe they didn't pursue understanding what had been spoken to them.   [00:41:40] Got you. So no wonder the path does not seem see deceit at all. It's rejected. Correct. Since it doesn't stay where the seed. Does the soil accept the seed? So there are two things you've got to accept it and you, Stuart. So did the soil ever accept the seed?   [00:42:07] No.   [00:42:08] No. Since the seed represents Christ, does that mean that this person did not accept Christ? That's correct. And is this person born again? No. No. And how do we know that?   [00:42:26] Because it says.   [00:42:29] The evil one snatched it away. What was sewn in their heart? So Jesus was taken out from their heart. They can't be born again.   [00:42:38] That's right. Okay, perfect. So now we have soul. No one does not accept the seed, does not therefore steward the seed. The say never forms itself in them through fruit. They are not born again. They don't go to heaven. Okay, so now let's look at soil number two, the rocky ground. This is going to be versus 20 through 21.   [00:43:02] As for what was sown on Iraqi ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately received it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself but indoors for a while. And when tribulation or persecution persecution arises on account of the word, he immediately falls away.   [00:43:24] So does the soil accept the seed?   [00:43:32] A little bit, right? It tries to, but actually I think it's a little bit a little bit deeper. Let's go back to it and look and says yet he has no root in himself. Do you see that? If there is no.   [00:43:50] Yes, go ahead.   [00:43:51] If there's if there's no route, then did the soil ever accept it?   [00:43:58] Go in the soil, right?   [00:44:00] Yes. One head down.   [00:44:04] Have you ever seen trees or plants grow on the side of a cliff where it's just wrong? Yes. Yes. Is there any. There's no soil, but they can still grow by putting roots down a little bit around the rocks. Does that make sense? So the soil does accept the seed. And we know that because there's no root and with no root, there's no acceptance. How does the soil steward the seed?   [00:44:36] Well, it says as soon as he heard it, he received it with joy. Right. But because there's no route. There's nothing to anchor it when the hard things come, he falls away. He gives up.   [00:44:52] Notice it says that he has no root in himself, but endures for a while. What are those passages that Jesus says?   [00:45:00] What does it say about endurance to endure until the end?   [00:45:05] So this guy only endures for a while, but not to the end.   [00:45:09] Okay. So the soil doesn't accept the seed. The soil stewards, the seed only poorly. It's enough that it grew up, got excited. But it did not endure to the end. Here's the question. Is this person born again?   [00:45:30] Now, how do we know that?   [00:45:35] Well, because they had no route. And because they chose to give up almost OK.   [00:45:42] So those are part of it. But the ultimate technical answers because there's no fruit.   [00:45:50] Because fruit is where Christ is formed in you. And there's no fruit. Therefore, there is no Christ formed in you. And only of Christ is formed. And you are truly born again. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So no one. Not a Christian. So, number two, they receive it with joy. A lot of people you share the gospel. They immediately pray the center's prayer type of thing. And you may see some life change. They're all excited, but they don't endure.   [00:46:21] That wasn't a what we would call in our Christian, these terms a true salvation. Christ was never formed in them. Now let's look at soil number three. This is the one with the thorns. And this is going to be verse 22.   [00:46:35] As for what was done along with thorns, this is the one who hears the word. But the cares of the world and deceitfulness of riches choke the word. And it proved unfruitful.   [00:46:49] Turn also real quick, I want to show you one other passage on this that it gives a little bit more information. Luke Eighty-seven. It's the same Jesus describing this, but he gives Luke eight, seven, gives one more piece of information. Let's see if you can find that piece of information.   [00:47:06] And some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. So this one. Thorns are growing up with the.   [00:47:17] Which means the seed is growing. Right. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Okay. So now let's ask our questions, our diagnostic questions on this. Does the soil accept the seed?   [00:47:30] Yes. Yes.   [00:47:32] Okay. Now, remember, the soil represents people, represents your heart. The seed represents Jesus. So this soil accepts Jesus.   [00:47:44] Yes.   [00:47:45] Follow me. Okay. Okay, so the soil accepts Jesus because the soil accepts the seed.   [00:47:56] How does the soil steward the seed? How well is that seed stewarded? Well, it does it does the soil steward the seat at all. Let's start with their.   [00:48:15] No.   [00:48:17] Maybe a little bit in the beginning, because it says when the cares of the world and deceitfulness come and you choke it.   [00:48:26] Okay, okay. Go back to Luke eight, seven.   [00:48:32] And some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up with it. Grew up with a plant that the seed produced but choked it. So this means that. They grew up means that it actually grew into a plant, which means that the soil did steward the seed enough to produce a plant. Okay, so here soil number three, except the seed. If we put this in human terms, someone accepts Jesus. It's two words.   [00:49:03] The seed enough that it forms a plant. And that plan looks exactly like the replica of what the seed was reproducing, because it is. But is this person born again?   [00:49:22] No, because they do not endure to the end almost.   [00:49:27] Not that they don't endure it to the end. There's the key element. What's the defining moment of whether someone's born again?   [00:49:37] They don't produce fruit.   [00:49:38] It's Christ in you. Right. And the only way to have Christ in you that you have fruit. Where the seed is produced.   [00:49:51] You say that it was unfruitful.   [00:49:53] That's right. There was no fruit. And now here's a person who accepts Christ. Who manifest Christian type of behavior? Because the fruit grows up. But produces no fruit, which is evidence that Christ was never formed in them.   [00:50:17] They did not endure to the end. You had to endure longer for the verb to be formed, that may be one way to describe it. I don't think that's really an accurate statement. But there's something else here. Why was fruit never produced?   [00:50:32] Because of the sarin.   [00:50:35] What are the odds? Come check it out. What do Soren's come from?   [00:50:42] We the ground.   [00:50:48] All blind reproduces after its own time.   [00:50:51] What is blind going? I'll see. There you go. Okay.   [00:50:58] There you go. So here here we have a number three person receives and accepts the seed of the word. But they're also accepting all kinds of other seed and they stoo or the other seed more diligently than they steward the Christ seed.   [00:51:19] And by stewarding other seeds, Jesus calls them the cares of the world. There's this staple ness of riches by stewarding those seeds more. This all number three person allows that stewardship to choke out the Christ. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, that's really good. So is it possible to accept Christ? Had the appearance of growing as a Christian. And yet not actually being born again, having Christ formed into you and ultimately going to heaven. Yes, it is. And this is startling and this interesting.   [00:52:05] Oh, it's going to get a whole lot better. This is setting the stage.   [00:52:12] Now, let's go to soil number four. This is the good soil. This is verse 23.   [00:52:19] As for what was done on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands that he indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold and another 60 in another 30.   [00:52:36] All right, great. So does the soil accept the seed? How is the seed stewarded? Very well, very well. Is this person first off, what happens with the sea?   [00:52:55] Cared for. It's your word. It's helped nurture so that it can grow.   [00:53:02] All right. Is this person born again? Yes. And how do we know? Because they bear fruit. Okay. In terms of fruit. Some hundred, some 60, some 30. Notice also. It's not the soil that bears fruit. What bears fruit? The seed is the seed that bears the fruit, not the soil. The soil is merely the womb in which the fruit is produced that produces more seed. The seed producing the fruit. In other words, it's not us, it's the Lord.   [00:53:52] Now, we've already been to always been taught. It's Christ living through us. There's nothing we can do of our own. The fruit of the spirit is not what we do. It's Christ in us. This is what's going on. It's the sea that reproduces the fruit.   [00:54:06] It's not the soil. We're just the container.   [00:54:12] So now as we start to wrap up, I wanted to talk on two things. The first one is Convert's versus Disciple's, because I think this is what is this is kind of where where a lot of this starts to focus in on. I want to set the definition first off, let me ask you if I were to ask you to define the difference between a convert and a disciple, what would you tell me?   [00:54:40] A disciple to me is one who has a desire and longing for teaching.   [00:54:46] And then.   [00:54:48] Finding someone else and seeing that same quality in someone else.   [00:54:53] Kind of like a leader, a good leader is going to look for someone who also wants to be a leader. And they're going to raise up that leader.   [00:55:01] Right. Let me.   [00:55:08] Give a simple definition that that I like to include a convert is going to be someone who accepts Christ right.   [00:55:21] But a disciple is going to be someone who follows Christ. And I think there's a difference.   [00:55:29] Does that make sense? Absolutely. I was watching this great documentary on the underground Iranian church and they had people from the church talking and everything and sharing, and it was really cool. But one of the guys made a really interesting comment, Converts versus Disciple's. Here's what he says. Disciples for the world and cling to Jesus till he comes.   [00:55:57] Converts don't. Disciples are not engage in a culture war. Converts are disciples. Cherish, obey and share the word of God. Converts don't. Disciples choose Jesus over anything and everything else. Converts don't. Converts run when the fire comes, disciples don't mean that cool. So can you see a difference between merely accepting Christ, which is a convert, versus following Christ? Can you see that difference in the four soils?   [00:56:35] Sure. Absolutely. Okay.   [00:56:38] So the obvious question, but which of those soils are the disciples?   [00:56:45] The last one.   [00:56:46] Number four, which went to their convert's.   [00:56:57] I would say probably number two. It could be three or four years.   [00:57:06] So technically, I guess you could say was two, three and four. The converse, because they all accept Christ to a degree. They all received the word with joy, but only soil for is the disciple who actually pursues Christ. So back to my original question. Does everyone who accepts Christ go to heaven? No. Okay, so you change your answer now, right?   [00:57:35] Okay. So wrapping up. Let me share what this parable I think teaches us. No one's really kind of cool.   [00:57:43] I think there shows that to a degree. Now, these aren't exactly accurate. But we can kind of pull some some things out of this parable shows that there are actually two stages of obtaining eternal life, two stages of the kingdom of heaven within us.   [00:58:02] First is the seed is sown and the soul has to accept it. But second, after accepting the soul has to steward, it produces Morsey. And without that stewarding and without the production of fruit.   [00:58:21] Which is the seed being reformed in you then? Then your you haven't gone that second stage of stewarding it. Let me show you this also turned to Matthew three eight two three eight. This is John the Baptist. He's talking the Pharisees. And if you remember, John the Baptist comes baptizing with water for forgiveness, basically repentance leading toward forgiveness. A little bit different type baptism than baptism as a new believer. But reading Matthew three eight.   [00:58:59] Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.   [00:59:03] So now we have fruit again. Do you think this fruit might be similar to the fruit that Jesus is talking about?   [00:59:09] Yes.   [00:59:11] And then you have bear fruit in keeping with what?   [00:59:14] Repentance.   [00:59:16] And what was the key message that Jesus came preaching or intent for the Kingdom of God is near.   [00:59:23] So we see all these all these same characters keep coming back up and cycling around.   [00:59:27] Does that make sense? Yeah. So if we have repented. We will bear fruit if we have not repented. We won't bear fruit. Repentance is a key to bearing fruit. I would say repentance is a key to stewarding the sea.   [00:59:47] Right. So when I started this study, I was kind of amazing what I found. And as I started to pursue it further, what's really cool is I start to see this pattern throughout all of scripture, but specifically in the New Testament where this is highlighted. So what we're going to do not on today's call is because we're at the end of the time. But as we go through, I want to start to dissect and open up a lot of these not only the parables, but the epistles and some more things that Jesus says and just kind of show this whole picture of what's going on. And here's to value. So the question is, well, what's so important about this?   [01:00:28] Well, obviously, it's important if God puts it in there, but how does it change what we do not want to share? Kind of how it changed for me. But first, let me ask you, do you remember there is a section in the Bible that is called the Great Commission. You remember the great commission. Do you remember the first you know where it is?   [01:00:48] I feel like it's. Go go to Matthew. 28 a day.   [01:00:58] Well, it is the very end, Matthew, in Revelations is the end of God's word. So you could have the end, right.   [01:01:06] The great commission, verse sixteen through twenty.   [01:01:11] Looks like somewhere in there. Let's begin with all the authority has been.   [01:01:20] Jesus came and said to the disciples, all authority and heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I had commanded you. And they hold. I am with you always to the very end of the age.   [01:01:41] Great. So where did go out and share the gospel. Is that right? Go out and evangelize. Yeah. Okay. Now that's different than sharing the gospel.   [01:01:56] Make disciples go therefore make disciple.   [01:01:59] Yeah. Okay. So you're going to heaven. Is not the reason Jesus came. But it's a part of the kingdom of God. Sharing the gospel is not the great commission, but it's part. Of making disciples. You got to share the gospel to make a disciple. Yeah, that's true. So this is the focus. This is the thing that really hit me as I've come through here. Our focus isn't let's go evangelize. That's important. It's not the focus of what the Lord is called us to do is to make disciples. And the reason it's so important is only the disciples are the ones for Christ has formed in them. It's not enough just to go share the gospel. It's not enough just to quote unquote live as a Christian. We've got to help those people that we are around to steward the seed well, and we have to be careful that we steward the seed well as well. And if we're stewarding our say, well, it will produce fruit and fruit will manifest itself by the fruit dropping off a tree, say, going back in the ground and reproducing. So we're going to see more of this. But anyway, we'll stop there. But before we wrap up the call, any thoughts or observations that are hitting you?   [01:03:26] Gosh, as always, just eye opening to see scriptures revealed in a way that you don't necessarily ponder and consider on a regular basis.   [01:03:39] I thought it was great. I love the just the analogies between the seed and Jesus and the fruit. And it was really good. It was really good. I enjoyed it. Great. All right. Thank you so much for today. Thank you so much for your expertise. The time again that you put into studying and preparing this message for the listeners. Anything else that you want to share with our listeners before we say goodbye?   [01:04:09] Just make sure you listen to. If you're not listening to our podcast, but you're just kind of get this on the Web site. Go to depending on which podcast you're on. Get cellar's calling you what we do for real estate or we have get radical faith, which is just the radical faith podcast by himself. Go back. There's a lot of great content there. And the other thing I would really encourage is there's a lot of stuff here. Don't listen to one time and say, I got it. Go back and really absorb it. Take some time. Pull out your Bible, read and see what you can see the words in print as you go through this and you'll get a lot more out of it.   [01:04:49] Yes. Such great wisdom. Such great wisdom. Well, thank you. And we thank you to all of you who are listening. And we hope you all have a blessed day. And we'll see you next time.   [01:04:59] Thanks, Beatty. Thank you. Be blessed. Thanks.   P022

