Podcasts about only jesus christ

Isaiah 53Only Jesus Christ the risen Saviour has the power to rescue souls. His suffering brought a saving work of mercy and grace to the whole world. And He invites everyone to come to Him.

Introduction: 1 Peter 1:18-19 - ...knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of ua lamb vwithout blemish or spot. What is Redemption? Jesus Christ Paid the Ultimate price to Purchase my freedom and salvation. What Does Christ Redeem Me From? An Empty life of bondage to sin that leads to an Excruciating eternity in hell. What Does Christ Redeem Me With? His Own life which is worth more than anyone or anything that this world has to offer. Psalm 49:7-8 – Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice. What Does Christ's Redemption Require of Me? Acknowledging that I Cannot Work Off My Debt to God. Isaiah 64:6 – We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. Trusting that Christ has Paid my Debt In Full . Colossians 2:13-14 – And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Living for the One who Gave Himself for me. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 – Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANKHint: Highlight blanks above for answers! Audio Transcript If you have a Bible, please turn to 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 18 through 19.1 Peter chapter 1 verses 18 through 19.We live in a time when everything is expensive.Am I right?Every single time you go to the grocery store, every time you go to the gas station, you'rein a state of shock over how much money you had to spend.We all leave our house expecting to spend this amount of money and we always end up spendingeven more than we hoped.It can be difficult to keep track of ever-changing prices, but I want to help you have a heartbeaton how much things truly cost.In April 2025, I'm going to do a quick game with you to make that happen.Who's excited for a game?All right, way more excited than I expected.This is your first official harvest game show called Guess That Price.So imagine I'm Bob Barker and you're the excitable crowd.Everyone say guess that price.Yes, guess that price.Oh man, this is really exciting.So I'm going to ask four questions and you will win amazing and imaginary prizes if youguess the answers correctly.And most of the answers were found on Google, which we know is never wrong.So first question on the board.Is that a pretty good talk show voice?Game show voice?Okay, good.First question on the board, what is the median listing price for a house in Pittsburgh?What do we think?Janelle got it right, $250,000.Come see me afterwards for your imaginary prize.Next question, the best selling minivan in 2025 is the Honda Odyssey.What is the suggested retail price for a base model?$55,000?All right, I'm not hearing any right answers.$42,220.No one wins a prize for that one, I guess.Third question, what is the average price of a baseline Disney World vacation for afamily of four?My mom has an answer, $10,000.Janelle once again is very, very close, $7,093.I guess Janelle is the winner of this game for the most part.Well, it's time for the final and most important question of the game.And for this question, you don't have to shout out your answer, instead silently considerit in your heart and mind.What price did Jesus Christ have to pay to rescue lost and undeserving sinners like youand me?That's very true, Cody, his own life.Until the sermon, we're going to talk the rest of the time about that.So this is the third message in our latest series, What is Finished?And our goal is to unpack what Jesus truly accomplished on that cross 2,000 years agoand why he victoriously declared it is finished with his dying breath.Over the past two weeks, we've studied the doctrine of salvation like a diamond and examinedit from different angles and aspects.First we focused on justification.Our guilt before God is gone.And last week, we talked about the glorious truth of reconciliation.Our broken relationship with God has been restored.And tonight, we will examine another facet of the salvation diamond.Redemption, the price has been paid.You know, during the Easter season, you were bombarded with crosses on bumper stickers,road signs, even in chocolate form.Without even realizing it, you can become numb to the meaning and magnitude of the crossof Christ.So on this Good Friday, I want each and every one of you in this room and watching onlineto be overwhelmed with the weight of your sin and the depth of your debt before a holyGod.Some of you in this room need to come to the realization that you have an outstanding balanceon your spiritual account.That will not affect your credit score or your financial portfolio, but it will affect youreternal destiny unless it is dealt with before it is too late.And for the rest of you whose balance has been taken care of and wound down to zero,I want you to truly count the cost of your salvation and calculate the immensity of whatwas sacrificed for you.Because if you have a cheap view of grace, you will have a weak walk with Christ.But if you have a costly view of grace, you will have a rock-solid relationship with yourLord and Savior.So let's spend a moment in prayer.Please pray for me that will faithfully proclaim God's Word, and I will pray for you that youfaithfully receive it.Father, I am completely overwhelmed by my inability to properly communicate the pricethat has been paid and what your Son has sacrificed for me.What He has sacrificed for everyone in this room.Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would preach a much better message in our heartsthat I ever could with my mouth.May you watch over your Word to perform it this evening.May you do a great and mighty work.We ask all this in Jesus' mighty name.Amen.So our textual this evening is 1 Peter 1, verses 18 through 19.But before we dive into these verses, we need to understand the purpose of this letter andwho Peter is writing to.Throughout chapter 1, Peter makes it crystal clear that he is writing to struggling andsuffering Christians who do not feel at home in this fallen and ungodly world.He describes these believers as refugees, exiles, aliens, and pilgrims who stick outlike sore thumbs in a culture that hates God.And Peter doesn't want his brothers and sisters in Christ to feel discouraged that they arebeing persecuted and are suffering.Instead he wants them to be encouraged that they are experiencing the results of standingapart from everyone else and acting different.In the verses leading up to our passage, Peter gives a list of important commands.He says, "Prepare your minds for action.Be sober-minded.Do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.Be holy in all your conduct and conduct yourself with fear throughout the time of your exile."Simply put, imitate your perfect and holy God by being who he has called you to be anddoing what he has called you to do.Okay?But why?Why should these Christians choose to act differently from the world around them?What is the motivation?Well, Peter gives the motivation in verses 18 through 19 of chapter 1.He says, "Knowing that you were ransomed, redeemed from the futile ways inherited fromyour forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the preciousblood of Christ.Like that of a lamb without blemish or spot."So to fully unpack these verses and what redemption actually is, we need to ask and answer forwhat questions this evening.And the first what question on your outline is, what is redemption?What is redemption?When Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price to purchase my freedom and salvation.Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price to purchase my freedom and salvation.You know redemption was a common concept 2,000 years ago when it came to slavery and captivity.Prisoners of war were not released until their ransom was delivered.Prisoners were not set free until their debt was paid in full.And it's essential for you to understand that apart from Christ, you have a sin debt hangingover your head.You are a sinner by nature and by choice.And you have no one to blame for your spiritual bankruptcy besides yourself.And this debt will not magically go away.It must be paid by someone and there are only two options.Option one is a payment plan.You pay the penalty in hell forever.The second option is much better.And it's the one I hope you will choose.Jesus Christ settles your debt once and for all through His death on the cross that youcan be set free.You know as a pastor I'm asked a lot of theological questions on a weekly basis.And one of the questions I receive almost more than any other, almost even more than"Do my pets go to heaven?"Which will always be the uncontested champion of theological questions.I've lost count of how many people have asked me, "Why did Jesus have to die?"Why did Jesus have to pay a price?Why couldn't God just look past our sin, snap His divine fingers and say, "You know what?Just forget about it.Go on, go home.Don't worry, you're all forgiven."Have you ever wondered that?Have you ever asked that question?Well to answer that question let me walk you through a few scenarios.Imagine with me after service you punch me in the face.First of all, please don't do that.Please, please.Second of all, would there be consequences for your assault?There's a lot of police officers here so I guess they could arrest you.I could press charges.What if you punch your boss in the face on Monday?Would there be even worse consequences?Yeah, on top of going to jail you'd also be fired from your job.Imagine you were pulled over by a cop after service today and you punched that cop inthe face.Were there serious consequences for that?You would be in prison for a long time for assaulting an officer.What if you punched the President of the United States or another world leader in the face?Would there be even worse consequences for that?You can maybe be charged with an assassination attempt.Last question.What is the penalty for slapping the creator of the universe in the face?Sending against the eternal God demands eternal punishment.The punishment has to fit the crime.And infinite debt only makes sense for offending an infinite God.Once again, someone has to pay your debt.It cannot just be forgotten without someone covering the bill that you owe to the Lord.So we answer the first what question of what is redemption, which leads into our secondquestion which we touched on a bit.What does Christ redeem me from?What does Christ redeem me from?And Peter makes her crystal clear in verse 18.He says you were ransom from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers.So what does Christ redeem me from on your outline and empty life of bondage to sin thatleads to an excruciating eternity in hell?Peter says that we have all inherited futile ways from our forefathers.What does that even mean?Well, it's very simple.We all have been taught worthless ideas that lead to meaningless living.You have been served an endless amount of lies throughout your entire life that are niceand candy coated and look great on the outside, but on the inside are hollow.So many people have no idea who created them, why they exist, and what their purpose evenis.Instead of submitting to the perfect revelation of God, they make up their own pointless answersto the question.There is the you do you way of living.You are the bright and shining star of your own universe.Do whatever you want to do.There's the close your eyes mentality and don't think about God.Don't think about life and its meaning.Don't think about death.Don't think about what happens after death.Just enjoy your life as long as it lasts.There's the American dream.You work really hard to get into a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can marrythe right person.Have a bunch of kids who then repeat that same cycle.Impressive degrees, a high paying job, successful children of the measures of success.There's the empty religion school of thought.Just pick whatever religious path seems good to you.They all lead to the same destination.You know that sentiment is almost true.Every single spiritual path but one leads to the same destination, but that destinationis not a place you want to end up.Every path but one that is laid out in God's word leads to an excruciating eternity awayfrom the loving and caring presence of Almighty God.But whoever turns to Christ and walks by his way of salvation is redeemed and is rescuedfrom a life of dead end streets that go nowhere and a destiny of eternal suffering.So we know what redemption is.We also know what Christ redeems us from.Our third what question, what does Christ redeem me with?And Peter gives us the answer in verses 18 through 19.He says, "Not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious bloodof Christ like that of a lamb without blemish or spot."So what does Christ redeem me with?His own life which is worth more than anyone or anything that this world has to offer.You know according to the Old Testament law, the Israelites were commanded to only sacrificeanimals that were free of deformities, rashes, and other obvious issues.They were to only sacrifice animals that were clear of disease and imperfections.This trend first pops up in Exodus 12 as God tells the Israelites to spread the blood ofspotless lambs over their doorpost to be spared from death.And these spotless lambs in every single Old Testament sacrifice point forward to the perfectand spotless Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who came into this world to lay down his own lifeand pour out his own blood so that anyone who trusts in him will be washed of all theirsinful stains.You know Psalm 49 verses 7 through 8 talks about the unimaginable cost of a human soul."Truly no man can ransom another or give to God the price of his life for the ransom oftheir life is costly and can never suffice.God cannot be bribed with gold, silver, a briefcase full of cash, or bitcoin, becausehere he owns it all.No mere human being can take the place of another or pay off the debt of someone else.Only Jesus Christ who is fully God and fully man can bridge that gap and pay that price.The blood of Christ is the only currency of redemption.It is the only thing of true value that God the Father can or will accept.Nothing more precious could ever be offered and nothing less will even be considered."So we've answered three what questions.What is redemption?What does Christ redeem me from?And what does Christ redeem me with?We've talked about the theology of redemption.Now let's close by talking about the application of redemption with our final question.What does Christ's redemption require of me?What does Christ's redemption require of me?Well, firstly, acknowledging that I cannot work off my debt to God.Acknowledging that I cannot work off my debt to God.And my five-year-old son Sam loves Legos.Now imagine with me that I take him to the Ross Park Mall to buy a very small and inexpensiveLego set.In the process, he knocks over and destroys five of their most expensive displays.All told, I'm on the hook for $3,000 in damage.And Sam hysterically says to me, "Dad, I promise I'll pay you back.I don't have any money in my piggy bank right now, but here's what I'll do.I'll go around the neighborhood and pull weeds for a penny of weed.I promise I'll pay you back soon."I'm not great at math, but $3,000, a penny of weed, how many weeds would he have topull to cover that debt?How much?300,000 weeds.Come on, let's be realistic.Is that ever going to happen?No way.That is way too high a sum for a five-year-old to handle on his own.And the same way, your sinful sum is way too high for you to handle on your own.Thinking that you can pay it off and work it back to God is as foolish as Sam thinkingthat he can pull hundreds of thousands of weeds to pay off his debt to me.You can never be good enough.You can never do enough to earn your way back into God's good graces.Isaiah 64-6 gives us an important insight about all the things that we think are righteousdeeds.He says, "All of us have become like Juan who was unclean, and all our righteous actsare like filthy rags.We all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweeps us away."The first step in receiving redemption is acknowledging your need for it and admittingthat you can never earn it or buy it for yourself.So what does Christ redemption require of me?Secondly, trusting that Christ has paid my debt in full.Trusting that Christ has paid my debt in full.While you are spiritually destitute and delinquent, Christ has an infinite amount of riches.That He will give to you if you come to Him in humility and faith.Your debt to God will now and forever be wiped away in an instant if you turn from yoursin and trust in Christ.You must believe that He is your Savior and that the incomparable gift of His blood ismore than enough to cover your bill to the Lord.I know what some of you are thinking, "Taylor, you have no idea how long and detailed mysinful bill really is.It's like a CVS receipt on steroids."There's no way that God could forgive that.I don't know the horrible things you've done.I don't know all the things that are written on your debt to the Lord.But do you know who does?Jesus Christ.He knows how broken you are.He knows not just every single sin that you've committed, but every sin that you have yetto commit.Yet He offers you redemption anyway.If you were to pull me aside for service to share your deepest, darkest secret with me,I would have the same exact response to every single one of you.There is no debt that the blood of Christ cannot pay, even yours.But please stop making excuses for why Jesus can't forgive you and just ask Him to forgiveyou.And He will, because the Bible says so.It's that simple.Listen to how the Apostle Paul describes those who were saved.In you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God madealive together with Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses.Not just some, not just most.Oh, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.Those verses can be true of you right now.If you simply repent and turn to Christ.I beg you, please don't leave tonight without making the most important transaction of yourlife.Submit your sinful bill to Christ that He will pay every last penny and then rip it up,never to be seen again.Finally, what does Christ redemption require of me?Living for the one who gave himself for me.Living for the one who gave himself for me.You will not live for Christ until you are truly thankful for what He has done for you.And your level of thankfulness to Christ will only reach as high as your genuine grasp ofwhat He has sacrificed for you.Let me prove it to you with a few examples.Would you be thankful if I let you borrow my hoodie because you were chilly during service?Pastor Jeff, would you be thankful?But Pastor Jeff wouldn't break his hand patting me on the back for that, right?How thankful would you be if I let, if I lent you my car for a whole week while you'rejust getting worked on?You would repeatedly express your gratitude, maybe even send me a thank you note.What if I found out you were homeless and I let you move into my house rent free?How thankful would you be?You would go out of your way to express your gratitude by cleaning up around the house,doing all the chores outside that I don't like to do.How thankful would you be if I pushed you out of the way of a moving car and died inyour place?You wouldn't even know where to begin with expressing your gratitude and honoring mymemory and helping my family.Magnify that made up example times a billion and describing how grateful you should be asa redeemed sinner.The eternal Son of God died in your place so that you could have eternal life.We hear that so much, but do you really think about it?Do you think about how unbelievable that is?Praise Him for what He has done because He deserves it.Thank Him for all that He has given to you instead of complaining about all the thingsthat you don't have.Stop living for yourself and start living for Him.You need to be thankful to Christ, but you also need to recognize that you belong toChrist.Once your debt is scratched out of God's heavenly ledger, you can't just say, "Hey, God, thanks.I'll see you later when I get to heaven.I'm off to do whatever I want to do now."Paul tells us why that doesn't make sense in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 19 through20."You are not your own, for you were bought with a what?With a price.Your life is not your life.Since Jesus gave you His life, your life is now His life.Christ ransomed you from slavery to sin so that He could make you His own personal slave."That may sound bad, but it's actually the greatest news imaginable because everyone is enslavedto something and someone.Money, stuff, possessions, status.These are all harsh dictators that care nothing for you.And Satan has dibs on every single person who rejects Christ, and he hates everyone whois enslaved to him.But the Christian slave has the freest life of all because you belong to the only masterwho truly loves you, who calls you his friend.And once what is best for you?And what is best for you is giving everything you have for Jesus, his glory, and his kingdom.This means that you look and act different.How you spend your time should look different than everyone else.More than anything, you want to meet with God and His Word and in prayer every singleday.How you view your relationship should be different.You want to be with your brothers and sisters in Christ, worshiping, fellowshiping, andserving together.You want to reach out to unbelievers in your life so that they can experience the redemptionthat you've experienced.You view your resources differently.Your gifts, talents, and resources are not to be used to get ahead and advance your ownplans.And you may be thinking, "Wow, this sounds really inconvenient."You still don't get it.True Christians are those who happily rearrange their lives around Christ because they realizethey belong to Him and not themselves.Turning your life upside down is not an annoying inconvenience.It is an absolute pleasure because Jesus Christ is more than worthy and His redemptive rewardsare more than worthwhile.You know what, Harvest?Some choose to designate their financial giving towards certain ministries and missions.You can designate your giving to the building fund, the General Missions Fund, or to Thailandto go to Barnabas and his band of missionaries and evangelists.And I promise you, if you ever designate your giving, the finance team honors your wishes.If you designate your giving to the building fund, it goes to the building fund.If you designate your giving to go to Thailand, it goes directly to Thailand.Do you know that the Lord Jesus designates His giving?He paid an infinite price, but His giving is geared towards one specific purpose, redeemingand recruiting genuine worshipers.Jesus only purchases selfless givers, not selfish consumers.He only purchases loyal friends, not flaky acquaintances.He only purchases faithful servants, not lazy slackers.Do not belittle the price Jesus paid by choosing to be the exact opposite of what He paid for.Do not undermine His sacrifice by choosing to act like everyone else.Do not dishonor the Lord of your life by acting as if you are the Lord of your life.Our worship team and communion service can make their way forward.You know, we spent a lot of time tonight talking about redemption, but now we're actually goingto look at a physical picture of it as we turn to the Lord's Supper.Sin forces us to count the cost of salvation and focus our attention upon Jesus Christand Him crucified.When we eat the bread and drink of the cup, we are reminded that Jesus gave His own bodyand shed His own priceless blood to ransom us from captivity to sin and give us His eternalriches.And to be clear, you don't have to be a member of harvest to take part in communion, butyou do need to be a member of the family of God.So if you have not yet turned to Christ, I want to ask you to stay seated and contemplatethe meaning and message of the cross.Once again, I want to call you to not leave this room without making the most importantdecision of your life.Please stop Pastor Jeff, myself, from one of the other elders.We have Justin over here.We have Brian right here and Pastor Rich in the back.We would love nothing more than to talk to you about Jesus and what next steps with Himlooks like.And for those who are born again believers in this room, we're going to do somethinga bit different tonight for communion.In a few moments, you will leave your seats, come down the center aisles to receive theelements.You'll go back to your seat using the outer aisles and you'll be taking communion onyour own.I ask you to eat the bread and drink at the cup, not quickly or flippantly, but prayerfully.Take time to confess to the Lord.Take time to thank Him for all that He has done for you through the life and death ofHis Son.And after you're done, we ask that you please leave respectfully and quietly.We want you to feel the weight of the cross upon your shoulders so that you can come rightto celebrate the resurrection of the empty tomb on Sunday.So you can make your way forward as you are ready. Small Group DiscussionRead 1 Peter 1:18-19What was your big take-away from this passage / message?Do you ever take your redemption for granted? How can you protect yourself from this indifference?Read 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 - According to Paul, why can't you just live however you want to live? How is your Heavenly Master calling you to change and serve Him more faithfully right now? BreakoutPray for one another.

Pastor Jack Graham taught about the darkness of human sin and today he points out everyone's question how do we get out of this darkness? The truth is, religion cannot save, Pastor Graham teaches. Only Jesus Christ can save. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29

Sin is rampant in the world today. So many false gods capture the attention and minds of people every day. These gods go by the names of alcohol, drugs, pride, greed, sex, envy, and much more. Humanity tends to run to these puny gods thinking they will fill a void in our hearts, but, honestly, there's only one God who can fill that void. Today, Pastor Ken teaches that you can try to worship all kinds of idols, but they will leave you thirsty. Only Jesus Christ can quench your thirst and heal your soul.

What makes someone right before God? Only Jesus Christ, God the Son, can make you right before God because He is our righteousness.

This is an important lesson to remember. In the name of Jesus we aren't alone, we find all our hope in the One and Only Jesus Christ!