It's Jesus by Church on the Trail

The Lord sent me to get Jadakiss --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/aei-leon/support

In our series "The Greatest Story: The Unexpected Narrative of Jesus" we explore some of the major and minor stories of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and discover some of the unexpected ways we encounter the love of Jesus. In this sermon Pastor Abraham launches our series with the story of the Samaritan Woman in John 4.

We live in a very individualized culture where much revolves around the self. This can creep into our relationship with God, where Christians can often end up thinking that all that matters is 'me and Jesus.' However, the Bible tells us a far greater story. In his immeasurable grace, God is calling a people to himself; a family. No, it's not 'me and Jesus.' It's Jesus and us.Support the show (https://www.gracecity.ca/giving)

Shout-out to Abraham! It's Jesus, and he's in Seattle - he's leading the Pride parade, he's marching in the Women's March, he's testifying in front of Seattle City Council, and he is hanging out with the Better Left crew as our special guest this episode. Why is this Muslim man dressed as Jesus leading Pride Parades and engaging directly with the braying hate-donkeys haunting the public events of Hellward bound heathens? Did it get dangerous? Was it remarkable? A.. miracle? Well, we find out, and you can too! Give the show a listen, then be sure to take your own pilgrimage to Jamil Suleman's Facebook page and follow him on Twitter- you'll thank yourself, and Jesus, later. https://www.facebook.com/jamilsuleman https://twitter.com/JamilSuleman Intro & Outro Artist: Jamil Suleman & Spekulation Title: Curry N' A Hurry License: With permission from artists Promoted by: https://soundcloud.com/jamilsuleman/curry-na-hurry Discussion Segue: Artist: Don Jaymor Song: Streetlyfe License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Promoted by: https://www.tribeofnoise.com/viewMusic.php?fileID=70125

Not long ago I was at the coffee shop and someone came up to me and said, "Do you ever frown? You're always smiling!" I was thankful that they thought that about me, because wherever I go I want my face, my life and my spirit to communicate that there is Someone greater living in me. Faith. When we get up on Monday morning and go to work, our workplace needs us to have life-giving faith. If our churches are truly going to win their cities for Christ, they must have life-giving faith. It has to be alive and real, so people experience that faith. It can't be just a statement, it has to be reality, and if it's going to be reality in our church, faith has to be growing in our heart. We can't afford to have weak faith if we want to win our cities for Christ. There is Only One God Every Christian should continually looking for those who are searching. Once we've found them, we need to help them move from searcher to inquirer. This happens when the searcher meets someone whose life is filled with faith. It's not what you say with your mouth, but what they see in your life. When they see the Spirit of God alive in you, and that your faith isn't religious they will ask, "What is different about you." And we will answer, "It's Jesus living in me!" Hopefully then we can help them moving from inquiring to discovery. If we are going be life giving Christians, where faith is not just in our heads, but lived out everyday from our hearts, we have to know the Living God. There is only one true God! If our faith is going to be strong an life-giving; we have to know Him, his character so our faith is anchored in Him and who He is. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving us a review. This helps the Foundational podcast reach more listeners.  Be sure to tell a friend about the Foundational blog and podcast, and share with them about the free Bible Reading Challenge journal they will receive when they subscribe to receive my newsletter!   More Content About Evangelism: Get my discipleship manuals today and start becoming a disciple for Jesus Christ! Discovering Jesus: A Discipleship Manual (Discipleship Series) (Volume 1)The Joy of Becoming Like Jesus: A Discipleship Manual - Discipleship 101 (Discipleship Series) (Volume 2)Becoming Ambassadors for Christ: A Discipleship Manual - Discipleship 102 (Discipleship Series) (Volume 3)

Happiness is....... Philippians 4:10-13 If you are content you're happy. 1. Praise God no matter what. 2. Choose to be happy & never stop learning to be happy 3. Discover the secret of true happiness. It's Jesus!

All right, guys! If you're watching the vide podcast, then you might notice that Cool Beans Comedy Producer Cory Craig has a few stitches these days on his face from playing basketball. Needless to say, Cory announced his retirement from recreational basketball immediately following what's come to be known as the "incident." But stitches won't stop Coirey Craig from bringing you an incredible Cool Beans Comedy podcast this week with Jesus Trejo, Francisco Ramos and Fabrizio Copano. They may be individually hilarious, but they talk about joining forces for their incredible show, "Trifecta Comedy." It's a brand new, Spanish-speaking comedy brand that gives a voice to a less served demographic. They are amazing. We hear about the origin of Trifecta, their upcoming shows and plans for the future. You are going to love it! Check out Trifecta Comedy for all of their upcoming shows.

In our concluding message for The Gospel of Mark, we are encouraged to go and preach the word. It's Jesus instruction for us and we have His Holy Spirit living with us. We only must go and share with those around us.

In our concluding message for The Gospel of Mark, we are encouraged to go and preach the word. It's Jesus instruction for us and we have His Holy Spirit living with us. We only must go and share with those around us.

In our concluding message for The Gospel of Mark, we are encouraged to go and preach the word. It's Jesus instruction for us and we have His Holy Spirit living with us. We only must go and share with those around us.

In our concluding message for The Gospel of Mark, we are encouraged to go and preach the word. It's Jesus instruction for us and we have His Holy Spirit living with us. We only must go and share with those around us.

The laymen welcome Jesus A.k.a Tyrant Dominus and his friend Liz to the show. A moment of Dankness is paid to Kieth Flint the late front man of The Prodigy. Shame files are Shared, this time not only McWonderBeast exposes his underbelly. A new tier to the Celebrity fist fights is introduced in the wake of the monumental Jordan Peele v.s. Donald Glover match. You can find all of Jesus's connections using the following link. https://linktr.ee/tyrantdominus Hey wanna know what I ate breakfast ask us...... AskaLayman@gmail.com

Today we're studying Luke 14:12-14. Here Jesus urges us to make Kingdom investments. Let's talk about it!

Thanks for listening to the City Life Lansing Podcast. Loving you and the city, one life at a time. Visit us online at citylifelansing.com. You can also catch us on all social media @citylifelansing. #YouBelongHere #LoveTheCity

Matthew 1:1-17

Epiphany Lutheran Message is part of the Sunday and Wednesday worship services of Epiphany Lutheran Church. We believe when the Bible says all, it truly means ALL because the gifts of God are free. For more info go to epiphanysuwanee.org.