Today is a very special day as the American people go to the polls to vote on who our next president will be. I trust you have been praying, have educated yourself on the issues and the candidates, and you have voted or will vote today! This election will definitely determine the course of our country for years to come. But as important as it is, what is really needed for our great country is not a new president, a new congress or new leadership in Washington. We need our nation to repent and come to Jesus! We need to “hear Him”, to be “healed” by Him, to be “cleansed” of tormenting spirits by Him, to be “touched” by Him, and we need to experience His “power” to bring healing to our souls and to our nation!   This is exactly what we see happening here in Luke 6:17-19! The major part of this sixth chapter of Luke is taken up with the message from Christ, which He gave to the people who "came to hear Him, and to be healed" by Him (Luke 6:17). Some of the message, but not all, is similar to the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 5-7. First, notice the place or the setting of this great message. It was a “level place”.   My friend, the most level ground in all the history of humanity is at the foot of the cross. No one is better than anyone else. We are all sinners, and it doesn't matter how rich or poor we are, how famous or insignificant we might seem to be, how educated or uneducated we are, we still all have the same need. We need forgiveness for our sins that can only be found in the finished work of Jesus at the level ground of the cross!   Luke details the make-up of the people who were present on this occasion. It was both Jesus' disciples and a great multitude of people (v. 17). And they came from everywhere! “From all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon”. The people were from many different areas as the news about Christ had been circulated in many lands. Notice the problems of the people. "Diseases... tormented with unclean spirits" (Luke 6:17, 18). The people were plagued with many problems. Health problems and demon possession were two of their prominent problems. Others came with hungry hearts, aware of deep longings in their empty souls. No doubt these are the same issues that are plaguing the multitudes in America today!   Most importantly, notice the pursuit of the people. "Came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases... the whole multitude sought to touch him" (Luke 6:17, 19). They came to hear Christ and be healed by Christ, to be taught and to be touched by Christ. Both the physical and the spiritual are involved. The world still has like problems; but sadly, and unlike these people, they do not seek Christ for relief. Furthermore, they are generally only interested in their physical problems. Few have any concern about their spiritual problems and needs.   The scientists, the philosophers, the psychologists, the educators, and the politicians all claim to have the answers to our problems and needs. Yet nothing changes when we apply their cures or solutions!  I love how Luke simply says, “…And they were healed. And the whole multitude sought to touch Him, for power went out from Him and healed them all. Only Jesus Christ has Divine power that can overcome any physical or spiritual problem of the people. Jesus has the “power” to heal. The word “power” is the Greek word from which we get our English word “dynamite.” No government can boast of such power!   Finally, we should notice that Jesus first expresses His compassion and care for all the people before He brings His great message in the rest of the chapter. This illustrates the truth that, “People don't care what you say until they know that you care”.   Do you care enough for your family, friends, neighbors and country to spend the night in prayer, to give up your right to yourself to serve others, to be criticized or mocked because you speak the truth? Think about it!   God bless!

October 21, 2024 Hello and Happy Day! This is Dr. MaryAnn Diorio, Bible Teacher, Novelist, and Life Coach, welcoming you to another episode of Winning with the Word. Today is Monday, October 21, 2024, and this is episode #19 in Series 2024. This episode is titled, “Why Jesus Is the Only Way to Heaven.”Recently, Pope Francis told the world that there is more than one way to Heaven. Well, with all due respect, the pope is wrong.The Holy Scriptures make very clear that there is only one way to Heaven, and that one and only way is through Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself said as much.Let's look at the Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 6: Jesus was talking with his disciples and was explaining that He would be leaving them soon to prepare a place for them and that He would one day return to take them with Him. He added that they knew the way to the place where He was going. Thomas, one of the twelve Apostles, questioned Jesus: "Lord, we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus answered Thomas' question with these words: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me." To say that there are many ways to Heaven is to believe a lie. And believing that lie is sending countless numbers of people to Hell. So, I want to set the record straight in this blog post and podcast by explaining why Jesus is the only way to Heaven and why believing in Him is the only way to be saved.In order for Jesus to be able to save us, He had to be two things:1) He had to be God.2) He had to be a man.Jesus Christ was both.But why did the Savior of humanity have to be both God and man?1) The Savior of humanity had to be God because only God could satisfy the wrath of God. Sin is an offense against a perfect, infinite God and demands the payment of a perfect, infinite price. Only someone who was perfect and infinite was qualified to pay that price. Jesus alone was qualified. No other human being fit the bill because no other human being was perfect. Not Buddha. Not Mohammed. Not Hare Krishna. Not anyone but Jesus. 2) The Savior of humanity also had to be man. He had to be human because He had to represent the human race He was saving. In order to represent them, He had to be one of them in order to stand in their place. No other so-called god gave his life to save his followers. Only Jesus Christ did.So, let's put our heads together and do a little reasoning together, shall we? In other words, let's have a rational discussion about why believing in Jesus is the only way for anyone to be saved.In an outstanding article titled "3 Reasons Why Jesus is the Only Way," Dr. Tim Stratton says this: "There are three fundamental Laws of Logic that are always required in rational discussion." We will use these laws of logic in our discussion. These laws are:1) The Law of Identity2) The Law of the Excluded Middle3) The Law of Non-Contradiction.The Law of Identity states that a thing is what it is. In other words, a thing has specific qualities that make it what it is. For example, a square is a square because it has four equal sides. If it had three equal sides, it would not be a square. It would be a triangle.The Law of the Excluded Middle, attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, explains that a a statement that asserts or denies something is either true or its negation is true, thereby eliminating a third option. In other words, either a statement is true or its negation is true. There is no third option, no middle ground. For example, I can say that water is wet or water is not wet. Water is wet is a statement that asserts, and water is not wet is a statement that denies or negates. It has to be one or the other. There is no middle ground because water cannot be half wet and half dry.Applied to Jesus, we could say that He either rose from the dead or He didn't. There is no middle ground. He could not have half risen from the dead and half not risen from the dead.

In Jesus' day, two prominent realities organized Jewish life, the Temple and Torah. At the Temple, sacrifices were made, feasts celebrated, and worship offered. Through the Torah, God instructed His people to live holy lives by keeping His Commandments. Over time, Israel's religious leaders developed extensive and complicated teachings for how the Law of God should be applied in specific areas. But as often happens, when human beings add to God's law, we end up subtracting from it. Rule keeping and score keeping replace heart devotion. Following customs and traditions can't fix your sinful heart. Only Jesus Christ, through His atoning work on the cross, can grant forgiveness of sins and a transformed heart.

In Jesus' day, two prominent realities organized Jewish life, the Temple and Torah. At the Temple, sacrifices were made, feasts celebrated, and worship offered. Through the Torah, God instructed His people to live holy lives by keeping His Commandments. Over time, Israel's religious leaders developed extensive and complicated teachings for how the Law of God should be applied in specific areas. But as often happens, when human beings add to God's law, we end up subtracting from it. Rule keeping and score keeping replace heart devotion. Following customs and traditions can't fix your sinful heart. Only Jesus Christ, through His atoning work on the cross, can grant forgiveness of sins and a transformed heart.

To desire to be like Jesus means that the world, the flesh and the devil, must be put to the spiritual sword. Only Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the only begotten Son of God, must be our goal and guide in life. No one can ever be like Jesus unless they repent of their sins and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. They must be a born again child of God, their Father, through the shed blood of the Lord, on the Cross of Calvary. Only those who truly aspire to walk in God's ways, as revealed in God's word, the Holy Bible, can ever become like Jesus.

Listen to the full-length version or read the manuscript of this message here: https://wfth.me/pap. While you probably know the Sunday school song about Zacchaeus the tax collector, chances are you may not understand the extent of his sin and the miraculous nature of his restoration. Only Jesus Christ can deliver the kind of life-transforming grace that would cause the richest cheat in Israel to become a compassionate, benevolent, above-and-beyond kind of follower of Christ.  

Listen to the full-length version or read the manuscript of this message here: https://wfth.me/pap. While you probably know the Sunday school song about Zacchaeus the tax collector, chances are you may not understand the extent of his sin and the miraculous nature of his restoration. Only Jesus Christ can deliver the kind of life-transforming grace that would cause the richest cheat in Israel to become a compassionate, benevolent, above-and-beyond kind of follower of Christ.  

The only fulfilling thing in the universe is to have the love of Christ in your heart. Satan is the Magistrate of the rat race also known as the "Beast 'θηρίῳ' " . That dangerous system of things that has people trapped in unsatisfying jobs living their lives in a quiet desperation. The rat race sees no humanity in the individual. The individuals constant value becomes owned by a system. Money and shiny things become spiritually dead peoples identity and mark. Genesis 4:14 Revelation 13:18 Only Jesus Christ can set you free. The lead Churchy Church Clergy called Jesus Christ 'beelzebub' (lord of the dunghill) then did the unthinkable. Watch to the end to avoid misunderstanding. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCaB3vM5EVoA8GBq0In_QTw?sub_confirmation=1 CLICK IT, YOU WON'T REGRET IT There is nothing new under the sun as far as human character goes. As it is written all these things are for examples for us in these end times. Mankind has a 100% failure at governing ourselves. GOD is governmental perfection. No SugarCoated Bible Study Here. Is there anything more important than where you go when you die? There will be a great permanent separation of people. If God allowed people with ideologies contrary to His back into the Kingdom of Heaven, it would be nothing more than a new Hell. Observe how the Apostles never let phoney's disempower them. Obsessive taunting creates an obscene mob-scene but we are never to lose our faith. BEWARE of people that call themselves Christians. People drop that terminology on themselves to gain trust through false pretences. "Show me your works and I'll see your faith" We live in an era where telling the truth is the problem, not misinformation. God has nothing to prove to us. We have everything to prove to God. What is more important than where you go when you die? Death in the original Biblical languages never denotes non-existence. Spiritual life is a conscious existence in communion with God. Spiritual death is a conscious existence separate from God in the nether parts of the earth where there is no praise or presence of God whatsoever. Companion Chapel Worldwide Ministry is a registered non-profit. These broadcasts depend on your provisions. Partner with the Companion Chapel to help us reach out to a hurting world with the message of Christ's love. Please give what you can at companionchapel.com Please email companionchapel@gmail.com with your questions about the Bible, your prayer requests or just to say hi to let me know you are out there. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/companionchapelpodcast/message

Becoming BeYOUtiful You Part 4 - Peace “…when the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control…” Galatians 5:22, 23 NLT 1.Storms hit everyone- even the Followers of Jesus “Don't worry about anything” Philippians 4:6 NLT “…Do not be anxious for tomorrow…each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:34 NAS “Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? Of course not! And if worry can't do little things like that, what's the use of worrying over bigger things?” Luke 12: 25, 26 NLT “And my God will meet all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:19 NIV 2. Followers of Jesus can't Stop Storms 3.Only Jesus Christ is Powerful Enough to Stop Storms As evening came, Jesus said to his disciples, "Let's cross to the other side of the lake." So they took Jesus in the boat and started out, leaving the crowds behind (although other boats followed). But soon a fierce storm came up. High waves were breaking into the boat, and it began to fill with water. Jesus was sleeping at the back of the boat with his head on a cushion. The disciples woke him up, shouting, "Teacher, don't you care that we're going to drown?" When Jesus woke up, he rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "PEACE! Be still!" Suddenly the wind stopped, and there was a great calm. Mark 4:35-39 4. Jesus is not Shaken by Storms PERSONAL STEPS TO PEACE IN THE STORMS- PRAY ABOUT EVERYTHING “Pray about everything” Philippians 4:6 NLT Prayer Reminds Us of God's BIGNESS “Heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool…My hand made all these things” Isaiah 66:1, 2 NAS Prayer Reminds us of God's NEARNESS “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5 NAS THANK HIM FOR ALL HE HAS DONE “Thank Him for all He has done” Philippians 4:6 NLT Peace is a Quality of Soul, not a Quality of Circumstances! Peace is not the absence of storms. It's calm within the storm. Peace is not found in a place; it's found in a person- His Name is Jesus!

Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are a glorious God. And everything you created, you created to reflect your glory. And sometimes, Lord, when we look at the beauty of creation, a stunning sunrise or sunset, when we look into the ocean or when we look at the mountains, we're mesmerized by how beautiful it is. And all of that is just a mere reflection of your glory. You created us, male and female, in your image to image forth your glory. And Lord, we chose not to. In our rebellion recalcitrants, we chose to live for our own glory, our own name. And we do live in a city where many devote themselves to the pursuit of their own personal glory, be it through education or through athletics or through career in many other ways. And Lord, once we attain that personal glory, we know it's doesn't satisfy. There's only one glory that does. And then that's the glory of the Son of God.We thank you Jesus that you revealed your glory, but you also veiled it in your incarnation. You took on flesh. The eternal son of God took on flesh to represent us on the cross to pay an eternal penalty that we deserve for falling short of the glory of God with our sin. And then Lord, because of your death, burial, and resurrection, you promise that whoever believes in you repent of sin, you wipe out that record of condemnation. You replace it with imputed righteousness. And then you call us to live in a manner worthy of the glory of the name you've given us, the name of Christ. We are Christians, we are followers of Christ.And Lord Jesus, today I pray that you empower us to live whatever path you've called us to to bring the most glory to your name. Because we know that in the path of self-denial and living for your glory, that's when we begin to experience what our souls long for most, which is your glory. Bless our time, the holy scriptures, we pray all this in the beautiful name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.We're continuing our sermon series through the Gospel of Mark called Kingdom Come. The gospel Mark, the secret of God's kingdom. Today, Jesus Christ reveals one of the greatest secrets, which is he is the glorious God. The title of the sermon is a Foretaste of Glory. Os Guinness once said, "We have too much to live with and too little to live for. Everything is permitted and nothing is important."In many ways, life is difficult. And to get through the difficulties of life, you need a why. Why am I going through what I'm going through? Or why should I get up in the morning? What gets you up in the morning? What do you live for? What gives you energy to keep striving, keep working, keep grinding. In chapter 8 of the previous chapter, Jesus Christ said, "Whoever would follow me, take up your cross and follow me daily. Deny self that the way to life is self-denial, death of your own selfish ambitions." And the disciples have to decide, is it worth it? Deny self, is it worth it? "Why? Why should I deny myself?" Take up your cross daily and follow Jesus Christ? Why? "Follow me." Why Jesus? Take up the good fight. Fight the good fight of faith. Why? Repent of sin and mortify sin. Why?Well, the answer is that you get more of God, you get more of God's presence, more of His power. You get more of Jesus Christ, you get more of God's glory the more you live to glorify Him. Jesus Christ said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." In some sense, we have the ability to see God with the eyes of faith, the eyes of our soul, even today what gets in the way impurities of heart. The author of Hebrew says, "Strive for holiness without which no one will see God."Today we are Mark chapter 9, verses 1-29. Would you look at the text with me? "And he said to them, 'Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.' And after six days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them. And his clothes became radiant, intensely white as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them, Elijah and Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, 'Rabbi, it's good that we are here. Let us make three tents and one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah, for he did not know what to say for they were terrified.' A cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud, 'This is my beloved son. Listen to Him.' And suddenly looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.""And as they were coming down the mountain, He charged them to tell no one what they had seen until the son of man had risen from the dead. So they kept a matter to themselves questioning what this rising from the dead might mean. And they asked him, 'Why did the scribes say that first Elijah must come?' And he said to them, 'Elijah does come first to restore all things and how is it written of the son of man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt. But I tell you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they pleased as it is written'.""And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd when they saw Him were greatly amazed and ran up and greeted him. And he asked them, 'What are you arguing about with them?' And someone from the crowd answered him, 'Teacher, I brought my son to you for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out and they were not able.' And he answered them, 'Oh, faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me'.""They brought the boy to him and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, 'How long has this been happening to him?' And he said, 'From childhood. It has often cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.' And Jesus said to him, 'If you can, all things are possible for one who believes.' Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, 'I believe. Help my unbelief.' And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, He rebuked the unclean spirit saying to it, 'You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again'.""And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out and the boy was like a corpse so that most of them said, 'He is dead.' But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he arose. And when he entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, 'Why could we not cast it out?' And he said to them, 'This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer'." This is the reading of God's holy narrative and fallible, authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time, a foretaste of heaven. Second, Jesus suffered hell to give you heaven. And third, a foretaste of hell.First is a foretaste of heaven. Why did I use the term foretaste? My wife was making a cake this week and it looked delicious. I was very tempted to come up, stick my finger right in and taste it, a foretaste of the glory of the cake. Here we have a foretaste of the glory of heaven. What's the greatest thing about heaven? It's not just that we get to enjoy existence for all of eternity. No, the greatest thing about heaven is God. It's the glory of God, proximity to God. And in Mark 9:1, Jesus promises prophesies to the disciples. Some of you are going to see that glory, the kingdom of God come in power. He says in verse 1, "Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power."So He, Jesus, is going to show Peter, James and John, the big three disciples, his inner circle. He's going to show them what the greatest thing about the kingdom of God is. It's the glory of Jesus Christ as He reveals His glory. In verse 2, "After six days, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves and He was transfigured before them."After six days, time indications are rare in Mark. Mark usually, when he talks about time, says something like, "In those days" or "That day" or "Several days later," or his favorite word "immediately," that's his favorite word. But here he says six days. Very specific. Most likely it is symbolic. Six days. If you remember, God created the world in six days and he rested on the seventh day. The seventh day, the Sabbath day was set apart as a sanctuary in time, a day that was holy. And Jesus Christ chooses to reveal His glory to His closest disciples on the Sabbath day.The symbolism is also seen if you read in Exodus 24 where Moses goes up on the mountain. For six days, he waited and then on the seventh day, that's when the Lord revealed himself to Moses and says He was transfigured before Him. He was transformed. Transformed from what? From his earthly body. Jesus is the glorious son of God, eternal. He took on flesh in his incarnation, which veiled his glory. That was part of the humbling experience. He humbled Himself by taking on flesh. And here he reveals who he truly is.Verse 3, "And his clothes became radiant, intensely white as no one on earth could bleach them." His clothes even became radiant, a dazzling, extremely white. When Moses went up in the mountain and he came down, His face shone. He reflected the glory of God. Well, here this is different. Jesus is not reflecting glory. No, it's his own glory. It's emanating from within Him. It's to symbolize what? That this man is God. He is the son of man and He is the son of God. It was the only way. We have transgressed a holy law of an eternal God and the punishment for transgressing the eternal law of an eternal God is eternal punishment. It's eternal damnation in hell. Therefore, if anyone is going to save us, that person has to be holy and eternal and he has to be a person. Only Jesus Christ could do it.Here, Jesus is reassuming his true form. This is who He's always been. It's who He always will be. This is his prehuman glory and it's His eternal glory. This is partially why Jesus said, "I am the light of the world." Not just light morally speaking, not just that He speaks the truth. He's literally the light of the world. He is Yahweh incarnate. Despite the fact that he was human, he had to be to represent us, He grew tired, He walked, He talked, He got sick. He knew some things, others he had to learn through study and observation. He laughed, He wept. He experienced pain and exasperation, melancholy. He bled and he died, but he was God.He's the same God that Isaiah saw in Isaiah 6. Isaiah 6, it says, "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him, stood the seraphim. Each had six wings, with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. One called to another and said, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory'."And who was this Lord that is sitting on a throne? And John 12:41, Jesus said that Isaiah was speaking of Him. Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of Him. Therefore, as you meditate on the glory of God and you say, "Imagine the humility," I was thinking about Superman. The humility that Superman had and walking around looking like a normal guy and he had the glasses and everything, but he's superman. Anytime he can use his power. Jesus are like that to the end, that's times' infinity. Jesus Christ veiled his glory. In order to stoop down, He took on flesh in order to represent us.John 1:14, "The Lord became flesh. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only son from the Father full of grace and truth and dwelt among us." In the Greek gets tabernacle with us. He pitched his tent with us. It's as if he came down and hid His glory. But hear the disciples are given a fresh glimpse of the unsurpassable glory, of unimaginable majesty, of the dignity and transcendence and otherness of Jesus. When he walked with them on a daily basis, there was this hiddenness.On the one hand, He's saying He's the son of God. On the other hand, they completely forget. They're oblivious sometimes. He teaches and then all of a sudden it says they're hardened in their heart. They don't understand. He teaches, they don't understand. And part of it was they're looking at a human being. And he's right with them. He looks just like them. And in a sense, familiarity does breed contempt, but Jesus here is showing them disciples. "It is worth it to die for me. It is worth it to sacrifice anything and everything for me. I'm here with you on your level, which does not mean we are equals. Let me show you how much other than you I am." And he reveals his glory to them.And as He's transfigured, verse 4, there appear to them Elijah with Moses and they were talking with Jesus. Now at this point, Moses had been dead over 1,400 years. He died in a secluded place and he was buried by the very hand of God. Elijah had been gone for about 900 years. He didn't die. God took Him while he was still alive. And both Moses and Elijah are mentioned in Malachi 4, which is a prophecy about the one who would come to prepare the way for the Messiah. In Malachi 4:4, it says, "Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest thy come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction."God promised that through the preparation, the preparing work of the one who will come in the spirit of Elijah and that's John the Baptist. We'll get to that in the second point. Why Moses and Elijah? Because both of them saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai. And also Moses himself prophesied that there will come a day when God will send a prophet, "Just like me," in Deuteronomy 18:15, "the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, from among you, from your brothers. It is to Him you shall listen."Moses was the great prophet because he was given the law of God, the decalogue, the 10 commandments, which is God's pattern. This is how humanity is to live. And Moses taught the people of Israel. This is how you glorify God in your life by living according to the commandments out of hearts of love toward God and neighbor. And then Elijah, what was his ministry? He went to very stubborn people of God, covenant people of God who were not living according to the commandments and he called them back to worshiping God, not Baal, back to following the commandments of God, not the desires of the heart.And what did Jesus Christ come to do? Well, he didn't come to abolish the law. Matthew 5:17, "Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them." And when he says fulfill them, that means live according to them. Jesus did not abrogate the law. He actually lived according to the law in order to represent us on the cross as he bore the wrath of God for our lawbreaking. And I wonder what they were talking about, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. I think they were talking about the death of Jesus Christ. We get that from Luke chapter 9, the parallel passage. "Behold two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep and when they became fully awake, they saw his glory. And the two men who stood with him."Moses and Elijah were talking to Jesus in his glorified state about his departure. What's the word departure mean? It means his death. He, the glorious son of God, is going to die. And Moses and Elijah, they were dumbfounded by this. "How is the son of the eternal son of God, how is he going to die? Why would he die?" And God's response is "Because Moses, you weren't capable of changing people's hearts to obey the commandments from within. You could tell them what to do. You could tell them demands of God. You couldn't change their hearts to do it out of hearts of love. And Elijah, you could yell at the people of God and try to muster their zeal for the holiness of God, but even that was temporary. And Elijah, you yourself, what did you do? You prophesied that there will be a new covenant. And in the new covenant God will remove hearts of stone, replace them with hearts of flesh and write his law on those new hearts."That's what they were talking about Christ departure. And it's the word exodus, the same word exodus that's used about Moses is the word for departure here. Moses, in the same way that you led millions of people out of slavery, out of captivity, Jesus is going to lead the elect out of the captivity of the nets of Satan and sin. In verse 5, Peter said to Jesus... This is a very, very important moment. Peter's terrified and when he's terrified, he just did not speak. But he decides to speak as the representative and he says, "Rabbi, it is good that we are here." He doesn't know what to say. Verse 6 says that he was terrified. He had no idea. But he knows what he feels.Someone said, most people aren't going to remember what you said, but they're going to remember how you made them feel. At this moment, he feels something he's never felt. He feels a satisfaction, a satiation of the soul. He realized this is the whole point. This is the whole purpose of life. It's to bask in the glory of God. And Jesus, why would we leave? I don't want to go back to that. Let's stay here. And he has an idea. "Let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah." Why the tents idea? Maybe he thought, "You know what? Moses likes tents. He lived in tents. The tabernacle was a tent. The people of God knew about the festival of booths to remember the fact that they lived in tents. I think he just wanted to stay up here." And I think his ploy was, because it was his idea with the tents, "James, you get to bunk with Moses. And John, you get to bunk with Elijah. You guys are same. And Jesus, come here. Come here. Jesus. I am going to bask in the glory of God."He got a foretaste of heaven and he didn't want to leave. In verse 6, "For he did not know what to say for they were terrified." And verse 7, "And a cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of that cloud, 'This is my beloved son. Listen to him'." So we've got the glory of Jesus Christ emanating from within him. And then we get a cloud which also is a representative of the glory of God. The cloud in the Old Testament was a sign of the presence of God, the Shekinah glory of God. That cloud is what led the people during the day and a pillar of fire during the night out of Egypt.Imagine what this all looked like from the ground, the mountain capped with divine incandescent and it is overshadowing them a gesture of protection. And then you hear the voice of the Father, God the Father. He says, "This is my beloved son. Listen to him." And listen to Him in allusion to Deuteronomy 18 where Moses said, "Listen to the prophet." And this is how God speaks to us. God, very rarely does he speak audibly and most likely it's because he's already spoken the most important truths to us through his son Jesus Christ.Hebrews 1 says, "Long ago, at many times in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by His son whom he appointed the heir of all things through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature. And he upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs."Do you want to hear from God? Well, God has spoken through His son. Go to the Son, ask the son to reveal himself to you, to reveal his glorious nature to you. King Herod, he heard about the work of Jesus and he said, "Who's that?" I think it might be Elijah come back from the dead after Herod executed him. The disciples, Jesus asked, "What do the people say that I am?" And he said, "Some think that you're a great prophet. Others think that you are Elijah." And here God the father's gives us the ultimate definition, the ultimate identity of Jesus. "This is my son, my beloved son. This is my chosen one."The Father loves the son so much that the very first time he speaks in the presence of the glory of His son, the first thing he wants to say is how much he loves him. This is my beloved son. Listen to Him." Moses and Elijah, they were the king's servants, God's servants. "This is God's son." So obviously, He's the one worth living for. This is the greatest purpose that there is. He's worth denying yourself for. He's better than self. There's no one like Him, no one greater, no one equal, no one even close. And He's the only one who can satisfy your soul. We know we long for that satisfaction. We know you can't just live for self. Anyone that's done that for any period of time, you know it doesn't satisfy, living for yourself, living for your own appetites, living for your own desires. We all know we need a greater purpose than self. But the greatest purpose, the absolute greatest purpose is Jesus Christ. Everything points to Him.And here the father overshadows them. And in response maybe to Peter's desire to stay up in the mountain and just forget about all the work below, the Father says, Listen to him." And what does Jesus say? He says, "It's time for us to go down the mountain." After he gives him a foretaste of the indescribable glory, they descend down to earth to deal with the hell below. And point 2 is that Jesus suffered hell to give you heaven. In verse 9, "As they were coming down the mountain, He charged them to tell no one what they had seen until the son of man had risen from the dead."We're having a conversation community group about why Jesus just keeps telling them, "Don't tell anyone. Don't tell anyone." He does a miracle and he's like, "Don't tell anyone." I think it's more than just reverse psychology. In the beginning he told him don't tell anyone because he knew as soon as they proclaim the full truth, that both Rome and the Sanhedrin will attempt to kill Jesus and do it before the appointed time. But this is the last of the nine commands in the Gospel of Mark for silence. After this moment, after the transfiguration, it's as if Jesus is descending from the mountain and say, "Yes, now is the time, gloves are off, I'm going to fulfill the mission."In verse 10, "So they kept the matter to themselves questioning what this rising from the dead might mean." Why do they have questions about Jesus rising from the dead? Well, because they didn't really understand why Jesus had to die. "Jesus, why would you have to? You're the Messiah. You're here to establish your physical kingdom. We want to be in your court of that kingdom. We want thrones next to you. What do you mean die? What do you mean rise from the dead? Let's not talk about rise from the dead because we don't want you to die." But Jesus knew that this was the only way for salvation to be procured because scripture teaches that the penalty for sin is death. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. We have all disobeyed. The penalty is death. So if someone is going to save us from the execution that we deserve, well that person has to die in our stead. And that's what Jesus had to do. The eternal son of God had to pay the eternal penalty on the cross on our behalf.The disciples didn't want to ask about the resurrection because that wasn't even a category for them so they start asking about Elijah. And why Elijah? Because the two issues are related. If Jesus is to die and rise and the scriptures taught that Elijah must come, or one in the spirit of Elijah must come before the Messiah, their question is, "Well, if you're going to die, did Elijah already come?" And verse 11, "They asked him, 'Why did the scribes say that first Elijah must come?'." They expected the Elijah to come and to restore all things to fix everything. The same way that they thought that the Messiah was going to fix everything physically with the physical kingdom, they thought Elijah was going to prepare the way for the Messiah in the same way.But Jesus points out in verse 12, "Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the son of man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt?" He's saying Elijah will go before the Messiah, but you need to understand that the way of the Messiah, the ministry of the Messiah is a ministry of death. So if Elijah comes before the Messiah and the servant is not greater than the teacher, well, if the teacher dies, then the Elijah figure must die as well. So Jesus is working backwards and he's correcting their false understanding of the Messiah. The Messiah is eternal, but the Messiah must also die. And this has been prophesied. He must suffer at the hands of men. He must suffer being treated with contempt because God promised this.In the scriptures, thousands of years before even the coming of Christ, one of the clearest prophetic passages about the Messiah suffering is Psalm 22. Psalm 22, in such an uncanny detailed way, talks about the crucifixion as if the psalmist is sitting at the foot of the cross eyewitness to everything that's happening and watching the suffering of the Messiah. And Jesus quotes the psalm on the cross, Psalm 22 verse 1, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning?"The Son does not address God the Father is Father. The Son on the cross feels such a chasm between him and the Father that he just cries out to him as God. "God, why have you forsaken me? For what purpose have you forsaken? You forsaken me because Jesus Christ took our sin upon himself." Being forsaken by God is to experience the wrath of God. So if you reject Jesus Christ, if you reject God and you say, "I just want to be neutral, I want to be neutral toward God, I don't want heaven, I don't want hell and I'll just cease to exist." That's not true. It's either heaven or it's hell. It's either God or itself. And self and pursuit of self, that's ultimately Satanic. And Jesus Christ there on the cross, what's he experiencing? He's experiencing cosmic alienation that the father has removed. The Father who loved his beloved son so much, he's removed his affection. He's removed the presence of his love and Christ suffering. That's the hell that he's experiencing on the cross.Verse 16 of Psalm 22, "For dogs encompass me, a company of evildoers encircles me. They have pierced my hands and feet. I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them. And for my clothing they cast lots. They have pierced my hands and feet." Centuries before crucifixion was even invented as a method of torture and execution, Jesus Christ on the cross, that's what was happening. And this was prophesied centuries before. So obviously the son of man, the Son of God had to suffer to fulfill the prophecies and as the only means of our salvation.Verse 13. "But I tell you that Elijah has come. And they did to him whatever they pleased as it is written of me." If the son of man is to be a suffering Messiah, then Elijah must be a suffering forerunner to prepare the way for the Lord. And this is what Jesus is saying. He's saying that John the Baptist is the Elijah figure who found his Jezebel in Herodes. And this is promised by the angel when the angel came to John the Baptist parents, Elizabeth and Zachariah, in Luke 1:14. "And you ill have joy and gladness and many will rejoice at his birth for he'll be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink and he'll be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just to make ready for the Lord a people prepared."So Jesus says that, "Elijah has come, Elijah has suffered, Elijah has died, and now it's my turn to fulfill my ministry." And as they descend from the mountain, that's the conversation they're having. The scene turns from glory of the mountaintop and to the darkness of the shadow of death. The Vatican hangs Raphael's last painting, he was commissioned before his death, to paint the transfiguration and he actually didn't finish the painting. Some of his students did. But the top of the painting is the transfiguration. It's Jesus Christ in his glory, light emanating from him. And you've got Moses and you've got Elijah, you've got the disciples, the three of them blinded by the brilliance. And then below and everything changes drastically from light to darkness. And below you have the disciples trying to fight a demon that's possessed a little boy with his father by his side.It's an overwhelming contrast. It's as if they've experienced heaven and now they have to return to hell on earth, but the only way to heaven is to overcome hell. And that's what Jesus came to do.So this is point 3, a foretaste of hell. In verse 14, "When they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd when they saw Him were greatly amazed and ran up to Him and greeted Him." They were amazed. We're not sure why. Perhaps it's because there was an after glow of the radiance as we saw with Moses, as he descends from Sinai. So they're all mesmerized by Him. In the verse 16, "He asked them, 'What are you arguing about with them to the disciples? What are you arguing with the crowds and the scribes?'." In verse 17, "And someone from the crowd answered Him, 'Teacher I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out and they were not able'."The father here provides a detailed description of what the demon was doing to the child. The demon was trying to destroy the child through mutanus, through indulgence, through foaming at the mouth, teeth, grinding rigidity. And the father has spent enough time with the son to know it's not just physical. This isn't just medical intervention that's needed in this case. In this case, we need something more and we need a greater power than the power of the demonic. He understood he was powerless against the demon. The child is powerless so we needed a power greater than the demon.He brought the child to Jesus. He said, "I brought him to you." But Jesus wasn't here. Jesus was on the mountain. So he turned to the disciples and he says the disciples were not able. They didn't have the strength, they didn't have the power. And in verse 19, "Jesus turns to disciples, he answered them, 'Oh, faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me'." Why couldn't the rest of the disciples, the nine that were left, why couldn't they cast out this demon? And Jesus says lack of faith, faithless generation. And you say, "Lack of faith?" We've already seen the disciples casting out demons. The disciples went on a mission trip where they cast out demons. They came back to Jesus and they were pumped about it. And Jesus says, "Rejoice not that the demons listen to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."So they've done it before, but he says, "You faithless generation, the reason why you didn't have power over the demonic was disbelief. You weren't believing." And if you ever considered exorcisms or casting out demons, to even attempt to cast out a demon is an act of faith. You know you can't do it. It's an act of faith to do it. So as they tried, they were believing, but the faith was wrongheaded. It wasn't directed in the right object of faith. Well, where was their faith directed? It wasn't directed at Christ. Christ wasn't here. They felt his absence. All of a sudden, what are they relying on? Perhaps their past experience. "We've done this before." All of a sudden they're believing in themselves or they're believing in their calling or they're believing in their anointing. But they stop believing in Jesus Christ, the lack of faith.And this echoes other times where Jesus calls them out, rebukes them for their lack of faith, meaning he expected more of them. But because of the absence of Christ physically, they lost faith. Verse 20, "They brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth." The demon recognizes who Jesus is immediately and musters his last attack. He's an entrenched demon, a self-confident demon. He's defeated the disciples and their attempts to oust him. He thinks he might be able to do it again before Christ. And he attacks the boy.Verse 21. "And Jesus asked his father, 'How long has this been happening to him?' And he said, 'From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us'." Why is Jesus asking the question? He knows everything. He's asking the question to elicit information from the man for the crowd. So everyone else hears. Hears what? Hears the fact that a demon has possessed the boy from when the boy was a child. And here you got to pause and start meditating a little bit, that demons want to possess even children. Why? Because demons like Satan, their leader, they hate humans, they hate humanity. They hate anyone and everyone created in the image of God. They hate the glory of God and they hate anyone who might glorify God. And they want to destroy human beings as soon as possible. That's why he took over the boy.And here, this needs to inform the way that we think of children, the way that we think of parenting. The parents, we need to pray over our children. Lord, protect them from the evil one, protect them from oppression, protect them from demonic possession. And we have to pray over and pray to Lord. Lord, fill my child with the power of the Spirit from youth just like John the Baptist, there is a real spiritual war happening behind the scenes for every single soul and Satan wants to get them as soon as possible.And the Father cries out, "Have compassion on us. Help us. Have mercy on us if you can." And by saying if you can, he is questioning the ability of Jesus. He had believed in Jesus enough to bring his son to Jesus, but Jesus wasn't there and all he could see were the disciples. And the disciples, through their lack of faith, actually sow doubt in the man's heart about the ability of Jesus. Jesus catches onto that phrase in verse 23. Jesus said, "If you can?" And in the original text, we don't have punctuation. So in the Greek there's no periods and exclamation marks.So here it could be a question mark, "If you can?" Or it could be a question mark with exclamation mark, "If you can?!" Or it could be just multiple exclamation marks like, "Bro, if you..." What's he doing? He's saying, "Look, I just said that this demon can't be cast out with a lack of faith. If this is going to happen, you have to believe. You have to believe that I can do this." And the Father gets it.In the second part of verse 23, "All things are possible for one who believes." One who believes in what? The disciples had believed, but they weren't believing in Christ. All things are possible for the one who believes in Christ. This is the same thing Paul said in Philippians chapter 4, verse 13, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." So the power isn't in your faith, the power is in Christ. And when you direct your faith at Christ as imperfect as that faith is, Christ releases his power. And the man gets it in verse 24, "Immediately, the father of the child cried out and said, 'I believe. Help my unbelief. Lord, I believe'."I believe when we started the church, we did T ads on the T. And this is back before we had any professionals at the church. I put the first campaign together. One of the ads was a pretty good one. It said a sign from God. I thought that was pretty good. Another one said, "Don't stop believing." It had a picture of piano. One said, "I believe. Help my own belief." And you know why? Because I think that is one of the greatest professions of faith. It's like, "Lord, yes, I believe, but I still wrestle with doubt. Lord, I am simultaneously a believer and a doubter. Lord, I understand that faith is a gift and I need more of that faith. I need more of the gift." He understands that he doesn't have enough. So Lord, can you please fill that gap?It's the same sentiment in Martin Luther's great phrase, "Simul Justus et Peccator." Lord, I'm a simultaneously righteous and a sinner. I am simultaneously justified by the blood of Jesus Christ, but I'm still a sinner. I still struggle. Lord, I want to see more of you. I want more of your power released in my life and in the lives of the people around me. Lord, help my unbelief.We are a mixture of sinner saints. We're sinner saints. We were driving yesterday. When I have all the girls in the suburban, it gets very chatty. And we were chatting about birth, they wanted to talk about. My second daughter is like, "Did you name me Elizabeth because I was born in St. Elizabeth's hospital?" I said, "If that were the case, we would've named you Saint Elizabeth to live up to that name." But Jesus does call us saints, although we're still sinners. He calls us to be more and more evermore sanctify.And that's exactly what's happening in the father's heart. Logically, faith and unbelief, it's as if they're opposites. But in the Christian experience, they're simultaneous realities. Jesus told his disciples in Gethsemane, in Mark 14:38, "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." The battle for faith is evident in the disciples, and it's a battle that continues in the father's heart, and it's a battle that continues in our hearts. But the father's unbelief is different than the scribe's unbelief. The father's unbelief is different than the Pharisees unbelief or the Herodians unbelief. His unbelief is not stubborn. His unbelief is humble. It's repentant. It's, "Lord, help me. Lord, I want to believe more, but I can't do it apart from you."2 Corinthians 4:16 says, "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison as we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."In Mark 9:25, "And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit saying to it, 'You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.' And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out and the boy was like a corpse. So that most of them said, 'He is dead'."In exorcisms, the reality of the cure is often demonstrated through a final act of violence by the departing demon. And here this was the end goal to begin with, he wanted to kill the child through self-harm. And then as he's leaving, because Jesus had commanded him, he tries to kill the child. But verse 27, "Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, 'Why could we not cast it out?' And he said to them, 'This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer'."Most texts also add in fasting, "This kind cannot be driven out anything by prayer and fasting." But the oldest manuscripts do not have the word fasting in there. We do believe in the power of fasting. Fasting is abstaining from food for a period of time in order to do what? In order to pray. The power isn't in the fasting, the power is in the prayer. So either way, if you add fasting or not, the power is in the prayer. Fasting helps heighten prayer. And once you start feeling the hunger pangs, you start crying out to God in a more desperate way.But Jesus here emphasizes that the demon is cast out by prayer. You were faithless. And how does that reveal itself? In the fact that you did not pray. And you stop here and you say, "How in the world did the disciples forget to pray? Jesus, why couldn't we cast out a demon?" You forgot to pray. You say, "Oh, we forgot to pray. We forgot the most important part." Oh my goodness. And you say, "Why? Why did that happen?" I'll tell you why. Whenever you have a situation like this, it's heightened spiritual battle. It's chaos, a lot of emotions, a lot of people, a lot of commotion and everyone's demanding, "Disciples help us. Disciples help us." And then the scribes are there and they're like, "Yeah, you're losers. You can't help us." And they can't do anything either.And in moments like that, you try to fix the situation in your power and you start relying on your strength. You start relying on your past experience. You start relying on anointing and you forget the most important part of the equation, which is God. You forget to pray to the Lord.So friends, this is the punchline of the story. The punchline of the story is, if you want to be used powerfully in the kingdom of God, do not forget to pray. We are to be people of prayer, patterned by prayer. When Jesus Christ and Moses and Elijah then, when they were talking about his departure, when they were talking about His death, they understood that apart from Jesus Christ, prayer doesn't mean anything. A lot of people who don't believe in Christ, they pray. And Jesus here is revealing that apart from His death, burial, and resurrection, we do not have access to God apart from the substitutionary atone of Christ. So apart from Christ's departure, we can't experience his glory.One of the most interesting things that Jesus ever said in the Gospel of Matthew, the very last thing he says before he departs from earth, he says, "Lo, I'm with you to the end of the age. I'm with you. I am with you until the end of the age." And then he leaves. You say, "How does that make any sense?" The disciples lost faith because they couldn't see the physical Christ in their presence. When he comes down, all of a sudden the lights come on. But Jesus Christ had to depart first with his death, then burial, resurrection. Then through his ascension, he had to depart in order to send us the Holy Spirit. And now the very moment that you repent of sin and you trust in Jesus Christ and when you pray in Jesus' name, we have access to God because of the power of the Holy Spirit.Peter was on that mountain of transfiguration and he saw the glory of Jesus Christ. And then when he is writing to the early church about that experience, watch where he puts the emphasis, "Do you want to experience more glory?" He puts the emphasis on the scriptures. That it's through the holy scriptures, the deeper we go in the scriptures, the more we know the scriptures, the more glory of God is revealed to us.Look at 2 Peter 1:16, "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we meet known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty, for when he received honor and glory from God the father and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."The more we know the scriptures, love the scriptures, the more we love the word of God, the more we see the word of God, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, in the scriptures and the gospel.At this time, we're going to transition to holy communion in which we remember the suffering of Christ on our behalf. For whom is holy communion? It is for repentant believers in Jesus Christ. It's for those who have turned from self-righteousness and turned from earning salvation, turned from sin turned to Christ. Recognizing our faith isn't perfect, but when it's directed in the perfect one, it's a salvific faith. So if you are not a believer in Jesus Christ, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service. Or if you are living in unrepentant sin as one who carries the name of Christ, we ask that you refrain as well. Unless right now you repent and believe in Christ, receive grace and then you're welcome to partake.If you haven't received the elements, please raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring the elements to you. And I also need some elements. I forgot my second service elements. I'll read 1 Corinthians 9:23-32 to prepare us."For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed, he took bread." Thank you. "And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, also, he took the cup after supper saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then'.""So eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. This is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly we would not be judged. And when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."You pray with me over holy communion. Oh heavenly father, we thank you for the gift of your beloved son, Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, we thank you that you were willing to go to the cross, you were willing to endure the wrath of God, that you were willing to endure eternal hell to offer us heaven for eternity. And Lord, we repent of our sins now. We repent of our self-reliance. We repent of pride. We repent of seeking our glory above yours, falling short of your glory. And Lord, we receive your grace right now. We receive your mercy, your forgiveness, and your compassion. And Lord, by the power of the Spirit, bring to mind the suffering of Christ now as we remember his sufferings. And we pray this in the name of Christ, amen.There are two lids, one on top. If you pull it back, it opens the cup and there's one below to open the bread. On the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed, he took the bread and after breaking it, he said, "This is my body, broken for you, take, eat and do this in remembrance of me." He then proceeded to take the cup and he said, "This cup is a cup of the new covenant of my blood, which poured out for the sins of many. Take, drink, and do this in remembrance of me."Lord Jesus, we thank you that you were willing to endure the cross. Why? To glorify your beloved Father and for the joy that was set before you, the joy of bringing us into your kingdom, the joy of saving us, stubborn sinners, stubborn rebels. You saw the joy you would experience and bringing us into the household of God, regenerating us, removing hearts of stone, replacing them hearts that beat for you, hearts that long to glorify you by living lives of obedience and lives of faith.Lord, continue to empower us by the Spirit, to do your work here on earth. And Lord, whatever demons there are around us, whatever demons and the people around us, whatever demons in this city, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ and we plead the blood of Jesus Christ, cast them out. And we pray, Lord, use us in the process. And we don't trust in ourselves or in our experience, or in our anointing, or in our calling. We trust only in the name of Jesus Christ, the name above all names, the name that is more powerful than any demons. And we pray this in Christ's name, amen.