Everyone has the same amount of time in a day, yet we all manage our time differently and many of us may have lost a healthy perspective of and use of our time. In this episode, we discuss time and how if we value our time correctly then we can be more effective for the ministry God has for our marriages. We talk about how much time we have or how little we actually have. How do we perceive the value of our time? How can we see our time differently, how can we use it more effectively? Do we need to slow down? and most importantly we must ask ourselves what God's word says about time. -- Take our 31-day marriage prayer challenge today and join the 1000's of couples who have done it. https://shop.marriageaftergod.com/products/thirty-one-prayers-bundle -- FOR MORE MARRIAGE ENCOURAGEMENT https://marriageaftergod.com https://instagram.com/marriageaftergod SHOP MARRIAGE RESOURCES https://shop.marriageaftergod.com FOR WIVES https://unveiledwife.com https://facebook.com/unveiledwife FOR HUSBANDS https://husbandrevolution.com https://facebook.com/HusbandRevolution READ: Hey we're Aaron and Jennifer Smith with Marriage After God. Helping you cultivate an extraordinary marriage. And today we're gonna talk about making time count. Hey before we get started we just want to invite you as usual to subscribe to our channel so you get notified every time we upload a new episode. Also we love to hear from you guys so be sure to leave us a comment and let us know what stood out to you in this weeks episode. So this episode is about time. About how much time we have, and how little of it we have and how we perceive time, and how we perceive the value of time. This has been a conversation that we've had a few times in our life and it's always around situations where we feel overwhelmed or like failures because we've dropped the ball over here, we've dropped the ball over there, we have all these things that we need to be doing, wanna be doing, can't be doing, can be doing. And I think it's a good conversation for marriages, especially ones that are chasing after God together to have together so that we can get a good perspective on our time. I think it's a good topic too just in today's culture. I think that the moment you probably said time people are thinking wait don't talk about it 'cause it's gonna pass me by. It's fleeting and everybody knows that, and yet our culture tries to cram in so much and tell us to seize the day type thing. So, there's a lot of people out there trying to do a lot of things and sometimes it can feel overwhelming or like we can't breathe, and so taking that moment to just stop and evaluate our time, it's important. Taking what moment though? I know, I know it doesn't exist. When you think about your life all of us use words like oh I'm busy, I've got a lot going on. They're filler words and they're easy ways of not having to explain everything that's going on in our life. But, just thinking about time and being busy, I also think about one of the last episodes we've published about social media and I'm thinking like oh but I find plenty of time to scroll. That's true. So, it's really I think something that has gotten out of whack. Yeah. We've lost our perception of time. The value of it. And I think our purpose of guarding it, I think especially as husbands and wives and parents, and I don't know I just feel like maybe no one's talking about this. But, we need to be guarding our time. I feel like it's a really important thing to evaluate and consider often maybe regularly and we're just not doing it. We're not being encouraged to do it. Yeah, well I think we don't guard it is because we don't know the value of it. I've used that word a few times now and I'm just thinking about how we value other things. Money, we know money's worth something because it could buy certain things and it can do certain things for us. So, we put it in banks and we save it up and we store it and we use it and we try to be wise with it if we can. Money has a value. Our cars have values because they do things for us, and we have all these value metrics for other things, but I feel like all of history people valued time much differently than we do in our current culture. I feel like time now it's even though we say oh I don't have enough of it or there's only so little that we just throw it away. We throw it away hours on social media, video games. So wasted, yeah. It's wasted on other things that are important we waste our time on. So maybe if we had the correct value of it, if we recognize like I wrote some notes here that just said we only have 24 hours in a day. Yeah. And, a quarter of that or more needs to go to sleeping. What a waste. Right? You totally want sleep when you die. Yeah, sleep when you die. You know for people like that live in California, we used to live. I used to commute two and a half to four hours a day or more depending on how bad the traffic was. If there was an accident, I was in traffic all night. Or a fire, which have been going on in California. So, a lot of our time spent in a car. A lot of our time spent at work. A lot of our time spent on the toilet. In a shower, if you were to just take all of the things that we do to just live, the time gets real... Like what we have left is not much. So, I think if we were to just realize man, time's valuable. Do you recognize time as being valuable? I'm starting to. And then now we're talking about it. Yeah, no I know. I think that it's a message that God's been trying to get through to my heart and I just haven't stopped to take the time to really like hear him on this. But, this morning I was actually driving to a friends house, I was gonna drop her off some dinner and spend some time with our kids playing and on the way out there you know when you're driving you see everything kind of pass by, like literally. Really fast. Yeah, physically. Which is a really good picture. It is a really good picture for how time flies but I don't know maybe it was just the Lord speaking to my heart but I just felt like I've been going, going, going, and I really need to slow down more so what I specifically heard is like in my family life, and in my home management, and things that I do at home. I need to be slower. I don't know, I would like to explain a little bit more, but that was the brief message. What's awesome was God was kind of speaking to you through the Holy Spirit while you were driving and this was before I told you what our episode was gonna be on. Yeah, I asked you to text me so that on the way home I could be thinking about whatever the topic was gonna be. And you were already thinking about time, which is why we're bringing it up, it's just something that we need to recognize in our own life and how to capture the time that we do have. We call this making time count, and we always say we have to make time. Like, oh I just need to make time for getting healthy. I just need to make time for the Word of God. I just need to make time for playing with my son. We actually can't make any time. Yeah, I was just gonna say that, we can't make it. It's a pretty funny statement, 'cause we can't make any time. What we can do is sacrifice other things that we spend our time on. That's the only way we can make time. That little statement I said capturing time makes better sense. Oh I need to capture time for the Word of God. I need to capture time for spending time with my wife. Because we all have 24 hours. Yeah. And we all only have so many years and minutes. You actually helped me a few years ago kind of understand this idea that we're only given so much and at the beginning of the episode you started out by sharing how sometimes you recognize this struggle with time when we are faced with like failure and just struggles in our family life. Yeah. I was struggling a few years ago with feeling like I can't do it all, but I want to do it all. We were in the middle of writing your first traditionally published book. Yep we were writing The Unveiled Wife. And we were moving, and we had our first son and just trying to being parents. Yeah. Just a lot of stuff going on in our life. So, we do what we normally do and what we like to do and we took a drive, we talk about that a lot. We drove up to the mountains. We took like a 45 minute drive and I'm just kind of spewing out this heart issue I'm having with I wanna do all of these things and I just feel like I can't. How am I suppose to do this? And I think that the last thing we ended up talking about was working out. And I just need this time to do this, carve it out. Yeah. And what did you say? Well, I remember the conversation like, it wasn't just you, I was thinking through these things too but you were like I gotta write this book, I gotta edit this book, I wanna be a good Mom, how to do I be a good Mom? Yeah, I'm nursing all the time. And I wanna get back in shape, 'cause we had the baby and you're like I wanna get exercising. And then you were also talking about our social media, 'cause that's a big part of our ministry. You're like I want it to look better. How do I reach out to people through comments? How do I answer all those messages? It's a lot. And I remember telling you that you can't. Yeah, it was really actually annoying the way that you communicated it 'cause you're so blunt about it. I don't know if I was mean about it. You weren't mean, I just didn't want to hear that. I just didn't want to hear that I couldn't fit it all in. I was trying to be encouraging. No, it was encouraging. But it didn't come off encouraging. No, no, no it was encouraging, I just didn't want to hear that I don't have enough time. Like, nobody wants to hear that. And what I went into I remember in that car ride, I was just telling you you only have 24 hours in a day, and you can't work all 24 hours. Yeah. Man if we didn't have to sleep, we would have so much more time, that's insane. I said you are physically limited. You literally, every single person in the entire world that's ever existed, doesn't matter how strong you are, is limited. Yeah. In our physical abilities. No one can pick up a bus. Some people might be able to pull a bus, but we're limited in our physical abilities. We're limited in our mental abilities. We're limited in our financial abilities. We're limited in our time, we're limited in every single way possible. We are finite creatures. Not infinite like God is. You gave me this illustration where you put your hands up. I remember you putting your hands up almost like you're grabbing a bunch of things in your hands and you said you know, because we're limited beings, we can only do so much with the time that we're given, and if there's something over there that you want to do, you have to let go of something else in order to do it. Yeah. And I remember that, just the idea and imagery that you gave me of putting your hands up and showing me how much I can fit in my hands really stood out to me 'cause I could see it. It was almost like oh, well that makes sense. I think I specifically gave you that because you were talking about fitness. And I said hey if you wanna spend 45 minutes exercising, you might have to spend 45 minutes left sleeping. Yeah. Or you might have to go to bed later. So you had to sacrifice something over here to do that other thing. 'Cause if you kept everything the same, you weren't gonna be able to accomplish all the other things that you wanted. So, it's a good illustration to have. It's just really taking all of our time and energy and ability and just realizing how much can be done with it. But, I think it's more than that, because that's what the world currently wants us to do is just fill our time with everything. But, it just doesn't happen. You know we have some examples from our own life and from just the worlds perspective of what it looks like. What this time management thing looks like and how we have to sacrifice. So, the idea that we have so much time and ability and we're limited is first of all just a good place to remember. A good thing to remember that we are limited. Like I told you that one day, and like we tell each other often still. We can't do everything, but you know what happens, how this practically plays out especially when we are looking at other peoples live and we're like how do they do that? You get emailed sometimes and they say how do you do everything? Yeah. And they don't realize that we don't do everything. Sometimes our sinks full of dishes. Right, because you can't do it all. You have to sacrifice one thing for another. I haven't gotten the oil change on my car yet and it's like three months past the oil change due date. We've never gone that far. Not that far, it's been getting pretty close lately. But like I hadn't done that yet because I was filling up all my time with other things. And so we just, we let go of one thing to grab another. And what this might look like, and maybe the people listening know someone who has done stuff like this, or they themselves are. But like, you know people that are super, super successful. It's rare that they're successful in every area of their life, because they can't be. And this is what you were struggling with, this is what many people struggle with. How can I be this amazing business person and this amazing mother and an amazing wife, and an amazing godly woman or husband or man. And then also be a awesome father. And all of these things equally. We just can't. It's not physically possible, we don't have enough in us to do that. And so you see someone who is super successful and you think oh man, I think I want that kind of success. Well, you gotta calculate what it took for them to do that. They might have sacrificed their marriage. And we've seen that a lot. Lets think about ministry. We've seen pastors they're amazing pastors, and they're teaching their congregations and they loose their family over it. I don't personally think that is a good balance. I would rather be a okay pastor and have an awesome family life. But I think that's what we need to evaluate. What are we chasing? What are trying to hold onto or take on and do with our limited time, limited abilities, limited resources. And are we pursuing the right things? Are we using our time wisely? I think those examples that you gave or more of the severe ones that you see. The big, yeah we see those ones. Really big ones that can be really detrimental, but I think that if our time is mismanaged, even in the little things, it can really kind of backfire within our own families. And I think social media does play a role in the comparison trap of wanting to try and do it all. It's hard because you see someone really good at this and then you see someone really good at that, and you're piecing all these things together to make this perfect person that can literally do everything and you're trying to fulfill that. I know, you bring up you're feed and you're like man this feed looks awesome. But all those other people that are really good at those individual things aren't trying to do everything. They're just doing the one thing that they're good at and you're seeing that and adding it to the list of things that you wanna try and do and accomplish. I think that's a good example. Our curated feeds of all the people we follow and we turn it into one perfect person. And you're like I wanna be that. How do we make our house beautiful and work all the time and go travel the world and it just doesn't exist. Here's the reality, if you're gonna go travel you're probably going to have laundry all over your bed because when you go to pack you have to do all the laundry and make sure it's clean before you go. So when you get back, there's gonna be a lot of laundry everywhere, right? That's just like a simple example. Or if you're traveling all the time you can't have a home. Yeah. And so you want this beautiful home and you want this beautiful travel life. And these are big pictures things from a few people we follow. They're just examples that we're throwing out there. But, the people listening, they have their own things that they're thinking of. They're like oh man yeah, I've been wanting to this, and I've been wanting to that and I just feel like I can't. And how does everyone else do it? Okay, I gotta tell this one story. So, my friend was getting into sourdough and I thought this is so cool and I so wanna do this. And so I start putting my time and energy into feeding this starter that she gave me, and for the first couple weeks, it was really great. It was like, you put it in a dark place for awhile and let it grow. We had bread every night. Oh my goodness. It was pretty awesome. It was amazing, and it tasted so good. Yeah. But after about two months of me trying to scramble and figure out how this sourdough things works 'cause I never done it before, I realized that I was letting certain things around the house go, or I'd have to rush out to get more flour because I was in the middle of baking something and I was not managing my time well just because I was so focused on trying to do this sourdough thing. And that was one little thing. It was just one little thing. But, it absorbed a lot of your time throughout almost every day for like a couple weeks Yeah, and I had to just let it go thinking okay I was learning and I learned this process and it was really cool but I'm gonna have to shelve this for a little bit and move on and figure out how it can fit into my schedule like in a normal way and not just at a frenzy. 'Cause that's what it felt like. I just recently went through a season of we have this home and there's all these little things that we've been wanting to do that need to get done. We have our businesses. And our home life, and I just had this list of all these things that need to be done, and I would chase after one of them and I realized I would put so much energy into the one thing and it took up mental space and it took up emotional space and actual physical time. And I started telling myself okay, I have to either take one day and finish all of these things or realize some of these things, nothing's going to change in our life if I did not do it. It doesn't get done. I'm just thinking about the rims on our car are super dirty, and a friend of mine just keeps saying oh all you need to do is acid wash them and they'll probably come looking beautiful, and every time I see him I'm thinking I gotta do that thing. It literally won't affect anything in our life at all, and so I just tell myself I don't need to do that. Nope. I don't need to do that. It's useless, it doesn't matter. Maybe one day if I have this extra day and time and it just perfectly aligns in the moon and stars all... I'll do it maybe. So, I'm just trying to practice. And that was like one little example. I'm trying to practice it in a lot of little areas. And then also recognizing where we waste time out of all of our things. Do you have areas in real life that you waste time? The bread thing was one example, but I feel like there was a benefit. I don't like I was wasting time there 'cause I was learning a new skill and it was really important to me. It started getting to waste time though. You thought it was gonna be this thing on the side. I could just fit into everything else and it became a thing. Yeah, I would say that I don't feel like I necessarily waste a lot of my time because I use it and I'm with the kids the majority of the day, but I think that I could definitely manage it better so that I was more efficient with my time. Right. That's another thing, how efficient are we with the time that we do have. Yeah, I feel you asked me that just kind of on the spot and I'd have to seriously contemplate how I'm... Well I asked you because I have one specifically. Oh go ahead. Based off of that previous episode about social media, I waste time on social media. Oh, yeah. When I do it, there's the conviction I get from the Holy Spirit when I'm doing it. I'm like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and I'm like why am I not using this time that I'm scrolling to read the Word of God? I could be scrolling through the Word of God on my phone. I have it on my phone. I'm always a big advocate of using my physical Bible, and we always tell couples to just be in the Word of God physically. But, I waste so much time when I could be in this more. Yeah. I have this desire to know the Word of God, and yet I do things that are contrary to that desire. Like knowing social media really well. It's literally this fruitful. So that's one thing I waste my time. It's something that I'm actively trying to change in my life. That's good. So when I feel that prompting of like why am I scrolling, I'll go to my Bible app and I'll read a Proverb, I'll read a Psalm. But I'm sure there's other areas of my life I waste time too. So when we were talking about sacrificing one thing for another to make sure that we're prioritizing the things that we want. Wasting time and things like that. How does that affect the family or relationships when we mismanage our time? Why is it important to value our time? Like, what's the why? Well, again, we've been everything to steward. Our time is a gift. God's grace is on you every morning, but the fact that we get a morning and that the sun rises is a gift from God, and he desires that our life and our resources and our energy and our time be used to please Him and to serve Him and to minister to the world and to our families and to our neighbors for him. So I think when we mismanage our time it's just being a bad Steward with something He's given us. Yeah. And again, it's probably I'm say this, time is the most valuable asset we have. 'Cause you can't make more of it. That's true. We're only running out of it. And so much changes within time. Such a short period of time. So, everybody always tells you kids grow up fast, and it's just so true. I feel like our kids are growing up so fast, and when we were considering this topic for today's episode, I was just thinking about my drive this morning on my way out to my friends house, and how everything is going so fast, and how I feel like I just need to slow down. The reason that I felt that prompting was because these are just little examples but Elliot's got these shoes that he got frustrated over 'cause he wants to learn how to tie them but he can't. And I have three other kids who need to get ready and get in the car and make sure everyone's got shoes on and instead of sitting there, teaching my kid how to tie his shoe with a gentle spirit, I'm like rushing everyone out the door. Yeah, I'm like hurry up everybody, come on let's go. We gotta be here at a certain time. We gotta make this happen because I'm trying to fit so much into my day that I don't have time to sit there and help you. I don't have time to walk you through this process right now. That doesn't happen everyday, but when it does happen it's like I just missed that opportunity to minister to my child or to engage with them. I was telling you Aaron, going to the park and just being with them in a slow pace in my own heart so that we can engage with them in nature. And talk about why the leaves are falling off the trees right now. And how God created everything and all those little moments for walking in the Spirit. One of them is patience. I think that was a good point, I was just connecting is was you sitting with Elliot. Elliot has the same amount of time also, and what we're doing is we're being generous with our time. Or are we being hoarders of our time? Like, I'm gonna use it only for myself. 'Cause I do the same thing. I'm like hurry get in the car, hurry get in the car, hurry buckle up, like it's always like I don't even know why I'm rushing them. We're not even trying to be somewhere. I know. They're learning something about us we probably shouldn't be telling. We are hurried, and I think everyone does that. I think it's because we know our times limited, but the same time we're not managing our time well. If we just managed our time better, we would stop hurrying everything and everyone and stop to engage with them and be present with them. And I think that goes down to understanding the value of time, because if we valued our time we'd realize we're not gonna have very many moments with our son learning how to tie his shoes, or our daughter learning how to buckle in, or our littlest son learning how to drink from a cup. All these little things that we may not value correctly, 'cause it takes time. And I would be careful to even for those listening to justify the way that you organize your time because like this morning when I was taking dinner over to a friends house who needed dinner, that's ministering and that could be looked at as a good thing and yet rushing everyone out the door to get there by a certain time, it just kinda jolted everybody and I didn't need to do that. I could have done it either in peace or said I can't do that today. Well, we actually talked about this. Imagine if you or I or together we did that everyday, we wouldn't be able to minister to our children, minister to each other. Yeah there wouldn't be enough time for that. Minister to other neighbors. So, you can't just look at ministering, well I need to do that because that's the most important thing to do with my time. Because, there's other ministering that needs to be done. We have to spread out what God's given us. And it actually makes me think of a scripture we read to our kids this morning during family bible time. This is probably what prompted everything. It might be. And it's in Luke 5, and I'm gonna read a few verses just so you have the context. It's Jesus right after he heals a leper. It says, in verse 15, but now even more the report about him went abroad, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. And you think oh my gosh. Jesus was healing people, his fame spreading. He just healed this man with leprosy, and now all these people are coming and flocking to him. And you're like oh Jesus is gonna be touching people, healing people, and this is what it says. It says, but he would withdraw to desolate places to pray. You know? Jesus, the Savior, the perfect one. Emmanuel, God with us. All these people are coming to be healed and he's like I'm gonna go pray. Yeah. Even Jesus didn't just fill his time with all of these things that we thought would be the most important thing 'cause Jesus knew how to prioritize his time, he knew what he was there, and he's like I'm gonna go pray. I'm gonna go recharge. I'm gonna go be alone in desolate places, places like that have nothing around, no one around. In darkness, and he's gonna go and just be with God. And what's funny is we say we're busy, our time's filled up. We have all these things going on. How often do we just go into desolate places and pray? Go into our dark room, get on our knees. I know that I don't. And God's called us to do that. And so I was just pointing out, I wrote here, even Jesus would quiet himself and pray. Yeah, and I feel like those opportunities to stop and pray and spend time with the Lord are just as valuable when you're actually engaging with the children, praying for them. Like being a Father who goes before the Lord for them to ask for protection, to ask for good health, to ask for maturity and to ask for all of these things on their behalf is just as valuable as spending time with them. And so I feel like this needs to be prioritized. Yeah, and it goes too how do we value our time? Yeah. What are we doing with our time? Looking into our lives, and asking the Holy Spirit, and saying Holy Spirit show me areas that I'm wasting your time that you've given me. This is all your time, all the time that we have in a day is God's. How are we wastin it? And that could be filling it with good things. Yeah. Oh we're doing this, we're doing homeschool. We're going over here, we're going over there, instead of maybe God is like I want you to dedicate some of your time to me. Just me, just being with me. Being in my Word, just being quiet. We're trying to teach our daughter to be quiet and to be still right now, and are we doing that? Are we quiet and still? And letting God have some of our time. Letting him have a lot of our time. So, I think that's really good, just recognizing that even things that we call ministry could be out of whack if we do too much of it. If it's just all that and we're not even doing other things that God's called us to do. Man, time is a weird thing. Okay, so we titled this episode Making Time Count, and for the benefit of those listening and ourselves, how can we make time count? Like as a marriage after God, as husbands and wives who want to fulfill the Lords will and purpose in their life. What does time have to do with it? Well, like I said, it's our most valuable asset, is the time that we have in a day, in our life. Ecclesiastes, Solomon says our life is like a breath. Which should give us some real perspective on how much time we actually have. It's fleeting, it's like boom gone. Here today, gone tomorrow. So recognizing that our times short. Paul says that a lot, recognize the times, that our time is drawing near, that the Lord's returning. Just understand there's an urgency for just guiding our families and ministering in our families and to our children. In ministering, guiding our neighbors. And doing the things that God's asked us to do now when we have time. Today's the day of salvation. Today is the day, don't worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow has enough worries of its own. Today is the day. We get those words all the time 'cause God's like no, no, today. You have today, and it's the only thing you have. You're not promised tomorrow. So, I think an urgency, a recognition of the value of our time. How does that stand with you? Do you feel the urgency in our own life? I do feel the urgency for us to just recognize the value of what we have and that it's a gift and that the time that I have with you is a gift. I was actually just thinking about this also this morning. Not to get too in to detail or anything. But, the time that I have with you to be intimate that time is fleeting and I was just thinking as we grow older with each other, am I going to regret the time that I didn't take advantage of being with you? I know, when we were younger and healthier? Yeah, and I was being convicted on that. I felt like the Lord was just saying you need to initiate more. You need to be engaged more, and I already am starting to regret the time that I haven't been for whatever reason. And so, and I've enjoyed the times that we have been. So, I think that same way with our children, or as a family as a whole you know. The times that we have been slow and present and just laughing and playing. It's so peaceful, and I love that. Time that we get to spend with our family, with our children. So, I think making that a priority and I think that the thing that it's gonna require though I know for me is that when I feel that hurried spirit and when the words come out of my mouth hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, I need to stop and remember to walk in the spirit to be patient, and to choose to slow down. To choose to be present, to choose to say no even if that on the other side is really good. Whatever that other choice is for the sake of whatever other ministry I'm suppose to be doing. It's almost like being diligent to spend the time verses wasting it. Like money, oh I'm throwing it away or how much do I got to pay for that? Yeah how am I investing with my time? How is that being invested? Yeah. So thinking about our time in those terms, those quantities, those units. I will say that a marriage after God does that well. And we need to do it better. We need to do it better, and I wanna challenge those listening to start today. To evaluate your time, evaluate what things you're saying yes to, what things you're saying no to, and what things you're sacrificing for that grab of whatever it is you wanna try and fit into your schedule. And, to know that time is valuable. So I wanna end with a little bit of scripture, and then maybe we can give them a little bit of advice on how to look at our time. And, it's in Ephesians 5 and I'll just start in verse 15. And it says look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And so just make the best use of the time, and this is in reference to how we once were in darkness and now we're in light. And it's saying so, make the best use of your time. So, let's be godly in how we look at our time. Let's ask God how he views our time and would like us to use it. What are some of the little tips that we have on how we can look at our time and how our listeners can? Well I think the priority that you should look at would be is your marriage in balance? Are you spending that time with your spouse? Are you cultivating that relationship? Is time spent well there? Yeah, is time spent well there, because if that's not happening, that balance isn't right. Same, I would say, goes for your kids. If you're not engaging with them, if you're not spending quality time with them. Discipling them. Discipling them, teaching them, loving on them. Just being present with them without your phone or without friends around or without distractions. Yeah. I would say those are the key important things that I would recommend people stopping to evaluate. So, I just wanna remind them, the reason we're bringing all this up in the first place is 'cause we wanna encourage you guys. We wanna encourage you to have peace, to recognize that you are not able to do everything. So, that's the little bit of advice I wanna give is that they can't do everything. To not be worried that they can't accomplish everything and to recognize that they're not meant to. They're not meant to accomplish everything. My encouragement too would be to watch out for that comparison trap where maybe you look at your friends lives or maybe you know that neighbor across the street, or maybe on Instagram, someone on social media. And you're taking bits and pieces from all these different people and you're accumulating this list of the things you need to be capable of doing, the ideals within the home, and all of the little things that you think that you have to accomplish and just remember that not one person can do it all. And I would say take that list, and lay it at the Lord's feet, and say Lord... What's important. Yeah, what do you want me to do? Yeah. We should always be asking this, like Jesus did, we should go off in prayer. We say Lord, I have all these vision, dreams, ideas as a marriage we have these things we wanna do. What do you wanna us to do? What's valuable to you? What do you care about? And what should we pursue, what should we sacrifice so that we can do these things that you don't want us to do, and what should we sacrifice that you don't want us to do? That's good. And just be asking the Lord what he wants, like that's what he wants us to do. And I think too something that we're getting better at is just looking at our lives and saying how are we managing our time well? What are we doing that's beneficial to the whole family and to the ministry that we've been called to. And what things are sucking our time and being able to cut it out, yeah. And so we wanted to have this conversation with you all because it's something that we constantly are having conversations with. We forget and we get into this season of like we can't do everything. Yeah. We have all these visions, we wanna do this, we wanna do that. We have all these books we wanna write, we wanna post, we wanna do these videos. Things that fit with what we're doing. But, we can't do 'cause we're trying to also have a godly marriage. We're trying to also have a godly family and to disciple our children and to have a decently clean house and to have our cars not fall apart and have our home not fall apart and have our lives not fall apart. So, just recognizing that it's okay to not be able to accomplish everything. And if you're feeling that overwhelmingness, if you're feeling like you're hurrying through life, we would just say just stop today and go do as Jesus did. Find a desolate place, a dark quiet place. Escape everything, and just spend time with the Lord to be able to evaluate all of this and maybe you'll come out feeling a little bit more refreshed. Yeah, definitely do it as a couple. Yeah. Find that time. Maybe spend 30 minutes before bed and after everyone's asleep, no one needs you and get into prayer with each other. Say, let's ask the Lord how we can rest in him, how we can wait on him. As the Bible tells him, wait on the Lord and he will renew our strength. And so, we hope this encouraged you. We hope that it sparked some awesome conversation about how you value time. I know we're gonna still talk about this. Yeah. And we also love to hear from you if you wanna leave a comment in the box below. So, we as usual, we thank you for joining us. We hope this blessed you, and we hope to see you next week. [Aaron Smith] Did you enjoy today's show? Find many more encouraging stories and resources at marriageaftergod.com and let us help you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