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are a glorious God. And everything you created, you created to reflect your glory. And sometimes, Lord, when we look at the beauty of creation, a stunning sunrise or sunset, when we look into the ocean or when we look at the mountains, we're mesmerized by how beautiful it is. And all of that is just a mere reflection of your glory. You created us, male and female, in your image to image forth your glory. And Lord, we chose not to. In our rebellion recalcitrants, we chose to live for our own glory, our own name. And we do live in a city where many devote themselves to the pursuit of their own personal glory, be it through education or through athletics or through career in many other ways. And Lord, once we attain that personal glory, we know it's doesn't satisfy. There's only one glory that does. And then that's the glory of the Son of God.We thank you Jesus that you revealed your glory, but you also veiled it in your incarnation. You took on flesh. The eternal son of God took on flesh to represent us on the cross to pay an eternal penalty that we deserve for falling short of the glory of God with our sin. And then Lord, because of your death, burial, and resurrection, you promise that whoever believes in you repent of sin, you wipe out that record of condemnation. You replace it with imputed righteousness. And then you call us to live in a manner worthy of the glory of the name you've given us, the name of Christ. We are Christians, we are followers of Christ.And Lord Jesus, today I pray that you empower us to live whatever path you've called us to to bring the most glory to your name. Because we know that in the path of self-denial and living for your glory, that's when we begin to experience what our souls long for most, which is your glory. Bless our time, the holy scriptures, we pray all this in the beautiful name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.We're continuing our sermon series through the Gospel of Mark called Kingdom Come. The gospel Mark, the secret of God's kingdom. Today, Jesus Christ reveals one of the greatest secrets, which is he is the glorious God. The title of the sermon is a Foretaste of Glory. Os Guinness once said, "We have too much to live with and too little to live for. Everything is permitted and nothing is important."In many ways, life is difficult. And to get through the difficulties of life, you need a why. Why am I going through what I'm going through? Or why should I get up in the morning? What gets you up in the morning? What do you live for? What gives you energy to keep striving, keep working, keep grinding. In chapter 8 of the previous chapter, Jesus Christ said, "Whoever would follow me, take up your cross and follow me daily. Deny self that the way to life is self-denial, death of your own selfish ambitions." And the disciples have to decide, is it worth it? Deny self, is it worth it? "Why? Why should I deny myself?" Take up your cross daily and follow Jesus Christ? Why? "Follow me." Why Jesus? Take up the good fight. Fight the good fight of faith. Why? Repent of sin and mortify sin. Why?Well, the answer is that you get more of God, you get more of God's presence, more of His power. You get more of Jesus Christ, you get more of God's glory the more you live to glorify Him. Jesus Christ said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." In some sense, we have the ability to see God with the eyes of faith, the eyes of our soul, even today what gets in the way impurities of heart. The author of Hebrew says, "Strive for holiness without which no one will see God."Today we are Mark chapter 9, verses 1-29. Would you look at the text with me? "And he said to them, 'Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.' And after six days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them. And his clothes became radiant, intensely white as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them, Elijah and Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, 'Rabbi, it's good that we are here. Let us make three tents and one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah, for he did not know what to say for they were terrified.' A cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud, 'This is my beloved son. Listen to Him.' And suddenly looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.""And as they were coming down the mountain, He charged them to tell no one what they had seen until the son of man had risen from the dead. So they kept a matter to themselves questioning what this rising from the dead might mean. And they asked him, 'Why did the scribes say that first Elijah must come?' And he said to them, 'Elijah does come first to restore all things and how is it written of the son of man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt. But I tell you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they pleased as it is written'.""And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd when they saw Him were greatly amazed and ran up and greeted him. And he asked them, 'What are you arguing about with them?' And someone from the crowd answered him, 'Teacher, I brought my son to you for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out and they were not able.' And he answered them, 'Oh, faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me'.""They brought the boy to him and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, 'How long has this been happening to him?' And he said, 'From childhood. It has often cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.' And Jesus said to him, 'If you can, all things are possible for one who believes.' Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, 'I believe. Help my unbelief.' And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, He rebuked the unclean spirit saying to it, 'You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again'.""And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out and the boy was like a corpse so that most of them said, 'He is dead.' But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he arose. And when he entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, 'Why could we not cast it out?' And he said to them, 'This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer'." This is the reading of God's holy narrative and fallible, authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time, a foretaste of heaven. Second, Jesus suffered hell to give you heaven. And third, a foretaste of hell.First is a foretaste of heaven. Why did I use the term foretaste? My wife was making a cake this week and it looked delicious. I was very tempted to come up, stick my finger right in and taste it, a foretaste of the glory of the cake. Here we have a foretaste of the glory of heaven. What's the greatest thing about heaven? It's not just that we get to enjoy existence for all of eternity. No, the greatest thing about heaven is God. It's the glory of God, proximity to God. And in Mark 9:1, Jesus promises prophesies to the disciples. Some of you are going to see that glory, the kingdom of God come in power. He says in verse 1, "Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power."So He, Jesus, is going to show Peter, James and John, the big three disciples, his inner circle. He's going to show them what the greatest thing about the kingdom of God is. It's the glory of Jesus Christ as He reveals His glory. In verse 2, "After six days, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves and He was transfigured before them."After six days, time indications are rare in Mark. Mark usually, when he talks about time, says something like, "In those days" or "That day" or "Several days later," or his favorite word "immediately," that's his favorite word. But here he says six days. Very specific. Most likely it is symbolic. Six days. If you remember, God created the world in six days and he rested on the seventh day. The seventh day, the Sabbath day was set apart as a sanctuary in time, a day that was holy. And Jesus Christ chooses to reveal His glory to His closest disciples on the Sabbath day.The symbolism is also seen if you read in Exodus 24 where Moses goes up on the mountain. For six days, he waited and then on the seventh day, that's when the Lord revealed himself to Moses and says He was transfigured before Him. He was transformed. Transformed from what? From his earthly body. Jesus is the glorious son of God, eternal. He took on flesh in his incarnation, which veiled his glory. That was part of the humbling experience. He humbled Himself by taking on flesh. And here he reveals who he truly is.Verse 3, "And his clothes became radiant, intensely white as no one on earth could bleach them." His clothes even became radiant, a dazzling, extremely white. When Moses went up in the mountain and he came down, His face shone. He reflected the glory of God. Well, here this is different. Jesus is not reflecting glory. No, it's his own glory. It's emanating from within Him. It's to symbolize what? That this man is God. He is the son of man and He is the son of God. It was the only way. We have transgressed a holy law of an eternal God and the punishment for transgressing the eternal law of an eternal God is eternal punishment. It's eternal damnation in hell. Therefore, if anyone is going to save us, that person has to be holy and eternal and he has to be a person. Only Jesus Christ could do it.Here, Jesus is reassuming his true form. This is who He's always been. It's who He always will be. This is his prehuman glory and it's His eternal glory. This is partially why Jesus said, "I am the light of the world." Not just light morally speaking, not just that He speaks the truth. He's literally the light of the world. He is Yahweh incarnate. Despite the fact that he was human, he had to be to represent us, He grew tired, He walked, He talked, He got sick. He knew some things, others he had to learn through study and observation. He laughed, He wept. He experienced pain and exasperation, melancholy. He bled and he died, but he was God.He's the same God that Isaiah saw in Isaiah 6. Isaiah 6, it says, "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him, stood the seraphim. Each had six wings, with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. One called to another and said, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory'."And who was this Lord that is sitting on a throne? And John 12:41, Jesus said that Isaiah was speaking of Him. Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of Him. Therefore, as you meditate on the glory of God and you say, "Imagine the humility," I was thinking about Superman. The humility that Superman had and walking around looking like a normal guy and he had the glasses and everything, but he's superman. Anytime he can use his power. Jesus are like that to the end, that's times' infinity. Jesus Christ veiled his glory. In order to stoop down, He took on flesh in order to represent us.John 1:14, "The Lord became flesh. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only son from the Father full of grace and truth and dwelt among us." In the Greek gets tabernacle with us. He pitched his tent with us. It's as if he came down and hid His glory. But hear the disciples are given a fresh glimpse of the unsurpassable glory, of unimaginable majesty, of the dignity and transcendence and otherness of Jesus. When he walked with them on a daily basis, there was this hiddenness.On the one hand, He's saying He's the son of God. On the other hand, they completely forget. They're oblivious sometimes. He teaches and then all of a sudden it says they're hardened in their heart. They don't understand. He teaches, they don't understand. And part of it was they're looking at a human being. And he's right with them. He looks just like them. And in a sense, familiarity does breed contempt, but Jesus here is showing them disciples. "It is worth it to die for me. It is worth it to sacrifice anything and everything for me. I'm here with you on your level, which does not mean we are equals. Let me show you how much other than you I am." And he reveals his glory to them.And as He's transfigured, verse 4, there appear to them Elijah with Moses and they were talking with Jesus. Now at this point, Moses had been dead over 1,400 years. He died in a secluded place and he was buried by the very hand of God. Elijah had been gone for about 900 years. He didn't die. God took Him while he was still alive. And both Moses and Elijah are mentioned in Malachi 4, which is a prophecy about the one who would come to prepare the way for the Messiah. In Malachi 4:4, it says, "Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes and he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest thy come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction."God promised that through the preparation, the preparing work of the one who will come in the spirit of Elijah and that's John the Baptist. We'll get to that in the second point. Why Moses and Elijah? Because both of them saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai. And also Moses himself prophesied that there will come a day when God will send a prophet, "Just like me," in Deuteronomy 18:15, "the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, from among you, from your brothers. It is to Him you shall listen."Moses was the great prophet because he was given the law of God, the decalogue, the 10 commandments, which is God's pattern. This is how humanity is to live. And Moses taught the people of Israel. This is how you glorify God in your life by living according to the commandments out of hearts of love toward God and neighbor. And then Elijah, what was his ministry? He went to very stubborn people of God, covenant people of God who were not living according to the commandments and he called them back to worshiping God, not Baal, back to following the commandments of God, not the desires of the heart.And what did Jesus Christ come to do? Well, he didn't come to abolish the law. Matthew 5:17, "Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them." And when he says fulfill them, that means live according to them. Jesus did not abrogate the law. He actually lived according to the law in order to represent us on the cross as he bore the wrath of God for our lawbreaking. And I wonder what they were talking about, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. I think they were talking about the death of Jesus Christ. We get that from Luke chapter 9, the parallel passage. "Behold two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep and when they became fully awake, they saw his glory. And the two men who stood with him."Moses and Elijah were talking to Jesus in his glorified state about his departure. What's the word departure mean? It means his death. He, the glorious son of God, is going to die. And Moses and Elijah, they were dumbfounded by this. "How is the son of the eternal son of God, how is he going to die? Why would he die?" And God's response is "Because Moses, you weren't capable of changing people's hearts to obey the commandments from within. You could tell them what to do. You could tell them demands of God. You couldn't change their hearts to do it out of hearts of love. And Elijah, you could yell at the people of God and try to muster their zeal for the holiness of God, but even that was temporary. And Elijah, you yourself, what did you do? You prophesied that there will be a new covenant. And in the new covenant God will remove hearts of stone, replace them with hearts of flesh and write his law on those new hearts."That's what they were talking about Christ departure. And it's the word exodus, the same word exodus that's used about Moses is the word for departure here. Moses, in the same way that you led millions of people out of slavery, out of captivity, Jesus is going to lead the elect out of the captivity of the nets of Satan and sin. In verse 5, Peter said to Jesus... This is a very, very important moment. Peter's terrified and when he's terrified, he just did not speak. But he decides to speak as the representative and he says, "Rabbi, it is good that we are here." He doesn't know what to say. Verse 6 says that he was terrified. He had no idea. But he knows what he feels.Someone said, most people aren't going to remember what you said, but they're going to remember how you made them feel. At this moment, he feels something he's never felt. He feels a satisfaction, a satiation of the soul. He realized this is the whole point. This is the whole purpose of life. It's to bask in the glory of God. And Jesus, why would we leave? I don't want to go back to that. Let's stay here. And he has an idea. "Let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah." Why the tents idea? Maybe he thought, "You know what? Moses likes tents. He lived in tents. The tabernacle was a tent. The people of God knew about the festival of booths to remember the fact that they lived in tents. I think he just wanted to stay up here." And I think his ploy was, because it was his idea with the tents, "James, you get to bunk with Moses. And John, you get to bunk with Elijah. You guys are same. And Jesus, come here. Come here. Jesus. I am going to bask in the glory of God."He got a foretaste of heaven and he didn't want to leave. In verse 6, "For he did not know what to say for they were terrified." And verse 7, "And a cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of that cloud, 'This is my beloved son. Listen to him'." So we've got the glory of Jesus Christ emanating from within him. And then we get a cloud which also is a representative of the glory of God. The cloud in the Old Testament was a sign of the presence of God, the Shekinah glory of God. That cloud is what led the people during the day and a pillar of fire during the night out of Egypt.Imagine what this all looked like from the ground, the mountain capped with divine incandescent and it is overshadowing them a gesture of protection. And then you hear the voice of the Father, God the Father. He says, "This is my beloved son. Listen to him." And listen to Him in allusion to Deuteronomy 18 where Moses said, "Listen to the prophet." And this is how God speaks to us. God, very rarely does he speak audibly and most likely it's because he's already spoken the most important truths to us through his son Jesus Christ.Hebrews 1 says, "Long ago, at many times in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by His son whom he appointed the heir of all things through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature. And he upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs."Do you want to hear from God? Well, God has spoken through His son. Go to the Son, ask the son to reveal himself to you, to reveal his glorious nature to you. King Herod, he heard about the work of Jesus and he said, "Who's that?" I think it might be Elijah come back from the dead after Herod executed him. The disciples, Jesus asked, "What do the people say that I am?" And he said, "Some think that you're a great prophet. Others think that you are Elijah." And here God the father's gives us the ultimate definition, the ultimate identity of Jesus. "This is my son, my beloved son. This is my chosen one."The Father loves the son so much that the very first time he speaks in the presence of the glory of His son, the first thing he wants to say is how much he loves him. This is my beloved son. Listen to Him." Moses and Elijah, they were the king's servants, God's servants. "This is God's son." So obviously, He's the one worth living for. This is the greatest purpose that there is. He's worth denying yourself for. He's better than self. There's no one like Him, no one greater, no one equal, no one even close. And He's the only one who can satisfy your soul. We know we long for that satisfaction. We know you can't just live for self. Anyone that's done that for any period of time, you know it doesn't satisfy, living for yourself, living for your own appetites, living for your own desires. We all know we need a greater purpose than self. But the greatest purpose, the absolute greatest purpose is Jesus Christ. Everything points to Him.And here the father overshadows them. And in response maybe to Peter's desire to stay up in the mountain and just forget about all the work below, the Father says, Listen to him." And what does Jesus say? He says, "It's time for us to go down the mountain." After he gives him a foretaste of the indescribable glory, they descend down to earth to deal with the hell below. And point 2 is that Jesus suffered hell to give you heaven. In verse 9, "As they were coming down the mountain, He charged them to tell no one what they had seen until the son of man had risen from the dead."We're having a conversation community group about why Jesus just keeps telling them, "Don't tell anyone. Don't tell anyone." He does a miracle and he's like, "Don't tell anyone." I think it's more than just reverse psychology. In the beginning he told him don't tell anyone because he knew as soon as they proclaim the full truth, that both Rome and the Sanhedrin will attempt to kill Jesus and do it before the appointed time. But this is the last of the nine commands in the Gospel of Mark for silence. After this moment, after the transfiguration, it's as if Jesus is descending from the mountain and say, "Yes, now is the time, gloves are off, I'm going to fulfill the mission."In verse 10, "So they kept the matter to themselves questioning what this rising from the dead might mean." Why do they have questions about Jesus rising from the dead? Well, because they didn't really understand why Jesus had to die. "Jesus, why would you have to? You're the Messiah. You're here to establish your physical kingdom. We want to be in your court of that kingdom. We want thrones next to you. What do you mean die? What do you mean rise from the dead? Let's not talk about rise from the dead because we don't want you to die." But Jesus knew that this was the only way for salvation to be procured because scripture teaches that the penalty for sin is death. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. We have all disobeyed. The penalty is death. So if someone is going to save us from the execution that we deserve, well that person has to die in our stead. And that's what Jesus had to do. The eternal son of God had to pay the eternal penalty on the cross on our behalf.The disciples didn't want to ask about the resurrection because that wasn't even a category for them so they start asking about Elijah. And why Elijah? Because the two issues are related. If Jesus is to die and rise and the scriptures taught that Elijah must come, or one in the spirit of Elijah must come before the Messiah, their question is, "Well, if you're going to die, did Elijah already come?" And verse 11, "They asked him, 'Why did the scribes say that first Elijah must come?'." They expected the Elijah to come and to restore all things to fix everything. The same way that they thought that the Messiah was going to fix everything physically with the physical kingdom, they thought Elijah was going to prepare the way for the Messiah in the same way.But Jesus points out in verse 12, "Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the son of man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt?" He's saying Elijah will go before the Messiah, but you need to understand that the way of the Messiah, the ministry of the Messiah is a ministry of death. So if Elijah comes before the Messiah and the servant is not greater than the teacher, well, if the teacher dies, then the Elijah figure must die as well. So Jesus is working backwards and he's correcting their false understanding of the Messiah. The Messiah is eternal, but the Messiah must also die. And this has been prophesied. He must suffer at the hands of men. He must suffer being treated with contempt because God promised this.In the scriptures, thousands of years before even the coming of Christ, one of the clearest prophetic passages about the Messiah suffering is Psalm 22. Psalm 22, in such an uncanny detailed way, talks about the crucifixion as if the psalmist is sitting at the foot of the cross eyewitness to everything that's happening and watching the suffering of the Messiah. And Jesus quotes the psalm on the cross, Psalm 22 verse 1, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning?"The Son does not address God the Father is Father. The Son on the cross feels such a chasm between him and the Father that he just cries out to him as God. "God, why have you forsaken me? For what purpose have you forsaken? You forsaken me because Jesus Christ took our sin upon himself." Being forsaken by God is to experience the wrath of God. So if you reject Jesus Christ, if you reject God and you say, "I just want to be neutral, I want to be neutral toward God, I don't want heaven, I don't want hell and I'll just cease to exist." That's not true. It's either heaven or it's hell. It's either God or itself. And self and pursuit of self, that's ultimately Satanic. And Jesus Christ there on the cross, what's he experiencing? He's experiencing cosmic alienation that the father has removed. The Father who loved his beloved son so much, he's removed his affection. He's removed the presence of his love and Christ suffering. That's the hell that he's experiencing on the cross.Verse 16 of Psalm 22, "For dogs encompass me, a company of evildoers encircles me. They have pierced my hands and feet. I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them. And for my clothing they cast lots. They have pierced my hands and feet." Centuries before crucifixion was even invented as a method of torture and execution, Jesus Christ on the cross, that's what was happening. And this was prophesied centuries before. So obviously the son of man, the Son of God had to suffer to fulfill the prophecies and as the only means of our salvation.Verse 13. "But I tell you that Elijah has come. And they did to him whatever they pleased as it is written of me." If the son of man is to be a suffering Messiah, then Elijah must be a suffering forerunner to prepare the way for the Lord. And this is what Jesus is saying. He's saying that John the Baptist is the Elijah figure who found his Jezebel in Herodes. And this is promised by the angel when the angel came to John the Baptist parents, Elizabeth and Zachariah, in Luke 1:14. "And you ill have joy and gladness and many will rejoice at his birth for he'll be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink and he'll be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just to make ready for the Lord a people prepared."So Jesus says that, "Elijah has come, Elijah has suffered, Elijah has died, and now it's my turn to fulfill my ministry." And as they descend from the mountain, that's the conversation they're having. The scene turns from glory of the mountaintop and to the darkness of the shadow of death. The Vatican hangs Raphael's last painting, he was commissioned before his death, to paint the transfiguration and he actually didn't finish the painting. Some of his students did. But the top of the painting is the transfiguration. It's Jesus Christ in his glory, light emanating from him. And you've got Moses and you've got Elijah, you've got the disciples, the three of them blinded by the brilliance. And then below and everything changes drastically from light to darkness. And below you have the disciples trying to fight a demon that's possessed a little boy with his father by his side.It's an overwhelming contrast. It's as if they've experienced heaven and now they have to return to hell on earth, but the only way to heaven is to overcome hell. And that's what Jesus came to do.So this is point 3, a foretaste of hell. In verse 14, "When they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd when they saw Him were greatly amazed and ran up to Him and greeted Him." They were amazed. We're not sure why. Perhaps it's because there was an after glow of the radiance as we saw with Moses, as he descends from Sinai. So they're all mesmerized by Him. In the verse 16, "He asked them, 'What are you arguing about with them to the disciples? What are you arguing with the crowds and the scribes?'." In verse 17, "And someone from the crowd answered Him, 'Teacher I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out and they were not able'."The father here provides a detailed description of what the demon was doing to the child. The demon was trying to destroy the child through mutanus, through indulgence, through foaming at the mouth, teeth, grinding rigidity. And the father has spent enough time with the son to know it's not just physical. This isn't just medical intervention that's needed in this case. In this case, we need something more and we need a greater power than the power of the demonic. He understood he was powerless against the demon. The child is powerless so we needed a power greater than the demon.He brought the child to Jesus. He said, "I brought him to you." But Jesus wasn't here. Jesus was on the mountain. So he turned to the disciples and he says the disciples were not able. They didn't have the strength, they didn't have the power. And in verse 19, "Jesus turns to disciples, he answered them, 'Oh, faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me'." Why couldn't the rest of the disciples, the nine that were left, why couldn't they cast out this demon? And Jesus says lack of faith, faithless generation. And you say, "Lack of faith?" We've already seen the disciples casting out demons. The disciples went on a mission trip where they cast out demons. They came back to Jesus and they were pumped about it. And Jesus says, "Rejoice not that the demons listen to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."So they've done it before, but he says, "You faithless generation, the reason why you didn't have power over the demonic was disbelief. You weren't believing." And if you ever considered exorcisms or casting out demons, to even attempt to cast out a demon is an act of faith. You know you can't do it. It's an act of faith to do it. So as they tried, they were believing, but the faith was wrongheaded. It wasn't directed in the right object of faith. Well, where was their faith directed? It wasn't directed at Christ. Christ wasn't here. They felt his absence. All of a sudden, what are they relying on? Perhaps their past experience. "We've done this before." All of a sudden they're believing in themselves or they're believing in their calling or they're believing in their anointing. But they stop believing in Jesus Christ, the lack of faith.And this echoes other times where Jesus calls them out, rebukes them for their lack of faith, meaning he expected more of them. But because of the absence of Christ physically, they lost faith. Verse 20, "They brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth." The demon recognizes who Jesus is immediately and musters his last attack. He's an entrenched demon, a self-confident demon. He's defeated the disciples and their attempts to oust him. He thinks he might be able to do it again before Christ. And he attacks the boy.Verse 21. "And Jesus asked his father, 'How long has this been happening to him?' And he said, 'From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us'." Why is Jesus asking the question? He knows everything. He's asking the question to elicit information from the man for the crowd. So everyone else hears. Hears what? Hears the fact that a demon has possessed the boy from when the boy was a child. And here you got to pause and start meditating a little bit, that demons want to possess even children. Why? Because demons like Satan, their leader, they hate humans, they hate humanity. They hate anyone and everyone created in the image of God. They hate the glory of God and they hate anyone who might glorify God. And they want to destroy human beings as soon as possible. That's why he took over the boy.And here, this needs to inform the way that we think of children, the way that we think of parenting. The parents, we need to pray over our children. Lord, protect them from the evil one, protect them from oppression, protect them from demonic possession. And we have to pray over and pray to Lord. Lord, fill my child with the power of the Spirit from youth just like John the Baptist, there is a real spiritual war happening behind the scenes for every single soul and Satan wants to get them as soon as possible.And the Father cries out, "Have compassion on us. Help us. Have mercy on us if you can." And by saying if you can, he is questioning the ability of Jesus. He had believed in Jesus enough to bring his son to Jesus, but Jesus wasn't there and all he could see were the disciples. And the disciples, through their lack of faith, actually sow doubt in the man's heart about the ability of Jesus. Jesus catches onto that phrase in verse 23. Jesus said, "If you can?" And in the original text, we don't have punctuation. So in the Greek there's no periods and exclamation marks.So here it could be a question mark, "If you can?" Or it could be a question mark with exclamation mark, "If you can?!" Or it could be just multiple exclamation marks like, "Bro, if you..." What's he doing? He's saying, "Look, I just said that this demon can't be cast out with a lack of faith. If this is going to happen, you have to believe. You have to believe that I can do this." And the Father gets it.In the second part of verse 23, "All things are possible for one who believes." One who believes in what? The disciples had believed, but they weren't believing in Christ. All things are possible for the one who believes in Christ. This is the same thing Paul said in Philippians chapter 4, verse 13, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." So the power isn't in your faith, the power is in Christ. And when you direct your faith at Christ as imperfect as that faith is, Christ releases his power. And the man gets it in verse 24, "Immediately, the father of the child cried out and said, 'I believe. Help my unbelief. Lord, I believe'."I believe when we started the church, we did T ads on the T. And this is back before we had any professionals at the church. I put the first campaign together. One of the ads was a pretty good one. It said a sign from God. I thought that was pretty good. Another one said, "Don't stop believing." It had a picture of piano. One said, "I believe. Help my own belief." And you know why? Because I think that is one of the greatest professions of faith. It's like, "Lord, yes, I believe, but I still wrestle with doubt. Lord, I am simultaneously a believer and a doubter. Lord, I understand that faith is a gift and I need more of that faith. I need more of the gift." He understands that he doesn't have enough. So Lord, can you please fill that gap?It's the same sentiment in Martin Luther's great phrase, "Simul Justus et Peccator." Lord, I'm a simultaneously righteous and a sinner. I am simultaneously justified by the blood of Jesus Christ, but I'm still a sinner. I still struggle. Lord, I want to see more of you. I want more of your power released in my life and in the lives of the people around me. Lord, help my unbelief.We are a mixture of sinner saints. We're sinner saints. We were driving yesterday. When I have all the girls in the suburban, it gets very chatty. And we were chatting about birth, they wanted to talk about. My second daughter is like, "Did you name me Elizabeth because I was born in St. Elizabeth's hospital?" I said, "If that were the case, we would've named you Saint Elizabeth to live up to that name." But Jesus does call us saints, although we're still sinners. He calls us to be more and more evermore sanctify.And that's exactly what's happening in the father's heart. Logically, faith and unbelief, it's as if they're opposites. But in the Christian experience, they're simultaneous realities. Jesus told his disciples in Gethsemane, in Mark 14:38, "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." The battle for faith is evident in the disciples, and it's a battle that continues in the father's heart, and it's a battle that continues in our hearts. But the father's unbelief is different than the scribe's unbelief. The father's unbelief is different than the Pharisees unbelief or the Herodians unbelief. His unbelief is not stubborn. His unbelief is humble. It's repentant. It's, "Lord, help me. Lord, I want to believe more, but I can't do it apart from you."2 Corinthians 4:16 says, "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison as we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."In Mark 9:25, "And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit saying to it, 'You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.' And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out and the boy was like a corpse. So that most of them said, 'He is dead'."In exorcisms, the reality of the cure is often demonstrated through a final act of violence by the departing demon. And here this was the end goal to begin with, he wanted to kill the child through self-harm. And then as he's leaving, because Jesus had commanded him, he tries to kill the child. But verse 27, "Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, 'Why could we not cast it out?' And he said to them, 'This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer'."Most texts also add in fasting, "This kind cannot be driven out anything by prayer and fasting." But the oldest manuscripts do not have the word fasting in there. We do believe in the power of fasting. Fasting is abstaining from food for a period of time in order to do what? In order to pray. The power isn't in the fasting, the power is in the prayer. So either way, if you add fasting or not, the power is in the prayer. Fasting helps heighten prayer. And once you start feeling the hunger pangs, you start crying out to God in a more desperate way.But Jesus here emphasizes that the demon is cast out by prayer. You were faithless. And how does that reveal itself? In the fact that you did not pray. And you stop here and you say, "How in the world did the disciples forget to pray? Jesus, why couldn't we cast out a demon?" You forgot to pray. You say, "Oh, we forgot to pray. We forgot the most important part." Oh my goodness. And you say, "Why? Why did that happen?" I'll tell you why. Whenever you have a situation like this, it's heightened spiritual battle. It's chaos, a lot of emotions, a lot of people, a lot of commotion and everyone's demanding, "Disciples help us. Disciples help us." And then the scribes are there and they're like, "Yeah, you're losers. You can't help us." And they can't do anything either.And in moments like that, you try to fix the situation in your power and you start relying on your strength. You start relying on your past experience. You start relying on anointing and you forget the most important part of the equation, which is God. You forget to pray to the Lord.So friends, this is the punchline of the story. The punchline of the story is, if you want to be used powerfully in the kingdom of God, do not forget to pray. We are to be people of prayer, patterned by prayer. When Jesus Christ and Moses and Elijah then, when they were talking about his departure, when they were talking about His death, they understood that apart from Jesus Christ, prayer doesn't mean anything. A lot of people who don't believe in Christ, they pray. And Jesus here is revealing that apart from His death, burial, and resurrection, we do not have access to God apart from the substitutionary atone of Christ. So apart from Christ's departure, we can't experience his glory.One of the most interesting things that Jesus ever said in the Gospel of Matthew, the very last thing he says before he departs from earth, he says, "Lo, I'm with you to the end of the age. I'm with you. I am with you until the end of the age." And then he leaves. You say, "How does that make any sense?" The disciples lost faith because they couldn't see the physical Christ in their presence. When he comes down, all of a sudden the lights come on. But Jesus Christ had to depart first with his death, then burial, resurrection. Then through his ascension, he had to depart in order to send us the Holy Spirit. And now the very moment that you repent of sin and you trust in Jesus Christ and when you pray in Jesus' name, we have access to God because of the power of the Holy Spirit.Peter was on that mountain of transfiguration and he saw the glory of Jesus Christ. And then when he is writing to the early church about that experience, watch where he puts the emphasis, "Do you want to experience more glory?" He puts the emphasis on the scriptures. That it's through the holy scriptures, the deeper we go in the scriptures, the more we know the scriptures, the more glory of God is revealed to us.Look at 2 Peter 1:16, "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we meet known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty, for when he received honor and glory from God the father and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."The more we know the scriptures, love the scriptures, the more we love the word of God, the more we see the word of God, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, in the scriptures and the gospel.At this time, we're going to transition to holy communion in which we remember the suffering of Christ on our behalf. For whom is holy communion? It is for repentant believers in Jesus Christ. It's for those who have turned from self-righteousness and turned from earning salvation, turned from sin turned to Christ. Recognizing our faith isn't perfect, but when it's directed in the perfect one, it's a salvific faith. So if you are not a believer in Jesus Christ, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service. Or if you are living in unrepentant sin as one who carries the name of Christ, we ask that you refrain as well. Unless right now you repent and believe in Christ, receive grace and then you're welcome to partake.If you haven't received the elements, please raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring the elements to you. And I also need some elements. I forgot my second service elements. I'll read 1 Corinthians 9:23-32 to prepare us."For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed, he took bread." Thank you. "And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, also, he took the cup after supper saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then'.""So eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. This is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly we would not be judged. And when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."You pray with me over holy communion. Oh heavenly father, we thank you for the gift of your beloved son, Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, we thank you that you were willing to go to the cross, you were willing to endure the wrath of God, that you were willing to endure eternal hell to offer us heaven for eternity. And Lord, we repent of our sins now. We repent of our self-reliance. We repent of pride. We repent of seeking our glory above yours, falling short of your glory. And Lord, we receive your grace right now. We receive your mercy, your forgiveness, and your compassion. And Lord, by the power of the Spirit, bring to mind the suffering of Christ now as we remember his sufferings. And we pray this in the name of Christ, amen.There are two lids, one on top. If you pull it back, it opens the cup and there's one below to open the bread. On the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed, he took the bread and after breaking it, he said, "This is my body, broken for you, take, eat and do this in remembrance of me." He then proceeded to take the cup and he said, "This cup is a cup of the new covenant of my blood, which poured out for the sins of many. Take, drink, and do this in remembrance of me."Lord Jesus, we thank you that you were willing to endure the cross. Why? To glorify your beloved Father and for the joy that was set before you, the joy of bringing us into your kingdom, the joy of saving us, stubborn sinners, stubborn rebels. You saw the joy you would experience and bringing us into the household of God, regenerating us, removing hearts of stone, replacing them hearts that beat for you, hearts that long to glorify you by living lives of obedience and lives of faith.Lord, continue to empower us by the Spirit, to do your work here on earth. And Lord, whatever demons there are around us, whatever demons and the people around us, whatever demons in this city, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ and we plead the blood of Jesus Christ, cast them out. And we pray, Lord, use us in the process. And we don't trust in ourselves or in our experience, or in our anointing, or in our calling. We trust only in the name of Jesus Christ, the name above all names, the name that is more powerful than any demons. And we pray this in Christ's name, amen.