We're going to wrestle with some very easy words from Jesus today --- DO. NOT. JUDGE.  Or you too will be judged.  It's Jesus's teaching on the Sermon on the Mount and I joked last week about wanting an easy sermon. . . .one easy message from the Sermon on the Mount. . .and I think this is it.  Here's why.  Because when we talk about being judgmental, all of us have somebody in our mind who should be here today, but none of us think it's us.  Judgmentalism is always a problem for somebody else, but very rarely do you meet somebody who says, "I'm just one of the most judgmental people you will ever meet in your life!"  We don't say that.  We say, "I think I'm right.  I'm not judgmental, I'm just right. And I'm right the majority of the time and I don't mind telling people that I am right!"   So this gently---from somebody who's been wrestling with judgmentalism this week---you might fall into the same category that I found that I fell into that I'm a secret judger.  I'm judgmental.  I don't lead with it.  I cover it pretty well most of the time, but when it comes down to it, I'm judgmental.  Here's a few things that I'm judgmental about:  I am judgmental of you if you are a Yankees fan.  Or if you're a Patriots fan. {Bye, Felicia.}  If you think that cats are better than dogs, repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand!  If you don't like In 'n Out Burger, I don't have a place in my heart for you...  

Paul has been making it clear to the Galatians that we are saved y grace alone. It's not what we've done that saves us - It's Jesus alone. Now Paul is going to start to deal with the objections - and there are some good ones. This morning we'll look at the question of whether being saved by grace alone means that we can sin all we want.Support the show (https://pushpay.com/g/hillsidechgr?src=hpp)

It's Jesus vs Jesus, Waffles vs Samurai's, and Putin vs The World... or at least, it will be. Wonder what Trump would have to say about all this? Probably build a wall across the Alaskan coastline.