Only Jesus Christ could make Heavenly Father's plan possible.

Only Jesus Christ could make Heavenly Father's plan possible and he will help smooth out the difficulties in our lives.If you'd like to view the video that goes with this podcast, click here

“David's Q & A” • Psalm 15 – Elder Bryce Lowrance. After the events of trying to bring the Ark back to his house and Uzza being put to death, David realizes that God is more Holy than he even realized. In response to these events, David asks “who can dwell in the presence of God?” David answers in the following verses of the Psalm, but in doing so, he shows that he and all mankind are not fit to be with God. Only Jesus Christ fits the description! Therefore, it is only by the imputed righteousness of Christ than anyone is just before God.  This sermon was preached on Sunday, July 30,2023.

Matthew 28:19-20  1. Jesus wants followers, not fans2. Discipleship is costly “Salvation is free, but discipleship costs everything we have.” – Billy Graham“And if we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us? What decisions and partings will it demand? To answer this question we shall have to go to him, for only he knows the answer. Only Jesus Christ, who bids us follow him, knows the journey's end. But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship 3. Disciple-making is costly.

Hi, I'm John Sorensen, President of Evangelism Explosion International, and you're listening to Share Life Today. Now that you know Jesus, you have a purpose! You may have felt like you were floating through life before you came to know the Lord; but now, you can walk with purpose. And the purpose you have, to share the love of God with others. It's the perfect solution to a problem so many people face. Folks all over the world are searching for the reason that they're here. It's not enough to exist; and as a believer, you know that we were created for more than this life has to offer! So next time you hear someone say they don't know their purpose and they don't feel like they're doing what they're supposed to do, well, share with them how they CAN know. Only Jesus Christ can bring true purpose, no matter your current walk in life. Share that hope with someone today and pray the Lord will open their eyes to His plan for eternity. For tools and resources to help you get started, you can visit our website at www.sharelife.today. For tips, tools, and resources, visit www.sharelife.today.

Finding the Right Hope in Christ Alone1 Timothy 1:1-3Do you know fellow believers who are not of your physical family, but they're just like family? Isn't this awesome? There is a reason for that. Ephesians 4:16 & 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. This book of 1 Timothy is written out of a relationship like that. vs. 2Paul deals with this issue of hope in the very first verse of the book. The word “hope” means “anticipation; expectation; confidence.” It's not a wishy-washy, maybe so, probably so type of thing. It is a steadfast confidence. If your hope today lies in your job, your money, your house, your stocks and bonds, your religion, or your relationships, you are on a shaky foundation. Christ is your hope. Why is finding the right hope only found in Christ alone?First, Christ alone is Savior.The word “Savior” means “deliverer.” What do we need to be saved from? The Bible is clear. We need to be saved from our sins and the destruction that will come to this present evil world from the hand of God. Galatians 1:4Did you know Christ desires to be your Savior? He alone is Savior because He alone was God in the flesh, dying for our sins.Christ alone is Savior because He is the only One that abolished death. When Christ appeared, it was a wonderful day for this world. There was now hope, a way to be eternally delivered from death, a way to escape it, and a way to overcome it. 1 Thessalonians 5:9-10Why is finding the right hope only found in Christ alone?Second, Christ alone is Lord.Notice in verse 1 that Paul refers to Jesus as “Lord Jesus Christ.” Again in verse 2, he refers to him as “Jesus Christ our Lord.” The term “Lord”means “absolute authority.” cf. 6:15Jesus is called the “only Potentate [ruler]” and “Lord of lords.”Why is finding the right hope only found in Christ alone?Third, Christ alone can reconcile sinners.As we said, Christ alone is Savior. It is Jesus Christ that saves sinners. vs. 15How can that gap be bridged? We desperately need somebody who can mediate and bring peace with God for human beings that are sinners.There is now a way to find grace, mercy, and peace with God. If you have trusted Christ as your Savior, do you know what happened the moment you got saved?You received:Grace – You became an object of God's favor by faith in Christ alone.Mercy – You were released from the sentence of judgment you deserved.Peace – You were brought into a position of complete peace with God.Only Jesus Christ could do this for you. That is why Christ alone is our hope. Freedom MinistriesLearn more about Pastor Larry here.Support the Podcast If you like the show, please rate and review it on iTunes or wherever you subscribe, and tell a friend or family member about the show.Contact Pastor Larry here

For additional notes and resources check out Douglas' website.What exactly is the battle of Armageddon? Is there going to be a literal battle, as Revelation 16 seems to indicate? And how can we prepare for this awful battle at the end of time?1. Around 95 AD, the clear and present challenge to the Christian faith is emperor worship. Domitian is the first emperor to demand it in his lifetime. The center of emperor worship was Asia Minor, esp. the province of Asia (where Ephesus is).2. Armageddon comes from the Hebrew har-Megiddo, hill/mountain of Megiddo, on the edge of the Valley of Jezreel.3. Revelation is a book rich with symbolism, including 100s of allusions to the Old Testament.4. The general environs of Megiddo was a frequent battleground. Here are 34:BC2350 Pepi I and the "Gazelle's Head" -- Jezreel Valley1479 Thutmose III v. Canaanites – Megiddo1430 Amenhotep II in the Valley -- Jezreel Valley1360-1350 Biridiya v. Labayu – Megiddo1125 Deborah & Barak v. Sisera -- Taanach & Mount Tabor1090 Gideon v. Midianites/Amalekites -- Hill of Moreh/Endor1016 Saul & Jonathan v. Philistines -- Mount Gilboa925 Shosenq I (Shishak) -- Megiddo841 Jehu v. Joram & Ahaziah –Jezreel609 Necho II v. Josiah -- Megiddo218 Antiochus III v. Ptolemy IV -- Mount Tabor55 Gabinius v. Alexander -- Mount TaborAD67 Vespasian v. Jewish rebels -- Mount Tabor940 Ikhshidids v. Abbasids – Lejjun946 Ikhshidids v. Hamdanids -- Lejjun/Aksal975 Byzantines v. Fatimids -- Mount Tabor1113 Maudud v. Crusaders -- Mount Tabor1182 Saladin v. Daburiyans – Daburiya1182 Saladin v. Crusaders – Forbelet1183 Saladin v. Crusaders -- Ayn Jalut1187 Saladin v. Crusaders -- Mount Tabor1217 Fifth Crusade v. Moslems -- Mount Tabor1247 Ayyubids v. Crusaders -- Mount Tabor1260 Mamlukes v. Mongols -- Ayn Jalut1263 Mamlukes v. Hospitallers -- Mount Tabor1264 Hospitallers/Templars v. Mamlukes -- Lejjun1735 Zahir al-'Umar v. Nablus-Saqr alliance -- al‐Rawdah1771-73 Zahir al-'Umar at Lejjun -- Lejjun1799 Napoleon v. Ottomans -- Mount Tabor1918 Allenby v. Ottomans -- Megiddo1948 Israelis v. Arabs Mishmar -- Haemek1948 Israelis v. Arabs -- Zarin, Megiddo, Lejjun1967 Israelis v. Arabs -- Ramat David Airfield1973 Israelis v. Syrians -- Ramat David AirfieldComments on Rev 16Background: Plagues on Egypt (Exodus 6-13)The plagues are not fulfilled literally.Rome will fall and this is just: Invasions, plagues, corruption, ultimate demise.Not only to show she will fall, but to show that she has fallen….She is nothing but a cheap harlot (Rev 17).Metaphors involving sun, moon, and stars are common in apocalyptic literature.The God whom the Romans are defying is in control of the sun (not Apollo); he's in charge of the entire universe!Refusal to repent, refusal to admit God is right.Natural disastersEconomic slumpsInept and pleasure-seeking leadershipStupid laws and brutality in the governmentInvasionsAll warning signs ignored! (Are we paying attention to the "warning signs" in our own day?Eastern kings the threat to Rome – never subdued the Parthians.Dragon (ch 12) – Satan – the true power behind Rome.Don't be impressed by her power, or her false wonders.She is directly opposed to the Lord God Almighty!Rev 16:16 refers to Megiddo, where Sisera thrashed Jabin, Judges 4; and Necho slew Josiah, 2 Chron 35.Next chapter describes the Great Harlot, and in chapter 18-19 we read of her fall--the battle has in effect already taken place. Revelation is filled with different ways of describing God's ultimate defeat of Satan.This is speaking about Rome, yet the cosmic truths behind the description could just as well refer to any enemy of God. He's got no chance.There are many obstacles to taking the language of Revelation literally; I am afraid the preachers on pop religious radio are misleading many. The earliest recorded "battle of Armageddon" took place nearly 4400 years ago, and there have been dozens -- perhaps scores -- of battles in the region of Megiddo since that time. In other words, "Armageddon" is an image of warfare, for it reminds us of the battles waged from time immemorial.What would Revelation 16:16 conjure up in the mind of the reader/listener familiar with O.T. history?What does Gettysburg signify to an American? Normandy to a European? How about Waterloo? Focus on theology, not literal history. What is God trying to tell his people?Warfare--a showdown. The forces of good will ultimately triumph over the forces of evil, for Rome is not ultimately sovereign. Only Jesus Christ is the true King of Kings and Lord of Lords. ConclusionsThere will be no literal "Battle of Armageddon," radio preachers notwithstanding! Yet through the millennia, there have been numerous literal battles in the vicinity of Armageddon.It's an encouraging image, an apt picture of the cosmic battle between God and Satan, indeed! God's word assures us, in the book of Revelation, that ultimately he will vanquish every cause that sets itself up against him, his Son, and his kingdom. And in order to walk the walk of disciples, we need that assurance!If this is not a literal battle, there is no way to prepare for it physically. And yet both testaments urge us always to be ready to meet God. So rather than stockpiling water, canned goods, and ammunition -- as some survivalist groups practice -- it is the Lord's will that we heap up righteousness and good deeds, sharing what we have (not hoarding it) with as many as possible.Revelation 12:11 is in many ways the key to understanding the central message of the book of Revelation.Further study Remember that detailed chapter notes are available for every chapter in Revelation in the NT series.

John Baumgartner God is jealous over His people. He is jealous that His people do not worship Him in any way other than He has provided. He is jealous that His people do not worship Him through images. Images cannot substitute for God. Only Jesus Christ—who is truly God and not a substitute—reveals God to us. We worship God not through images but through Jesus Christ.

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic BostonChurch. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston ordonate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com. This morning we are beginning... We are in week four of our sermon series Committed. We've been talking about the essential habits of an abundant life. And what I've been saying over these last four weeks is that we are looking at the essential, the non-negotiable and super practical commitments that every Christian needs to make in order to grow in their faith, in order to persevere through the trials of life, in order to fulfill God's calling for their life and to experience and enjoy the abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give. And I'm probably going to repeat that every week. I've been told repetition is the mother of wisdom, but also every week we have new people here that are joining us for the first time and want to get them caught off the speed. And so as we begin, just a couple of reminders. First of all, as we talk about abundant life, said this in the first week of the series, we're not talking about a life full of the earthly comforts and pleasures that the world often seeks. We're talking about something deeper than that. We were talking about a life filled with purpose, meaning, with mission, with the hope, love, joy, peace, presence of God's Holy Spirit, of a life lived in the presence of Jesus Christ and so that's one reminder. Secondly, if you weren't here last week, we began looking specifically at something in scripture called the Great Commission. And you can find this in Matthew chapter 28 beginning in verse 18 said, and Jesus came and says to his disciples... This is right before he ascends into heaven. So he's been resurrected, he's risen, conquered the grave, he's about to return to his Father's right hand on his throne in heaven. He tells his disciples this, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And so go therefore and make disciples of all of the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age." This is the great commission. This is the mission of the church. This is the mission that every Christian is called to live out. And last week when we started this, we talked about how there's really two aspects of this mission. The first one we looked at last week was evangelism. It's the call to go and to make disciples of all the nations. And that for some of us, that means God's going to call us across the world. For most of us it means God's going to call us just across the street, across the cubicle, across the way to the people that he has put into our lives. But to go and to do so and to share this good news with them. And so we talked about evangelism last week. This week we are focusing on the second part. We're focusing on discipleship. We're focusing on Jesus' command to go and teach them to observe, all that I have commanded you to do. Discipleship to simply put is the lifelong process of following Jesus, of trusting his word, of obeying his commands, of becoming like him more and more in faith and knowledge and holiness and obedience to the Father. It's a total body soul transformation. Our minds are transformed by the truth of his word. He transforms the desires of our hearts, the actions of our hands. And last week when we started talking about this mission, we talked about how really when you look at it, the mission is very clear and the mission is very simple. The mission is simple, but simple doesn't mean easy. Evangelism's hard. And as we talk about discipleship today, what we're going to find is that discipleship is costly. That our salvation cost us nothing. It costs Jesus everything, our justification. But justification costs us nothing. We are saved by grace through faith. It is the free gift of God. Salvation is free. But our sanctification, this life of discipleship that we are called to, that may cost us everything. We sing the song often. Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. And so we're going to be talking about this today and we're going to see that discipleship is costly, but it doesn't need to be complicated. And so I'm going to be trying to demystify discipleship for us today so that together we can be the disciples that Jesus calls us to be. And so if you have your Bibles, open up to Matthew chapter four, we're going to be looking at verse 18 through 22. A pretty short passage, just a couple of verses. And really we're going to be focusing most of our time just on one verse within this passage, just one sentence, 10 words. But in these 10 words Jesus gives us, he lays out the entire framework for what it means to be one of his disciples. So if you have your Bibles, you can follow along. If not the words will be up here on the screen. This is Matthew chapter four, beginning in verse 17. Sorry, I said 18 earlier. Matthew 4:17. Matthew tells us, "From that time Jesus began to preach saying, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And while walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who's called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and they were casting the net into the sea for they were fishermen. And he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and they followed him. And going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets and he called to them and immediately they left the boat and their father and they followed him." This is the reading of God's holy word with us this morning. Would you please join me in prayer over our message today? Jesus, I pray today that you would make evident both the price and the privilege of being your disciple. Help us to count the cost so that we can find Christ worthy. Lord, challenge us today where we need to be challenged. Holy Spirit, convict us where we need to be convicted. Encourage us in whatever area that we may lack the faith or the courage to move forward, to commit, to take up our cross and to follow Jesus. Lord, I pray that you would bless our time and your word right now. I ask this in Jesus name. Amen. All right, well I said that we're going to be looking primarily at just one verse out of this passage and the verse we're going to be looking at it's right there in the middle. It's Matthew chapter four verse 19. And it just simply says this, "And he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men." And in that one short sentence, Jesus gives us the entire framework of what it means to be his disciple. Follow him and he will make you a fisher of men. And so we're going to break this down thought for thought. And the first thing Jesus says is follow me. And the first thing that we need to understand is that being a disciple of Jesus requires a change of both direction and of identity. And when Jesus tells us to follow him, this is what he's calling us to do. It's a change of direction and identity. Right before calling Peter and Andrew, Matthew tells us that from that time Jesus began to preach, and this was his message. His message was, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And we talked about this in the first week, that discipleship, following Jesus begins with repentance and faith. That you cannot follow Jesus and yet continue to live life your own way. That there needs to be a change in the trajectory of your life where you turn away from sin in repentance and you turn toward Jesus Christ in faith. You got to lay down your pride. You got to lay down your sin. You got to lay down the false idols and the ideologies of this world and submit fully to the lordship of Jesus Christ as your king. It's a change in direction, but it is also a change in identity. Discipleship, it's not just something that you do. It is something that you become. It is something that you are. That you were once a prisoner in the domain of darkness, you have now been transferred as a citizen into the kingdom of heaven. You were a slave to sin, but you have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. You've been set free. You've been adopted into the household of God. You are now a child of God. You are now a new creation in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. A radical transformation of identity takes place when you become a disciple of Jesus Christ. I'm going to read one of Jesus' most famous teachings that he gave his disciples about what it means to follow him. And if you never heard this, if you've never read this before, this is shocking. Matthew 16 verse 24. Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, if anyone wants to follow me and be my disciple, then let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." We talk so much about the cross. Sometimes you forget what that really is. This is the most gruesome form of execution and punishment and existence in that world. Jesus saying, this is what it looks like to follow me. You're going to have to die to yourself. You're going to have to pick up your cross. You're never going to find true life. You're never going to find your true self, your true identity until you lose it, till you lay down your old life. That to be born again as a child of God, you need to die to yourself. That to be accepted as a disciple of Jesus, you need to deny yourself, deny your selfish, proud, rebellious heart and surrender your life to Jesus Christ. And what we see is that Jesus offers us this glorious new identity, but with it comes a radical change in direction, one that is going to require total surrender. And so Jesus calls these first disciples and immediately they leave everything. They leave their nets, they leave their boats, their livelihoods, their family. They leave it all to follow Jesus. And before we go any further today, this is what we need to ask ourself. This is what I want you to ask yourself. What have you given up for the gospel? What have you needed to leave behind to follow Jesus? Or what do you know that you're being called to leave behind, to let go of right now? Are there things that you know should be giving up, that you need to be letting go of, leaving behind, surrendering in order to fully follow Jesus as you know that you ought? Peter and Andrew, James and John, they left everything. Now this doesn't mean that every Christian needs to leave their job and leave their family and go be a missionary somewhere across the world, but not all of us are going to be called to that, but we are going to all be called to something. So what is the Holy Spirit putting on your heart right now? Is there something there that you're holding on to? Is something there that's holding you back from following Jesus as you ought? The only way to come to Christ is with the empty hands of faith, right? It's hard to embrace God when you got your arms already wrapped around the world, when your hands are full, when you're clinging to things that you know need to let go of.Hebrews 12:1 says, "Since we're surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin in which clings so closely." Just whatever is holding you, whatever you're tangled up and cast it aside, let it go. And then in your freedom in Christ, "Run with endurance the race that is set before us." How? "By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him." He went that distance for us. "Seeing the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God." In Luke 14, Jesus is going about, he's preaching and large crowds of people begin to follow him. And in verse 27, he turns to these crowds and he says, "Listen, whoever doesn't bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?" "Otherwise, when he has laid the foundation and is not able to finish it, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, this man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 men to come against him with 20,000?" "And if not, while the other is he had a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace." So therefore, and this is his point, "So therefore any one of you who does not renounce all that he has, cannot be my disciple." What is it going to cost to follow a man who carried a cross? Jesus wasn't interested in drawing crowds, fair-weather fans, right? He wasn't coming so that he could clean up our lives a little bit or do some renovations here and there. He wants to come into your life. He wants to tear the whole house down. He wants to lay a new foundation, one that's going to last, one that he can build your life on for eternity. He wasn't looking for fair-weather fans, he's looking for people ready to deny themselves, ready to take up their cross, ready to follow him and lay their lives at his feet and say, Lord, not my will but yours be done. This is what it means to follow Jesus. We can't talk about discipleship without counting the cost. What is it going to cost? Are you willing to pay that price? I'm going to leave us here in this tension for a while. We'll come back at the end. I'll give you some resolution to this, but we're going to move on for now. And just understand that when Jesus says, follow me, he means take up your cross and follow me. But second, he says, follow me and I will make you. That if you follow Jesus, he's going to change your life. He's going to transform you. And the second point today we're going to be looking at is that being a disciple, it also requires a change of heart and behavior. To really grasp this, what Jesus is saying here and what's going on, you got to understand a little bit about first century Judaism because this idea of discipleship, it's maybe a word that we're familiar with, but it's not a word that's like commonly used or understood in our culture. It was very common in their culture back then. Everyone knew what a disciple was. They'd received disciples out and about following their rabbis around town. A disciple was a student who would come under the teaching and the instruction and the discipline of a rabbi, but they weren't just a student. See, first century Jewish kids, from an early age, they would begin the work of memorizing the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. And as these children grew up, there would come a time where the very best, the very brightest students might perhaps be offered the rare and distinguished honor of being called by a rabbi to be his disciple. And accepting this invitation it meant you had to leave everything. You had to leave your old life, you had to leave your family, the family business. They would leave everything not to follow their rabbi, not just to learn from the rabbi, but to live with the rabbi, to spend every moment with the rabbi trying to learn all that they could to become like their rabbi in every way being a disciple. What it meant was living life in the presence of your rabbi, close proximity, close relationship. And the goal was so that you could really in every way become just like them. And this is exactly what we see Jesus did with his 12 disciples. They follow him around. Everywhere he went, they watched how he lived, they heard him talk, they served with him, they went on missions together with him, and they were learning to be like him in every way. And so we have to ask, what are the implications of this for us today? And really to be a disciple today, it doesn't mean anything different than what it meant for the disciples back then. The difference is Jesus isn't here with us physically. We don't follow him around, the man Jesus Christ in a physical body, but he pours his spirit out upon his church so that yeah, spiritually we live our life in the presence of our rabbi Jesus Christ with him, going where he goes, doing what he says. And I say that because Christians today, we often want to reduce discipleship to like a program or a class or a one-on-one mentorship with a more mature believer. And none of those things are bad. They're just not what we're talking about. There are just such a long ways off from what the New Testament is talking about when it uses this word disciple. And so being a disciple of Jesus, it means living like the 12. It means living in fellowship with other disciples. But you're not following them, you're following Jesus, you're following him together. And so we can't reduce this to meeting with a mentor. We can't reduce it to going and attending a seminar or a Sunday school class or anything like that. When we're talking about the discipleship we're talking about living in community and fellowship with other disciples who are together following Jesus, living life in his presence by the power of his Holy Spirit. Following Jesus, abiding in Jesus, abiding in his spirit, abiding in his word together. And so what this means is two things. First of all, it means that disciples need to follow Jesus personally. And secondly, it means that disciples cannot follow Jesus privately. Personally, if you're a member of Mosaic or if you've taken our membership class, you know that one of the things we talk about in that class is that we have seven expectations of members here at Mosaic. And the first expectation that we have for our members is that each and every one of us strive spiritually. That we each take a personal responsibility for living life in the presence of Christ, of striving to build that relationship with Christ ourselves, of working out our own salvation with fear and trembling. This comes from Philippians chapter two verse 12. Paul says, "Therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, so now not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." You work out your own salvation personally because God is working in you personally. But bigger than that, the idea that Paul's really getting at here is that he wants this church to know and to understand and to never forget that he is not their pope, he's not their priest, he's not their rabbi. Jesus is. And this is important, the Philippians were not called to be disciples of Paul. They weren't called to follow Paul, they weren't called to live their lives in the presence of Paul. They were called to follow Jesus. And thankfully they were a church that really didn't struggle with this very much. They were a relatively healthy and mature and solid church. There was another church that Paul cared about that did struggle with this quite a bit. It was the church in Corinth. We did a whole sermon series on first and second Corinthians called Prodigal Church. And the reason we called it that is because this was a church that had some issues. They struggled with a lot of things and this was one of them. And so in first Corinthians chapter one, one of the very first things that Paul addresses with them is this. He says, "I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you all agree and that there be no division among you, but that you all be united in the same mind and the same judgment for it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there's quarreling among you brothers." And this is what I mean. "What I mean is that each one of you says, well, I follow Paul or I follow Apollos or I follow Cephas, that's Peter, or I follow Christ." He says, "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?" Corinthian Church was pretty immature and dysfunctional at times and you read the letter that Paul wrote to them. He gives them a lot of correction. The Philippian church, however, was relatively strong and healthy. He addresses this same thing with them, but does so from way of encouragement and reminder. And so when you read the book of Philippians, one of the things you got to keep in mind, and you see this throughout the book, if you're reading it closely, one of the things you see is that Paul is writing to them from a place in his life where he doesn't know that he is much longer to live, right? This could be his last correspondence with them. He may never see them again. There's a very real chance that he may be facing death, even execution sometime in the near future. And he's not sure, but he wants to write to them to remind them that they're going to be fine without him. Because from the very beginning, they were not his church. God used him in a very special way as an apostle to help this church get started. But what they really needed to understand was that they were not Paul's church. They were Jesus' church. Paul wasn't their pope. Paul wasn't their priest, their mediator or their rabbi. The word that Paul uses to describe his relationship with them. He says, "I was your partner." We were partners in the gospel. We were disciples following Jesus together. And this is why he opens his letter in Philippians chapter one. He says, "I thank my God and all of my remembrance for you, always in all my prayers of mine for you, all making my prayers with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus." Well, who is the he that Paul is referring to here, right? Because Paul is the one who kind of planted this church, but Paul's not referring to himself. The he who began the good work that Paul is talking about is Jesus Christ. That Jesus will complete this good work even if Paul's no longer around. And this is how he starts his letter and then he encourages them with the same thing again at the end. Like, okay Paul, if you go, if you leave us, if you die, who's going to take care of us as a church? And he tells them in Philippians 4:19. He says, "My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in Christ Jesus." Regardless of whether Paul lived or died, what mattered was that Christ would be with them till the end of the age. And that Paul had full confidence that he would make sure even in Paul's absence, that Jesus would finish the good work that he had started in this church. And I say all this because this is what making disciples is all about. It's about teaching people to become independently dependent on Jesus. To become independent in the sense that they're not dependent on us or any other human being for their spiritual wellbeing and to become dependent on Jesus Christ who really is the head of the church, the chief shepherd of every church. And so this might be a paradigm shift for a lot of Christians. It was for the early church as well because this is not how the religious leaders of their day behave. The religious leaders of their day, they very much gathered people around themselves who were dependent on them, who looked to them as spiritual authorities, as mediators between them and God. But Jesus warned his disciples not to be like them, that as his followers that they were going to need to be different, that they could not go on and fall into the same footsteps of the other religious leaders of their day. And Jesus actually had very harsh words for some of these religious leaders. In Matthew chapter 23, he's warning his disciples about this and in verse five he says, "First of all, they do all of their deeds to be seen by others. They love to make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long." They like to show off their spiritual maturity. "And they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces, and they love being called rabbi by others, but you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth for you of one Father who is in heaven. Neither be called instructor for you have one instructor, the Christ." He says, "The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted." Now, I don't think Jesus is trying to argue about semantics and titles and calling people teacher or whatever that may be, but he's trying to make a point and the point is this, there's only one Father and by the blood of Jesus Christ, God can be your Father, but God can't be your grandfather. You can't be dependent on some other earthly father to be the mediator between you and God the Father. Only Jesus Christ can do that. There is one teacher, one rabbi, and Jesus can be your rabbi, but he can't be your rabbi's rabbi. He can't be your pastor's pastor. You need that relationship with him yourself. Jesus can call you friend, but he can't be a friend of a friend. The big idea is every single Christian needs to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ for themselves. As Paul said in first Timothy 2:5 that, "There is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself as a ransom for all." This mission to go and to make disciples is not a mission to go and make disciples of ourselves. It's a mission to go and make disciples of Jesus. It's not a mission to go out and to become the mediator between God and men. The mission is to point people to the only mediator that there is, the man Jesus Christ. If I had to sum it all up, I would put it like this, that the call of discipleship... Well, first of all, it's a call to be a disciple, to be yourself connected to Christ, abiding in Christ, living in the presence of Christ, following your rabbi. But the call to make disciples is a call for those who are doing that, for those who are more mature in the faith, to help those who are less mature in the faith, become more mature in the faith, by becoming less dependent on them and more dependent on Jesus. That was a lot. So I'm going to say it again. That the call to make disciples is a call for those who are more mature in the faith to help those who are less mature in the faith, become more mature in the faith by becoming less dependent on them and more dependent on Jesus Christ, where you're teaching them to cling to Christ, to abide in Christ, to pursue Christ, to follow Jesus, and to live their lives in his presence. Yesterday our daughter Nora had a birthday party. She's turning eight tomorrow and with our kids we don't do the big huge birthday party every year. But we told them both, when you turn eight years old, you can do the big party where you invite the whole class and everything. So we did the whole trampoline park thing and celebrated her birthday and it was a ton of fun. Now every parent in the room knows when these birthdays come along its bittersweet because it's like how do they grow up so fast? I remember just as clear as it was yesterday, the day that she was born and now she's eight years old and it's hard to see them grow up. You just kind of want them to stay little forever. My wife saw one of these sappy parenting memes the other day, said something like, one day you're going to pick your child up and not realize it will be the last time you put them back down. First of all, how dare you? Like the internet is supposed to be a nice happy place, I thought. You say that and all the moms... It was more pronounced in the first service because we had all the MiniMo parents here. All the moms are like crying. All the dads coincidentally have something stuck in their eye and it's like, what? You just want them to stay little and cute forever, just hold on. They're so sweet and innocent. And we as parents, we think that way. God doesn't think that way. God doesn't want his kids to stay little for... He wants them to grow up fast, to grow up healthy and strong and mature. He wants them to grow up to be independent in the sense that they're not dependent on people or things, but dependent on himself. Because unlike us, unlike our kids, when God's kids grow up, they don't grow up by becoming less dependent on him as they mature. As God's children's mature, they mature in doing so, they begin to see how really totally and utterly dependent on God they really are. They become less dependent on people, on things, and they become more dependent on God himself. That's what it means to grow up, to mature in the faith, to live every moment with this awareness and dependency on your heavenly Father. And so what this means is like, yeah, a newborn baby Christian, they might need to be held, they might need to be fed for a while as they start to grow, they might need someone there to hold their hand as they learn how to walk. For a little while that's okay, but that's not the goal. The goal is not to coddle them, not to become the spiritual equivalent of helicopter parents. The goal is to help them grow up, push them out of the nest, teach them to feed themselves, teach them to walk on their own so that they can begin helping others to do the same. And John 15:5, Jesus said, "I'm the vine, you're the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." That the only way for a disciple to be healthy, to grow and to bear fruit is not to be a branch of a branch of a branch. It's to be a branch directly connected and abiding in the vine of Jesus Christ. And so disciples need to follow Jesus personally, but disciples can't follow Jesus privately. That you need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ but this doesn't mean that you should have a private relationship with Jesus Christ. I said this last week, I'm going to say it again. You almost never see Jesus in the gospels. You never any of the apostles. You almost never see them in a private one-on-one setting with anyone, like everything that Jesus did, he did in a communal setting. And Jesus knew each one of his disciples personally. He called each one of his disciples personally. He loved and he cared for each one of his disciples personally. But he spent almost all of his time with each one of his disciples in community, with the three, with the 12, with the 72. There's always a group of people around him, and I say this because sometimes we want to kind of narrowly define discipleship as like a one-on-one mentorship and that can be useful for a time, for a task, for a purpose. But when you read the New Testament, everything that you see happening is happening in the context of community. It's the body of Christ united working together. That's where people grow. And I said this earlier, I want to demystify discipleship. Discipleship is costly, but it shouldn't be complicated. And when you look at the example of Jesus, when you look at the example of the early church, what you find is there's really only four things that you need as a disciple of Jesus to grow in your faith. It's four things. You need the truth of God's word. You need the power, the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life. You need the fellowship of the church. And you need the experiences of life. You need God's word to cut to your heart, to reveal truth, to correct your understanding, to give you knowledge. You need God's Holy Spirit to bring conviction of sin, to bring assurance of your salvation. The Holy Spirit is needed. The Holy Spirit equips the members of the body so that they can minister with their gifts to one another. You need the word, you need the spirit. You need the fellowship of the church. You need the rest of the body holding you up and holding you accountable. And then you need the experience of life. And this is everyone, regardless of whether you're a disciple of Jesus or not, you're going to get the experiences of life. We're all going to go through the storms of life. How you go through those are dependent on those first three things. You go through the storms of life alone, they're going to crush you. Go through the storms of life with the power of God's Spirit and the fellowship with the church and the truth of his word. God's going to use those very experiences to grow your faith, your character, your perseverance to strengthen you. And so if you're living in the presence of Jesus, if you are in fellowship with other spirit-filled believers and together submitting your lives to the truth and to the authority of God's word, you are going to grow in your faith. It's not complicated. It takes commitment, it takes time. It takes patience and perseverance, but you will grow. And this is why if you know us as a church, we don't focus a lot of time in just offering a thousand different classes or seminars or programs. We focus so much time and care and attention into our community groups because this is where growth happens. Every week spirit-filled people coming together as the body of Christ around the truth of God's word. We're there together in community and that is where the Holy Spirit works in us and through us, to strengthen us, to guide us, to help us, to abide each firmly connected to the vine of Jesus Christ so that we can bear fruit as we go through the experiences of life together, the ups, the downs, the joys, the pains, all of it. God has ordained for our growth. There's a really beautiful picture of this in Ephesians chapter four that kind of shows how this all is intended to work. Ephesians 4:1. "I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. There's one body and one Spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one baptism when God and Father of all who is overall and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gifts." So first of all, Paul begins to show this picture of the unity of the body and of the power of the Father's Holy Spirit present in each member of the body. But then he says, within the unity of the body there is distinction among the members. That God equips the body, different people, members of the body in different ways and that they all need to work together to grow up together into maturity. And so he continues in verse 11, he says, "This is why he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love. We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. From whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love." When Jesus says, I will make you, when Jesus tells us he's going to change our lives, this is how he does it as one body with many members, each equipped by the Holy Spirit to come and to work together under the headship of Jesus Christ, growing in unity, growing as one. And the idea here is if you abide in this, you will grow. That Jesus will make you new. He will bear his fruit in your life. He will give you and transform your heart, your behavior, your character. You will be conformed to the fullness, the image of Christ. So that's point number two. Point number three, being a disciple requires a change of heart and behavior. It also requires a change of purpose and perspective. And so I said I was going to leave you in that tension. We counting the cost of discipleship, going to kind of come back to that. Now, from our perspective in this life, when you look at the cost of following Jesus, right? Deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow him. That's a high price. That seems like that cost might be too much. It is high, and Jesus calls us to consider that cost before following him. He calls us to consider that cost. Then he challenges us to consider it again and to consider it from an eternal perspective. Because if you keep going in Matthew 16, the verse we read earlier, Jesus told the disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." He tells them that, but then he gives them like... Well, let's look at this from a different angle. Let's look at this from an eternal perspective. Four verse 25. "Whoever would save his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? What should a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels and the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done." What Jesus wants to see is on the one hand the discipleship is costly and on the other hand, it's not nearly as costly as the alternative. What is it profit a man if he gains the whole world, all the money, all the fame, all the friends and praise and power and comforts of this world and yet loses his soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whatever following Jesus may cost you right now and the grand scope of eternity, it is a small price to pay. That Jesus says, "I'm coming, and when I do, I'm coming in the glory of my Father and I'm going to repay each person according to what they've done." And every single one of us, we need to have this perspective. We need to see things from this angle, when we do, what we see is that the true cost of discipleship, it's not a price to be paid, it is an investment to be made. You invest your life savings, you give everything that you have, you give it all to Christ and you live life through the bear market of this life, but you do so knowing that in the end that the bulls are going to win, that the investment is going to pay off. That Jesus is coming soon and that your sacrifice, everything that you give up right now, it is earning you spiritual dividends right now and it's earning you heavenly rewards when Christ returns. Mark 10. Peter comes up to Jesus and he's like, look, "Jesus, we left everything to follow you." And Jesus says in verse 29, he says, "Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brother or sister or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time. Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and land with persecutions and in the age to come eternal life." In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus shares a few parables and to show us what this is like. He says in verse 44, "That the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that's hidden in a field which a man found and he covered up. And then in his joy, he goes and he sells all that he has and buys that field." And the idea is from one perspective, this guy seems like a fool, right? He just gave his life savings to buy a worthless piece of dirt, an empty field. And yet from another perspective, you see that he didn't give up anything at all. That whatever he laid down to purchase that field could not compare to the infinite glory of riches that were buried beneath the surface that no one else could see. Jesus says again in verse 45, "That the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who on finding one pearl of great value." He goes out and he sells all that he has to buy it. And Jesus gives us this new perspective to think about discipleship and with this perspective, he gives us new purpose as well. That he says, "Follow me and I'm going to make you." And what is he going to make us? Ultimately he says, he's going to make you fishers of men. That's the purpose. Think about that purpose in the context of this new perspective that we have. Jesus asks, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet loses his soul?" Well flip that around. What does it profit a man if he gives up everything he has right now for the sake of the gospel, in order to gain the souls of others for eternity? Jesus wants to make us fishers of men. You think about that. Jesus wants to give you the opportunity right now as his disciple to play a part in altering the eternal destiny of souls, to play a part in changing the eternal destination of people. You talk about heavenly rewards, like imagine seeing someone in heaven and knowing that Jesus used your witness, your faithfulness, your sacrifice to get them there. Imagine the joy of walking in and seeing that person and knowing that they will be spending eternity in paradise, in the presence of Christ, and that you got to play a part in that. Before telling the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus told two other parables to the same effect in Luke chapter 15. In the context we're told that, "Tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to him and the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling about it, saying, "This man receives sinners and he eats with them." And so he told them this parable. He says, "What man of you having a hundred sheep if he has lost one of them, does not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he is found it, he lays it on his shoulder rejoicing and when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors saying, rejoice with me for I found my sheep that was lost. Just so I tell you, there's more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance." "Or what woman having 10 silver coins if she loses one does not light a lamp and sweep the house and see diligently until she finds it. And when she's found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, rejoice with me for I found the coin that I lost. Just so I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents." Who are we that we should be given the privilege, the joy of taking part in something like this? There is great joy we're told in heaven right now when one sinner repents, imagine the joy then. Imagine the joy when all the saints go marching into the joy of their master together and you see those souls that led you to Christ, and you see those people that Jesus used you in their life to lead them to Christ, to help them to grow in Christ. Imagine that joy of being there together. We do not deserve such an honor, and yet we serve a God of amazing grace. When you have this perspective and this purpose, it changes everything. And when you have this perspective and this purpose, all of a sudden everything seems, as Paul said in second Corinthians, it's like "Light and momentary affliction which is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." For why? Because, "We are not looking to things that are seen, but the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." Well, I could spend a whole lot more time talking about this theoretically, rather, what I would like you to do is I would like you to go into your community groups this week and talk about how you've experienced this for yourself personally. Share testimonies of God's grace. Jesus calls us fishermen and fishermen love to tell stories. And so tell some of those stories. I think we're going to be spending a lot of time in heaven telling fishermen stories of how Jesus used us to bring other people to faith or used other people to save us or lead us to himself. Share some of those stories this week. If you've played a part in leading someone else to Christ or share the stories of those who played a part in leading you to Christ, not to boast in yourself but to boast as Paul says in Jesus Christ, and to be an encouragement to one another. Share some of those stories this week. And if you're not connected to a community group, this is a really good week to get connected to a community group. If you don't take anything else away from the sermon, this is what I would hope you would take, that you need to be connected to a community, to have fellowship with other people in a meaningful way. And so we would love to help you do that. You can check those out on our website, or better yet, just stop by the welcome center out there and there's people there that would love to help you find a group that works for you. And then if you're here today and you are not yet connected to Christ, if you are ready to make that commitment, to become a follower of Christ, to become a disciple of Jesus Christ, we would love to talk to you about that as well. You can talk to people at the welcome center or Pastor Andy and I will be up here after the service. We'd love to talk to you about that. We could talk to you about baptism or just if you have any questions about Christianity in general, we'd be happy to talk to you, pray with you about that as well. Well, right now, let's pray and we'll spend more time worshiping together. Jesus, we thank you. We praise you so much for the price that you paid to save us. And I pray that you would give us now the grace and the strength and the courage to gladly pay, to gladly suffer and sacrifice whatever is needed to be your witnesses, your followers, your disciples here on earth right now. God help us to take up our crosses daily to follow you, knowing that as our good shepherd that you have promised to lead us into pastures of abundant life. Give us faith to believe that whatever we may have to give up right now in terms of worldly comforts and pleasure, they cannot compare to the spiritual blessings, the eternal rewards that await those who follow you. So Lord, help us to keep our eyes fixed, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Help us to keep our eyes fixed on you, Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that was set before you endured the cross for us, and you're now seated in glory and power at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. Father, we love you, we praise you, and now we just want to worship you together in the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic BostonChurch. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston ordonate to this ministry, please visit mosaicboston.com. This morning we are beginning... We are in week four of our sermon series Committed. We've been talking about the essential habits of an abundant life. And what I've been saying over these last four weeks is that we are looking at the essential, the non-negotiable and super practical commitments that every Christian needs to make in order to grow in their faith, in order to persevere through the trials of life, in order to fulfill God's calling for their life and to experience and enjoy the abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give. And I'm probably going to repeat that every week. I've been told repetition is the mother of wisdom, but also every week we have new people here that are joining us for the first time and want to get them caught off the speed. And so as we begin, just a couple of reminders. First of all, as we talk about abundant life, said this in the first week of the series, we're not talking about a life full of the earthly comforts and pleasures that the world often seeks. We're talking about something deeper than that. We were talking about a life filled with purpose, meaning, with mission, with the hope, love, joy, peace, presence of God's Holy Spirit, of a life lived in the presence of Jesus Christ and so that's one reminder. Secondly, if you weren't here last week, we began looking specifically at something in scripture called the Great Commission. And you can find this in Matthew chapter 28 beginning in verse 18 said, and Jesus came and says to his disciples... This is right before he ascends into heaven. So he's been resurrected, he's risen, conquered the grave, he's about to return to his Father's right hand on his throne in heaven. He tells his disciples this, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And so go therefore and make disciples of all of the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age." This is the great commission. This is the mission of the church. This is the mission that every Christian is called to live out. And last week when we started this, we talked about how there's really two aspects of this mission. The first one we looked at last week was evangelism. It's the call to go and to make disciples of all the nations. And that for some of us, that means God's going to call us across the world. For most of us it means God's going to call us just across the street, across the cubicle, across the way to the people that he has put into our lives. But to go and to do so and to share this good news with them. And so we talked about evangelism last week. This week we are focusing on the second part. We're focusing on discipleship. We're focusing on Jesus' command to go and teach them to observe, all that I have commanded you to do. Discipleship to simply put is the lifelong process of following Jesus, of trusting his word, of obeying his commands, of becoming like him more and more in faith and knowledge and holiness and obedience to the Father. It's a total body soul transformation. Our minds are transformed by the truth of his word. He transforms the desires of our hearts, the actions of our hands. And last week when we started talking about this mission, we talked about how really when you look at it, the mission is very clear and the mission is very simple. The mission is simple, but simple doesn't mean easy. Evangelism's hard. And as we talk about discipleship today, what we're going to find is that discipleship is costly. That our salvation cost us nothing. It costs Jesus everything, our justification. But justification costs us nothing. We are saved by grace through faith. It is the free gift of God. Salvation is free. But our sanctification, this life of discipleship that we are called to, that may cost us everything. We sing the song often. Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. And so we're going to be talking about this today and we're going to see that discipleship is costly, but it doesn't need to be complicated. And so I'm going to be trying to demystify discipleship for us today so that together we can be the disciples that Jesus calls us to be. And so if you have your Bibles, open up to Matthew chapter four, we're going to be looking at verse 18 through 22. A pretty short passage, just a couple of verses. And really we're going to be focusing most of our time just on one verse within this passage, just one sentence, 10 words. But in these 10 words Jesus gives us, he lays out the entire framework for what it means to be one of his disciples. So if you have your Bibles, you can follow along. If not the words will be up here on the screen. This is Matthew chapter four, beginning in verse 17. Sorry, I said 18 earlier. Matthew 4:17. Matthew tells us, "From that time Jesus began to preach saying, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And while walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who's called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and they were casting the net into the sea for they were fishermen. And he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and they followed him. And going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets and he called to them and immediately they left the boat and their father and they followed him." This is the reading of God's holy word with us this morning. Would you please join me in prayer over our message today? Jesus, I pray today that you would make evident both the price and the privilege of being your disciple. Help us to count the cost so that we can find Christ worthy. Lord, challenge us today where we need to be challenged. Holy Spirit, convict us where we need to be convicted. Encourage us in whatever area that we may lack the faith or the courage to move forward, to commit, to take up our cross and to follow Jesus. Lord, I pray that you would bless our time and your word right now. I ask this in Jesus name. Amen. All right, well I said that we're going to be looking primarily at just one verse out of this passage and the verse we're going to be looking at it's right there in the middle. It's Matthew chapter four verse 19. And it just simply says this, "And he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men." And in that one short sentence, Jesus gives us the entire framework of what it means to be his disciple. Follow him and he will make you a fisher of men. And so we're going to break this down thought for thought. And the first thing Jesus says is follow me. And the first thing that we need to understand is that being a disciple of Jesus requires a change of both direction and of identity. And when Jesus tells us to follow him, this is what he's calling us to do. It's a change of direction and identity. Right before calling Peter and Andrew, Matthew tells us that from that time Jesus began to preach, and this was his message. His message was, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And we talked about this in the first week, that discipleship, following Jesus begins with repentance and faith. That you cannot follow Jesus and yet continue to live life your own way. That there needs to be a change in the trajectory of your life where you turn away from sin in repentance and you turn toward Jesus Christ in faith. You got to lay down your pride. You got to lay down your sin. You got to lay down the false idols and the ideologies of this world and submit fully to the lordship of Jesus Christ as your king. It's a change in direction, but it is also a change in identity. Discipleship, it's not just something that you do. It is something that you become. It is something that you are. That you were once a prisoner in the domain of darkness, you have now been transferred as a citizen into the kingdom of heaven. You were a slave to sin, but you have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. You've been set free. You've been adopted into the household of God. You are now a child of God. You are now a new creation in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. A radical transformation of identity takes place when you become a disciple of Jesus Christ. I'm going to read one of Jesus' most famous teachings that he gave his disciples about what it means to follow him. And if you never heard this, if you've never read this before, this is shocking. Matthew 16 verse 24. Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, if anyone wants to follow me and be my disciple, then let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." We talk so much about the cross. Sometimes you forget what that really is. This is the most gruesome form of execution and punishment and existence in that world. Jesus saying, this is what it looks like to follow me. You're going to have to die to yourself. You're going to have to pick up your cross. You're never going to find true life. You're never going to find your true self, your true identity until you lose it, till you lay down your old life. That to be born again as a child of God, you need to die to yourself. That to be accepted as a disciple of Jesus, you need to deny yourself, deny your selfish, proud, rebellious heart and surrender your life to Jesus Christ. And what we see is that Jesus offers us this glorious new identity, but with it comes a radical change in direction, one that is going to require total surrender. And so Jesus calls these first disciples and immediately they leave everything. They leave their nets, they leave their boats, their livelihoods, their family. They leave it all to follow Jesus. And before we go any further today, this is what we need to ask ourself. This is what I want you to ask yourself. What have you given up for the gospel? What have you needed to leave behind to follow Jesus? Or what do you know that you're being called to leave behind, to let go of right now? Are there things that you know should be giving up, that you need to be letting go of, leaving behind, surrendering in order to fully follow Jesus as you know that you ought? Peter and Andrew, James and John, they left everything. Now this doesn't mean that every Christian needs to leave their job and leave their family and go be a missionary somewhere across the world, but not all of us are going to be called to that, but we are going to all be called to something. So what is the Holy Spirit putting on your heart right now? Is there something there that you're holding on to? Is something there that's holding you back from following Jesus as you ought? The only way to come to Christ is with the empty hands of faith, right? It's hard to embrace God when you got your arms already wrapped around the world, when your hands are full, when you're clinging to things that you know need to let go of.Hebrews 12:1 says, "Since we're surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin in which clings so closely." Just whatever is holding you, whatever you're tangled up and cast it aside, let it go. And then in your freedom in Christ, "Run with endurance the race that is set before us." How? "By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him." He went that distance for us. "Seeing the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God." In Luke 14, Jesus is going about, he's preaching and large crowds of people begin to follow him. And in verse 27, he turns to these crowds and he says, "Listen, whoever doesn't bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?" "Otherwise, when he has laid the foundation and is not able to finish it, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, this man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 men to come against him with 20,000?" "And if not, while the other is he had a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace." So therefore, and this is his point, "So therefore any one of you who does not renounce all that he has, cannot be my disciple." What is it going to cost to follow a man who carried a cross? Jesus wasn't interested in drawing crowds, fair-weather fans, right? He wasn't coming so that he could clean up our lives a little bit or do some renovations here and there. He wants to come into your life. He wants to tear the whole house down. He wants to lay a new foundation, one that's going to last, one that he can build your life on for eternity. He wasn't looking for fair-weather fans, he's looking for people ready to deny themselves, ready to take up their cross, ready to follow him and lay their lives at his feet and say, Lord, not my will but yours be done. This is what it means to follow Jesus. We can't talk about discipleship without counting the cost. What is it going to cost? Are you willing to pay that price? I'm going to leave us here in this tension for a while. We'll come back at the end. I'll give you some resolution to this, but we're going to move on for now. And just understand that when Jesus says, follow me, he means take up your cross and follow me. But second, he says, follow me and I will make you. That if you follow Jesus, he's going to change your life. He's going to transform you. And the second point today we're going to be looking at is that being a disciple, it also requires a change of heart and behavior. To really grasp this, what Jesus is saying here and what's going on, you got to understand a little bit about first century Judaism because this idea of discipleship, it's maybe a word that we're familiar with, but it's not a word that's like commonly used or understood in our culture. It was very common in their culture back then. Everyone knew what a disciple was. They'd received disciples out and about following their rabbis around town. A disciple was a student who would come under the teaching and the instruction and the discipline of a rabbi, but they weren't just a student. See, first century Jewish kids, from an early age, they would begin the work of memorizing the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. And as these children grew up, there would come a time where the very best, the very brightest students might perhaps be offered the rare and distinguished honor of being called by a rabbi to be his disciple. And accepting this invitation it meant you had to leave everything. You had to leave your old life, you had to leave your family, the family business. They would leave everything not to follow their rabbi, not just to learn from the rabbi, but to live with the rabbi, to spend every moment with the rabbi trying to learn all that they could to become like their rabbi in every way being a disciple. What it meant was living life in the presence of your rabbi, close proximity, close relationship. And the goal was so that you could really in every way become just like them. And this is exactly what we see Jesus did with his 12 disciples. They follow him around. Everywhere he went, they watched how he lived, they heard him talk, they served with him, they went on missions together with him, and they were learning to be like him in every way. And so we have to ask, what are the implications of this for us today? And really to be a disciple today, it doesn't mean anything different than what it meant for the disciples back then. The difference is Jesus isn't here with us physically. We don't follow him around, the man Jesus Christ in a physical body, but he pours his spirit out upon his church so that yeah, spiritually we live our life in the presence of our rabbi Jesus Christ with him, going where he goes, doing what he says. And I say that because Christians today, we often want to reduce discipleship to like a program or a class or a one-on-one mentorship with a more mature believer. And none of those things are bad. They're just not what we're talking about. There are just such a long ways off from what the New Testament is talking about when it uses this word disciple. And so being a disciple of Jesus, it means living like the 12. It means living in fellowship with other disciples. But you're not following them, you're following Jesus, you're following him together. And so we can't reduce this to meeting with a mentor. We can't reduce it to going and attending a seminar or a Sunday school class or anything like that. When we're talking about the discipleship we're talking about living in community and fellowship with other disciples who are together following Jesus, living life in his presence by the power of his Holy Spirit. Following Jesus, abiding in Jesus, abiding in his spirit, abiding in his word together. And so what this means is two things. First of all, it means that disciples need to follow Jesus personally. And secondly, it means that disciples cannot follow Jesus privately. Personally, if you're a member of Mosaic or if you've taken our membership class, you know that one of the things we talk about in that class is that we have seven expectations of members here at Mosaic. And the first expectation that we have for our members is that each and every one of us strive spiritually. That we each take a personal responsibility for living life in the presence of Christ, of striving to build that relationship with Christ ourselves, of working out our own salvation with fear and trembling. This comes from Philippians chapter two verse 12. Paul says, "Therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, so now not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." You work out your own salvation personally because God is working in you personally. But bigger than that, the idea that Paul's really getting at here is that he wants this church to know and to understand and to never forget that he is not their pope, he's not their priest, he's not their rabbi. Jesus is. And this is important, the Philippians were not called to be disciples of Paul. They weren't called to follow Paul, they weren't called to live their lives in the presence of Paul. They were called to follow Jesus. And thankfully they were a church that really didn't struggle with this very much. They were a relatively healthy and mature and solid church. There was another church that Paul cared about that did struggle with this quite a bit. It was the church in Corinth. We did a whole sermon series on first and second Corinthians called Prodigal Church. And the reason we called it that is because this was a church that had some issues. They struggled with a lot of things and this was one of them. And so in first Corinthians chapter one, one of the very first things that Paul addresses with them is this. He says, "I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you all agree and that there be no division among you, but that you all be united in the same mind and the same judgment for it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there's quarreling among you brothers." And this is what I mean. "What I mean is that each one of you says, well, I follow Paul or I follow Apollos or I follow Cephas, that's Peter, or I follow Christ." He says, "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?" Corinthian Church was pretty immature and dysfunctional at times and you read the letter that Paul wrote to them. He gives them a lot of correction. The Philippian church, however, was relatively strong and healthy. He addresses this same thing with them, but does so from way of encouragement and reminder. And so when you read the book of Philippians, one of the things you got to keep in mind, and you see this throughout the book, if you're reading it closely, one of the things you see is that Paul is writing to them from a place in his life where he doesn't know that he is much longer to live, right? This could be his last correspondence with them. He may never see them again. There's a very real chance that he may be facing death, even execution sometime in the near future. And he's not sure, but he wants to write to them to remind them that they're going to be fine without him. Because from the very beginning, they were not his church. God used him in a very special way as an apostle to help this church get started. But what they really needed to understand was that they were not Paul's church. They were Jesus' church. Paul wasn't their pope. Paul wasn't their priest, their mediator or their rabbi. The word that Paul uses to describe his relationship with them. He says, "I was your partner." We were partners in the gospel. We were disciples following Jesus together. And this is why he opens his letter in Philippians chapter one. He says, "I thank my God and all of my remembrance for you, always in all my prayers of mine for you, all making my prayers with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus." Well, who is the he that Paul is referring to here, right? Because Paul is the one who kind of planted this church, but Paul's not referring to himself. The he who began the good work that Paul is talking about is Jesus Christ. That Jesus will complete this good work even if Paul's no longer around. And this is how he starts his letter and then he encourages them with the same thing again at the end. Like, okay Paul, if you go, if you leave us, if you die, who's going to take care of us as a church? And he tells them in Philippians 4:19. He says, "My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in Christ Jesus." Regardless of whether Paul lived or died, what mattered was that Christ would be with them till the end of the age. And that Paul had full confidence that he would make sure even in Paul's absence, that Jesus would finish the good work that he had started in this church. And I say all this because this is what making disciples is all about. It's about teaching people to become independently dependent on Jesus. To become independent in the sense that they're not dependent on us or any other human being for their spiritual wellbeing and to become dependent on Jesus Christ who really is the head of the church, the chief shepherd of every church. And so this might be a paradigm shift for a lot of Christians. It was for the early church as well because this is not how the religious leaders of their day behave. The religious leaders of their day, they very much gathered people around themselves who were dependent on them, who looked to them as spiritual authorities, as mediators between them and God. But Jesus warned his disciples not to be like them, that as his followers that they were going to need to be different, that they could not go on and fall into the same footsteps of the other religious leaders of their day. And Jesus actually had very harsh words for some of these religious leaders. In Matthew chapter 23, he's warning his disciples about this and in verse five he says, "First of all, they do all of their deeds to be seen by others. They love to make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long." They like to show off their spiritual maturity. "And they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces, and they love being called rabbi by others, but you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth for you of one Father who is in heaven. Neither be called instructor for you have one instructor, the Christ." He says, "The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted." Now, I don't think Jesus is trying to argue about semantics and titles and calling people teacher or whatever that may be, but he's trying to make a point and the point is this, there's only one Father and by the blood of Jesus Christ, God can be your Father, but God can't be your grandfather. You can't be dependent on some other earthly father to be the mediator between you and God the Father. Only Jesus Christ can do that. There is one teacher, one rabbi, and Jesus can be your rabbi, but he can't be your rabbi's rabbi. He can't be your pastor's pastor. You need that relationship with him yourself. Jesus can call you friend, but he can't be a friend of a friend. The big idea is every single Christian needs to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ for themselves. As Paul said in first Timothy 2:5 that, "There is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself as a ransom for all." This mission to go and to make disciples is not a mission to go and make disciples of ourselves. It's a mission to go and make disciples of Jesus. It's not a mission to go out and to become the mediator between God and men. The mission is to point people to the only mediator that there is, the man Jesus Christ. If I had to sum it all up, I would put it like this, that the call of discipleship... Well, first of all, it's a call to be a disciple, to be yourself connected to Christ, abiding in Christ, living in the presence of Christ, following your rabbi. But the call to make disciples is a call for those who are doing that, for those who are more mature in the faith, to help those who are less mature in the faith, become more mature in the faith, by becoming less dependent on them and more dependent on Jesus. That was a lot. So I'm going to say it again. That the call to make disciples is a call for those who are more mature in the faith to help those who are less mature in the faith, become more mature in the faith by becoming less dependent on them and more dependent on Jesus Christ, where you're teaching them to cling to Christ, to abide in Christ, to pursue Christ, to follow Jesus, and to live their lives in his presence. Yesterday our daughter Nora had a birthday party. She's turning eight tomorrow and with our kids we don't do the big huge birthday party every year. But we told them both, when you turn eight years old, you can do the big party where you invite the whole class and everything. So we did the whole trampoline park thing and celebrated her birthday and it was a ton of fun. Now every parent in the room knows when these birthdays come along its bittersweet because it's like how do they grow up so fast? I remember just as clear as it was yesterday, the day that she was born and now she's eight years old and it's hard to see them grow up. You just kind of want them to stay little forever. My wife saw one of these sappy parenting memes the other day, said something like, one day you're going to pick your child up and not realize it will be the last time you put them back down. First of all, how dare you? Like the internet is supposed to be a nice happy place, I thought. You say that and all the moms... It was more pronounced in the first service because we had all the MiniMo parents here. All the moms are like crying. All the dads coincidentally have something stuck in their eye and it's like, what? You just want them to stay little and cute forever, just hold on. They're so sweet and innocent. And we as parents, we think that way. God doesn't think that way. God doesn't want his kids to stay little for... He wants them to grow up fast, to grow up healthy and strong and mature. He wants them to grow up to be independent in the sense that they're not dependent on people or things, but dependent on himself. Because unlike us, unlike our kids, when God's kids grow up, they don't grow up by becoming less dependent on him as they mature. As God's children's mature, they mature in doing so, they begin to see how really totally and utterly dependent on God they really are. They become less dependent on people, on things, and they become more dependent on God himself. That's what it means to grow up, to mature in the faith, to live every moment with this awareness and dependency on your heavenly Father. And so what this means is like, yeah, a newborn baby Christian, they might need to be held, they might need to be fed for a while as they start to grow, they might need someone there to hold their hand as they learn how to walk. For a little while that's okay, but that's not the goal. The goal is not to coddle them, not to become the spiritual equivalent of helicopter parents. The goal is to help them grow up, push them out of the nest, teach them to feed themselves, teach them to walk on their own so that they can begin helping others to do the same. And John 15:5, Jesus said, "I'm the vine, you're the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." That the only way for a disciple to be healthy, to grow and to bear fruit is not to be a branch of a branch of a branch. It's to be a branch directly connected and abiding in the vine of Jesus Christ. And so disciples need to follow Jesus personally, but disciples can't follow Jesus privately. That you need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ but this doesn't mean that you should have a private relationship with Jesus Christ. I said this last week, I'm going to say it again. You almost never see Jesus in the gospels. You never any of the apostles. You almost never see them in a private one-on-one setting with anyone, like everything that Jesus did, he did in a communal setting. And Jesus knew each one of his disciples personally. He called each one of his disciples personally. He loved and he cared for each one of his disciples personally. But he spent almost all of his time with each one of his disciples in community, with the three, with the 12, with the 72. There's always a group of people around him, and I say this because sometimes we want to kind of narrowly define discipleship as like a one-on-one mentorship and that can be useful for a time, for a task, for a purpose. But when you read the New Testament, everything that you see happening is happening in the context of community. It's the body of Christ united working together. That's where people grow. And I said this earlier, I want to demystify discipleship. Discipleship is costly, but it shouldn't be complicated. And when you look at the example of Jesus, when you look at the example of the early church, what you find is there's really only four things that you need as a disciple of Jesus to grow in your faith. It's four things. You need the truth of God's word. You need the power, the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life. You need the fellowship of the church. And you need the experiences of life. You need God's word to cut to your heart, to reveal truth, to correct your understanding, to give you knowledge. You need God's Holy Spirit to bring conviction of sin, to bring assurance of your salvation. The Holy Spirit is needed. The Holy Spirit equips the members of the body so that they can minister with their gifts to one another. You need the word, you need the spirit. You need the fellowship of the church. You need the rest of the body holding you up and holding you accountable. And then you need the experience of life. And this is everyone, regardless of whether you're a disciple of Jesus or not, you're going to get the experiences of life. We're all going to go through the storms of life. How you go through those are dependent on those first three things. You go through the storms of life alone, they're going to crush you. Go through the storms of life with the power of God's Spirit and the fellowship with the church and the truth of his word. God's going to use those very experiences to grow your faith, your character, your perseverance to strengthen you. And so if you're living in the presence of Jesus, if you are in fellowship with other spirit-filled believers and together submitting your lives to the truth and to the authority of God's word, you are going to grow in your faith. It's not complicated. It takes commitment, it takes time. It takes patience and perseverance, but you will grow. And this is why if you know us as a church, we don't focus a lot of time in just offering a thousand different classes or seminars or programs. We focus so much time and care and attention into our community groups because this is where growth happens. Every week spirit-filled people coming together as the body of Christ around the truth of God's word. We're there together in community and that is where the Holy Spirit works in us and through us, to strengthen us, to guide us, to help us, to abide each firmly connected to the vine of Jesus Christ so that we can bear fruit as we go through the experiences of life together, the ups, the downs, the joys, the pains, all of it. God has ordained for our growth. There's a really beautiful picture of this in Ephesians chapter four that kind of shows how this all is intended to work. Ephesians 4:1. "I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. There's one body and one Spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call. One Lord, one faith, one baptism when God and Father of all who is overall and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gifts." So first of all, Paul begins to show this picture of the unity of the body and of the power of the Father's Holy Spirit present in each member of the body. But then he says, within the unity of the body there is distinction among the members. That God equips the body, different people, members of the body in different ways and that they all need to work together to grow up together into maturity. And so he continues in verse 11, he says, "This is why he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love. We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. From whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love." When Jesus says, I will make you, when Jesus tells us he's going to change our lives, this is how he does it as one body with many members, each equipped by the Holy Spirit to come and to work together under the headship of Jesus Christ, growing in unity, growing as one. And the idea here is if you abide in this, you will grow. That Jesus will make you new. He will bear his fruit in your life. He will give you and transform your heart, your behavior, your character. You will be conformed to the fullness, the image of Christ. So that's point number two. Point number three, being a disciple requires a change of heart and behavior. It also requires a change of purpose and perspective. And so I said I was going to leave you in that tension. We counting the cost of discipleship, going to kind of come back to that. Now, from our perspective in this life, when you look at the cost of following Jesus, right? Deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow him. That's a high price. That seems like that cost might be too much. It is high, and Jesus calls us to consider that cost before following him. He calls us to consider that cost. Then he challenges us to consider it again and to consider it from an eternal perspective. Because if you keep going in Matthew 16, the verse we read earlier, Jesus told the disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." He tells them that, but then he gives them like... Well, let's look at this from a different angle. Let's look at this from an eternal perspective. Four verse 25. "Whoever would save his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? What should a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels and the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done." What Jesus wants to see is on the one hand the discipleship is costly and on the other hand, it's not nearly as costly as the alternative. What is it profit a man if he gains the whole world, all the money, all the fame, all the friends and praise and power and comforts of this world and yet loses his soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whatever following Jesus may cost you right now and the grand scope of eternity, it is a small price to pay. That Jesus says, "I'm coming, and when I do, I'm coming in the glory of my Father and I'm going to repay each person according to what they've done." And every single one of us, we need to have this perspective. We need to see things from this angle, when we do, what we see is that the true cost of discipleship, it's not a price to be paid, it is an investment to be made. You invest your life savings, you give everything that you have, you give it all to Christ and you live life through the bear market of this life, but you do so knowing that in the end that the bulls are going to win, that the investment is going to pay off. That Jesus is coming soon and that your sacrifice, everything that you give up right now, it is earning you spiritual dividends right now and it's earning you heavenly rewards when Christ returns. Mark 10. Peter comes up to Jesus and he's like, look, "Jesus, we left everything to follow you." And Jesus says in verse 29, he says, "Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brother or sister or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time. Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and land with persecutions and in the age to come eternal life." In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus shares a few parables and to show us what this is like. He says in verse 44, "That the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that's hidden in a field which a man found and he covered up. And then in his joy, he goes and he sells all that he has and buys that field." And the idea is from one perspective, this guy seems like a fool, right? He just gave his life savings to buy a worthless piece of dirt, an empty field. And yet from another perspective, you see that he didn't give up anything at all. That whatever he laid down to purchase that field could not compare to the infinite glory of riches that were buried beneath the surface that no one else could see. Jesus says again in verse 45, "That the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who on finding one pearl of great value." He goes out and he sells all that he has to buy it. And Jesus gives us this new perspective to think about discipleship and with this perspective, he gives us new purpose as well. That he says, "Follow me and I'm going to make you." And what is he going to make us? Ultimately he says, he's going to make you fishers of men. That's the purpose. Think about that purpose in the context of this new perspective that we have. Jesus asks, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet loses his soul?" Well flip that around. What does it profit a man if he gives up everything he has right now for the sake of the gospel, in order to gain the souls of others for eternity? Jesus wants to make us fishers of men. You think about that. Jesus wants to give you the opportunity right now as his disciple to play a part in altering the eternal destiny of souls, to play a part in changing the eternal destination of people. You talk about heavenly rewards, like imagine seeing someone in heaven and knowing that Jesus used your witness, your faithfulness, your sacrifice to get them there. Imagine the joy of walking in and seeing that person and knowing that they will be spending eternity in paradise, in the presence of Christ, and that you got to play a part in that. Before telling the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus told two other parables to the same effect in Luke chapter 15. In the context we're told that, "Tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to him and the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling about it, saying, "This man receives sinners and he eats with them." And so he told them this parable. He says, "What man of you having a hundred sheep if he has lost one of them, does not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he is found it, he lays it on his shoulder rejoicing and when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors saying, rejoice with me for I found my sheep that was lost. Just so I tell you, there's more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance." "Or what woman having 10 silver coins if she loses one does not light a lamp and sweep the house and see diligently until she finds it. And when she's found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, rejoice with me for I found the coin that I lost. Just so I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents." Who are we that we should be given the privilege, the joy of taking part in something like this? There is great joy we're told in heaven right now when one sinner repents, imagine the joy then. Imagine the joy when all the saints go marching into the joy of their master together and you see those souls that led you to Christ, and you see those people that Jesus used you in their life to lead them to Christ, to help them to grow in Christ. Imagine that joy of being there together. We do not deserve such an honor, and yet we serve a God of amazing grace. When you have this perspective and this purpose, it changes everything. And when you have this perspective and this purpose, all of a sudden everything seems, as Paul said in second Corinthians, it's like "Light and momentary affliction which is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." For why? Because, "We are not looking to things that are seen, but the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." Well, I could spend a whole lot more time talking about this theoretically, rather, what I would like you to do is I would like you to go into your community groups this week and talk about how you've experienced this for yourself personally. Share testimonies of God's grace. Jesus calls us fishermen and fishermen love to tell stories. And so tell some of those stories. I think we're going to be spending a lot of time in heaven telling fishermen stories of how Jesus used us to bring other people to faith or used other people to save us or lead us to himself. Share some of those stories this week. If you've played a part in leading someone else to Christ or share the stories of those who played a part in leading you to Christ, not to boast in yourself but to boast as Paul says in Jesus Christ, and to be an encouragement to one another. Share some of those stories this week. And if you're not connected to a community group, this is a really good week to get connected to a community group. If you don't take anything else away from the sermon, this is what I would hope you would take, that you need to be connected to a community, to have fellowship with other people in a meaningful way. And so we would love to help you do that. You can check those out on our website, or better yet, just stop by the welcome center out there and there's people there that would love to help you find a group that works for you. And then if you're here today and you are not yet connected to Christ, if you are ready to make that commitment, to become a follower of Christ, to become a disciple of Jesus Christ, we would love to talk to you about that as well. You can talk to people at the welcome center or Pastor Andy and I will be up here after the service. We'd love to talk to you about that. We could talk to you about baptism or just if you have any questions about Christianity in general, we'd be happy to talk to you, pray with you about that as well. Well, right now, let's pray and we'll spend more time worshiping together. Jesus, we thank you. We praise you so much for the price that you paid to save us. And I pray that you would give us now the grace and the strength and the courage to gladly pay, to gladly suffer and sacrifice whatever is needed to be your witnesses, your followers, your disciples here on earth right now. God help us to take up our crosses daily to follow you, knowing that as our good shepherd that you have promised to lead us into pastures of abundant life. Give us faith to believe that whatever we may have to give up right now in terms of worldly comforts and pleasure, they cannot compare to the spiritual blessings, the eternal rewards that await those who follow you. So Lord, help us to keep our eyes fixed, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Help us to keep our eyes fixed on you, Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that was set before you endured the cross for us, and you're now seated in glory and power at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. Father, we love you, we praise you, and now we just want to worship you together in the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I greet you in Jesus' precious name! It is Wednesday morning, the 25th of January, 2023, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.“Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers, The same is broken, and we have escaped.”Psalm 124:7To be caught in a snare is the most terrible thing. Again, we see how the Pharisees tried to set a snare for our Lord Jesus Christ. “But they could not catch Him in His words in the presence of the people. And they marvelled at His answer and kept silent.”Luke 20:26A snare is set by a poacher - I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary, the word poacher means: “Illegally hunting or catching game or fish on land that does not belong to you, that is not your own.” Now, who is the one who sets a snare? Its the devil himself, and how does he operate? He operates at night, he doesn't do it during the day - He does it when no one is looking, so we can't see where the snare is. He is an extremely dishonest thief. "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.” John 10:10He is the absolute poacher of all. He sets a snare for us and sometimes he will even parade as an angel of light. He is an excellent liar. He may say to you: “Have an affair with that woman, no one will know.” He is the one who says: “Steal that money,no one will see.” He is the very one who says: “Cheat on that exam paper and no one will ever know.” He is the one who says: “Don't pay your income tax because you don't believe in the government.”He is the one who tells you to tell a little white lie. Once he does that, he has caught you in his snare and you are now his. You belong to him, every time you try to get out of that snare by yourself, it gets tighter and tighter. Only Jesus Christ can set you free!“Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”John 8:36Folks, don't fall for the lies of the devil. I was jogging down a farm road some years ago and I heard the most heart-rendering crying. It was a little gazelle caught in a snare by its back leg. He was crying and bleating in the forest. It was overwhelming to listen to, I must be honest with you. I bent down, I had to be careful - his hooves are so sharp. I held him gently and took that horrible, ugly snare off his back leg. As I let go, he bolted off and he raced into the forest. I never saw him again. Don't let the devil catch you with his snare today. Look to Jesus and He will walk with you right through that path.God bless you and goodbye.