Click here to link directly to the audio file.**********I have spent the better part of this year talking about how we add to the plan God instituted when it comes to who we are. It is easy to think that it is Jesus plus success. We look to Jesus plus holiness when it comes to walking out this life with God. We seek after Jesus plus purpose to find meaning in this world. We yearn for Jesus plus our comfortable life as proof that God loves us in life changing ways.Anything we add to the fact that Jesus did it all for us become stumbling blocks when it comes to walking out our victor status. This is the case with our identity as God's Child. It is just as true when it comes to our ability to relate to this God that made us. When it comes to who we are, and who this God is in our lives, it is a Jesus plus nothing strategy that makes victor living something we can experience no matter what our lives look like.I have a friend who has suffered a moral failure. His entire world is crumbling around him because of the sinful things he has been doing that have come to light. Right now this friend is battling the natural thoughts that it is Jesus plus getting his life back into order. In other words, this friend is being told that until he gets this mess cleaned up, he isn't worthy of much in the Christian world. That's a lie from Satan that I don't think the Christian Church is too good at recognizing.Many of his Christian friends have abandoned this fallen man. Some are even advocating that others leave him high and dry as well. I totally get their anger and frustration at the craziness of this situation. I'm angry too. What I don't think they can see is that they are living a Jesus plus something kind of life that just isn't part of what I see the good news of Jesus is to be all about.I think this is why Christians have been accused of shooting our wounded at times. You see, this man who has fallen is wounded. It is my guess that he has been so for quite a while. He has been living a Jesus plus something kind of life by allowing sinful coping mechanisms to help him deal with the feelings that something is missing in his life. That emptiness in this friend's life that led to sinful coping mechanisms are in us all. It is when we turn to things of this world to help deal with the pain of feeling that emptiness in our lives that we let victim thinking take over in victimizing ways.It is much easier for us to just pretend that everything is OK. I have to look as holy as my other friends in the church seem to be. I can't share how unholy I feel at times because that might make the fragile identity I've worked so hard to build and maintain collapse in ways I just can stand. I pretend it is Jesus plus nothing but let my coping mechanisms be the plus that dulls the pain of loneliness and shame that are too deep to share. If I were to share them there is a good chance I'd be shot! Not literally, but figuratively. I'd be rejected. I'd be labeled. I'd be sidelined. I'd be judged and sentenced in ways the church has been way to quick to do to too many of its own.You see, even in the aftermath of this friend's sin being uncovered, God still sees him as blameless and without fault. I know how shocking this sounds, but it is true. Jesus died for ALL our sins. This includes the sin of friends that betray us in the right here and the right now. That's why I can say with confidence, that for my friend who is disgraced by sin, it is Jesus plus nothing. It isn't Jesus plus repentance. It isn't Jesus plus restoration. It isn't Jesus plus reconciliation. It is simply Jesus that makes it possible for this man to walk as the victor I know him to be in spite of the consequences of the failures he has lived out in his life.This doesn't condone what he has done to bring such disgrace on him and his family. What he has done is so completely wrong! This friend will face serious, and potentially irreparable, consequences due to his actions. But, for us to treat him with such disdain is a sin in of itself. It is telling this friend and the world that it is Jesus plus a perfect life that is required to be the victor God calls us to be. I'm sorry, that just isn't something that the Bible supports. Praise God it isn't because we all would be doomed to victim thinking if it was.There is nothing wrong with being angry at my friend as a result of his actions. There isn't anything incorrect with being frustrated to the point of needing to take a break from relating with this fallen man. Maybe that's what this man needs right now - time alone with God. But expecting something other than what God expects is adding to the powerful message of Jesus Christ in ways that I just can't be a part of.This begs the question, "What does God expect?" Take a look at today's Bible reading with me now and let's see if we can't see some of what God expects from us.Thank God! Pray to him by name!    Tell everyone you meet what he has done!Sing him songs, belt out hymns,    translate his wonders into music!Honor his holy name with Hallelujahs,    you who seek God. Live a happy life!Keep your eyes open for God, watch for his works;    be alert for signs of his presence.Remember the world of wonders he has made,    his miracles, and the verdicts he’s rendered Psalm 105:1-5 (MSG)I have to be honest with you. There are plenty of verses in the Bible that speak to obeying God's laws and keeping our lives pure that could be taken as what God expects of us. Of course God wants us to walk with Him in purity and honesty. What we too often do is make these self focused actions be what it takes to make relationship with Him something we can attain to. That's a failed way of living that Jesus came to replace.Think of it this way. If your relationship with your spouse or your child was dependent on them doing everything you expect them to do perfectly and without question, do you think you'd be in relationship with those people right now? There is no way! Our spouse and our kids are just like us. They are prone to failure. They are prone to going in their own direction. This fact makes our works based strategy so completely useless when it comes to the foundation for relating to one another in any meaningful and long-term way.Same goes with God. Our reading today points to something that can be so hard to define. Love is the basis from which we are to be in relationship with this God and with others. We are to look for the works of love God performs in our lives. We are to share those works of love with one another. Why? So that we all will be better able to let doing take a back seat to being when it comes to who we are. Love is to be the foundation of a Jesus plus nothing kind of life that makes us victors at every turn.My friend who has fallen did so because he failed to see God's love in his life. That makes him no different than you and than me. We are lousy at seeing the love God has for us. That's why we add so much to the Jesus plus nothing equation. When we are in that place where we doubt the love God has for us we can be driven to do some pretty victimizing things as a result of our victim thinking fueled ways.Those friends of this fallen man that are rejecting him are failing to see God's love just as completely as my fallen friend. The sad reality is that they are leaving as wide a wake of victims in their failure as this sinful man has wound up leaving in his life. When we add to Jesus, anything in this world, the results aren't something God is all that pleased for us to be a part of in this life.It's Jesus plus nothing. That's it. That's all we have when it comes to who we are. That's all we have when it comes to who this God is in our lives. The troubles we face can easily be traced back to adding something to the Jesus message. You are a victor because of what Jesus did for you on the cross. Stop adding to that amazing sacrifice and live in the power of who you are as God's Child today.

David Wood tells us his story of how he was radically saved and changed by Jesus in prison. Once a psychopathic atheist, now an on fire Christian! CBN.com  

If you are seeking contentmemnt in life it's no secret, It's JESUS. Lets listen to him. GOD JESUS Love Satisfaction Greed Wisdom just a few of the things covered in this Sermon.

It has begun.  And, no, I am not talking about Advent.  I am talking about the non-stop screenings of those syrupy, sentimental Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel.  I am talking about the Disney portrayals of Happy Holidays where there is joy and happiness forever after.  I am talking about Madison Avenue advertisers telling us what Christmas should look like and what we need to have and do to make this an absolutely perfect Christmas.  I am talking about the TV specials and bill boards and radio ads that give us a distorted understanding of Christmas and a bogus version of what Christmas is all about.  I am talking about all the ways media and culture place before us an idealized version of Christmas.  We see depicted in all of these settings ideal relationships, ideal children, ideal homes and holiday gatherings, idyllic Christmas dinners where all is bliss and where everyone is all smiles and all is perfection.  And, as we look at all of this, I am talking about our tendency to seek out and try to pursue such ideals only to discover that our lives and our experiences never quite measure up!     When talking about this search for the idyllic, theologian David Lose writes: I suspect our longing for ideals is rooted in the desire to improve, to be always prepared to see potential, a vision for how something could be better. But this admirable, and no doubt evolutionarily productive trait can easily turn aspiration into envy and devolve from a determination to improve to grasping for an ideal that, no matter how unrealistic, nevertheless undermines the reality with which we’ve been blessed. And that, I think, is the greatest danger of idealized pictures – whether painted by Rockwell, created by Madison Avenue advertisers, or concocted in our own imaginations: they lead us to see what we have – and often who we are – as insufficient, unworthy, unimportant. So, on this first Sunday of Advent, as we look at our gospel reading from Mark, I think we are given an opportunity to begin this season in a different, maybe even healthier way.  We are called back to reality as it is. Initially, the 13th chapter of the gospel of Mark is frightening and chilling to read.  And, while it has sometimes been interpreted as a prediction of the future to frighten future generations, we must look at the historical context and think about what was happening when it was written.  Mark 13 is NOT a prediction about the future.  This writing from Mark follows a long tradition of apocalyptic literature and it is all about providing comforting words to people as they faced their present life and present experience.  Mark’s words describe what his readers had already seen their brothers and sisters in Christ experience.  Written around 70 CE, Mark is writing to a community of people who were facing horrific situations. Christians were being dragged before local authorities, sometimes by members of their own family.  They lived in fear.  War was on the horizon and, in fact, already happening as they experienced the Jewish Revolt of 66-70 CE, a war that brought the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.  For these early Christians, it felt as if the world had ended, and in some very real ways, it had ended. You see, when people are experiencing fear and going through great pain, you’ve got to acknowledge that pain, that grief, the seriousness of the obstacles that stand before you and not bury it or cover it up by simply saying, “Don’t panic, everything will be ok.”  So, Mark tells these early Christians: Yes, there is serious pain in the world, in your community. There are wars and rumors of wars. There's strife within families, and even within the family of faith, those called to be one in Christ. And God's name is profaned, an abomination to those for whom God's name is the name of one who feeds the hungry, lifts up the lowly, and frees the prisoner.  So, when you see these horrible things happening, don't think it's a sign that the kingdom of God Jesus promised is late in coming or has been derailed.  We don't know the day or hour, but we know that God is faithful, and Jesus' resurrection from the dead is a sign to us as it was to Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and our own wounded communities: Jesus is coming, and God's kingdom, inaugurated with Jesus' ministry, is being revealed and finding fulfillment. (Sarah Dylan)   Friends, this same word is Good News for us. There is serious pain in our world.  There are wars and rumors of wars.  There is strife within our families and even the family of faith.  God’s name is regularly profaned and used as a political prop to assert power over the powerless — even by those who claim to be Christian as they twist what it means to be a follower of Christ by enforcing policies that take away food from the hungry, push the lowly even further down, and imprison people instead of setting people free.  But, we know something that they don't seem to realize: the person we call Lord is none other than Jesus of Nazareth, who taught and healed, who welcomed the outcast and broke bread with anyone willing to eat with him. It's Jesus, whose way of life and manner of death underscored what his words taught:  love your enemies.  He truly lived this every day of his life and we are also called to live it every day of our lives.  When we know Jesus, the Jesus of the gospels, we know that God is love, and love drives out all fear.   The writer of Mark’s gospel is not pointing us to a future apocalyptic event, but rather a very present one in which Christ’s death and resurrection change absolutely everything we know.  For once and for all, in Christ’s death and resurrection, Jesus suffers all that the world and empire and death have to throw at him…and is raised to new life and nothing will ever be the same again!  And, that includes our present lives and our present situations. So, get ready!  Jesus is here and Jesus is coming!  Do not be afraid!  Stay awake and be alert!  God comes to us now and is still entering into our lives in ways that align with God’s coming in the vulnerability of a baby in a manger and a man dying on a cross.  God comes to us now as we embrace all those we consider “other.”  God comes to us now as we collect food for the hungry in the apartments across the street.  God comes to us now as we collect warm clothing for the people at Loaves & Fishes.  God comes to us now as we work to offer a hope and future to these wonderful young people from Samaritas who are joining us today.  God comes to us now, as we are, in our vulnerability, in our messed-up family lives, in our deep brokenness, in our imperfections, telling us we are deeply loved as we are.  We do not need to seek the ideal.  We do not need to work so hard to measure up.  In the person of Jesus, God is pulling back the curtain of false hopes and perfect ideals in order to reveal a very present reality, the reality about God’s commitment to enter into and redeem our lives and world just as they are.  Yes, life is messy and there is so much that is not right in this world.  But, newness is on the way, a newness we can trust.  So, as we begin this Advent, stay awake and be aware of the many ways Christ appears in the present.  Stay alert to see where Christ arrives, breaking through time and space to be present in our lives and the lives of others. Christ is arriving now, in this present moment, choosing to meet us in our messed-up-ness, meeting us as we are, loving us as we are and redeeming us as we are, right here and right now, right before our very eyes.

Pastor Doug continues the series It's Jesus with a transformational message on the story of Lazarus in John chapter 11. Speaking on the act of leaving your grave clothes behind, Pastor Doug encourages listeners to leave the old behind and step into the new. 

Pastor Doug continues the series "It's Jesus" with a message centered around the healing and testimony of the blind man in John chapter 9. This powerful message unpacks the journey of the blind man Jesus healed, and the many trials his testimony faced- encouraging listeners to carry our testimonies the same way.    

In the first message of the series "It's Jesus", Pastor Doug dives into the gospel of John and speaks on the man Jesus healed in John 5 at the pool of Bethesda. Powerful and encouraging, this message shows you are never forgotten, and that Jesus came for you.

Show Notes One developer is attempting to archive the entirety of Miiverse. (http://bit.ly/2j5kdaw) (Update) Shadow of War DLC honours developer who passed away. (http://bit.ly/2j2IHkw) Pokémon Boss Thought The Switch Was Going To Be A Failure. (http://bit.ly/2j2ILkg) Steam's Haphazard Sex Games Policies Hit Another Game. (http://bit.ly/2j4GuoN) W.T.F This trailer for the Chuck Tingle game is going to pound you in the butt. (http://bit.ly/2j50cRl) Jesus Kicks Ass In New 2D Fighting Game. (http://bit.ly/2j5QgXF) 227 Artists Remade An Episode Of Super Mario World's Cartoon. (http://bit.ly/2j4Zvrp) http://kotaku.com/1798696067

TUESDAY EVENING 08/ 9/2016, JUST SUCH A TIME AS THIS, JOIN ME WON'T YOU! WE ARE GOING TO TALK ABOUT US AND OUR FRIENDS AFTER OUR GREAT AND WONDERFUL SALVATION.  "OH GLORY WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED" SEE YA'LL  RIGHT HERE, BRING YOUR BIBLE,  SHALOM, EVANGELIST LACEY KAY GREEN www.laceykayministries.org PRAY  WHOLE WIDE WORLD PRAY FOR THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD  ***NOTE ONE NIGHT TIME CHANGE*** 

This is a bible teaching from the Gospel According to Mark 5:25-29. This teaching is about using your God given Faith to see mountains moved in your life. We explain how you use this Faith by trusting in Jesus to see this power work for you.

The truth is out there. (It's Jesus).

Subscribe for daily devotions.Daily Devotional Preaching with Peter Timothy Cooper.Your questions, suggestions or personal contact requests are welcome. BROADCASTING ON Flame Radio:1521 MEDIUM WAVE in the North West of EnglandContact Peter:peter@dailydevotionalpreaching.com or Twitter @withpetercooperWebsite: http://www.dailydevotionalpreaching.comFlame Christian Radio: 1521 MW in the North West of EnglandPeter Timothy Cooper is a vicar, preacher and author.

Subscribe for daily devotions.Daily Devotional Preaching with Peter Timothy Cooper.Your questions, suggestions or personal contact requests are welcome. BROADCASTING ON Flame Radio:1521 MEDIUM WAVE in the North West of EnglandContact Peter:peter@dailydevotionalpreaching.com or Twitter @withpetercooperWebsite: http://www.dailydevotionalpreaching.comFlame Christian Radio: 1521 MW in the North West of EnglandPeter Timothy Cooper is a vicar, preacher and author.

This week we move to Anger as the thing that is attacking our hearts and messing up our relationship with God and with others. We diagnose the problem today, and will give the solution next week! (hint: It's Jesus!)

Message for 09-23-2012 - "Living Easy - It's Jesus" by Steve Craig

Bishop Willimon was a guest on Day1's radio broadcast and presented the sermon "How You Will Know If It's Jesus?"

It's Jesus preached by Dennis Hermerding from Ephesians 5:3-5.

It's Jesus preached by Dennis Hermerding from Ephesians 5:3-5.

It's Jesus preached by Dennis Hermerding from Ephesians 5:3-5.