Pastor Jack Graham taught about the darkness of human sin and today he points out everyone's question how do we get out of this darkness? The truth is, religion cannot save, Pastor Graham teaches. Only Jesus Christ can save. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29

Pastor Jack Graham taught about the darkness of human sin and today he points out everyone's question how do we get out of this darkness? The truth is, religion cannot save, Pastor Graham teaches. Only Jesus Christ can save. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29

Pastor Seth Wetter teaches us, to Cross over, from the Flesh life, to be in the Spirit filled Life. No man can Save you, Only Jesus Christ. From the Book of Joshua, the 3rd Chapter. On December 4th, 2022 God's Word is Truth!

Rev Steven Craft all Americans want to be safe and want law and order. No one wants lawlessness. The real fix for lawlessness is to deal with the issue of SIN. Only Jesus Christ can fix that. Crime and drug abuse are a choice made by a godless sinful person in need of the Savior. Clare Lopez Rick Manning discusses the southern border and national sovereignty as well as America's role overseas and around the world. Uprising in Iran and the apparent leaning toward a regime change in that nation.

Rev Steven Craft all Americans want to be safe and want law and order. No one wants lawlessness. The real fix for lawlessness is to deal with the issue of SIN. Only Jesus Christ can fix that. Crime and drug abuse are a choice made by a godless sinful person in need of the Savior. Clare Lopez Rick Manning discusses the southern border and national sovereignty as well as America's role overseas and around the world. Uprising in Iran and the apparent leaning toward a regime change in that nation.

No Compromise Radio-Always Biblical, Always Provocative, Always In That Order. Pastor Mike talks about funerals on today's episode. What do you do as a Christian when there is a death in the family? If someone dies that you know, or that you know the family of, what do you do? How do you rearrange your life in order to minister to their family? People are afraid of the dead. Pastor Mike gives advice on what to do during wakes and funerals. Do not leave your kids at home when you go to the wake or funeral. Death and experiencing death is a part of life. Go to the wake or funeral as a family. Death is a reminder and it helps make the lessons stick. On the way to the funeral coach you kids on what to say and do. Death is very ugly and gross. Sin entered the world because of the fall; and as a result there is death. It is okay and good to cry at a funeral. It is holy to feel sadness just as Jesus did. You need to preach the Gospel to your kids. Start early and show them what death is like. If there is a death you need to cancel what you are doing. Even though you are busy you are supposed to love others. Only Jesus Christ, only God, can take someone who is dead and say get up and they will get up; God has power over death. You cannot raise a body from the dead. When you look at the body, you need to be prepared to die. You need to have your sins forgiven. Our bodies will die, but our spirits will live on forever in bliss (Heaven) or torment (Hell). Go and love your neighbor as yourself. If there is a death in the church family you ought to drop everything and go. If in a public place give them a big hug and say, I love you. Scripture Mentioned In Episode: Ecclesiastes Romans 8 John 11 Romans 1 1 Thessalonians

Before there was an is, meant Jesus has always existed. He was alive and active before the creation of the world. Indeed, He is the Creator, our source of life, and first in everything. He was alive and active before the creation of the world. Indeed, He is the Creator, our source of life, and first in everything. Jesus is the Alpha and Omega, the first and last, the beginning and the end. Only God incarnate could make such a statement. Only Jesus Christ is God incarnate.He Was. He Is. Therefore We Are.Scripture References:Gen. 1:26Col. 1:15-23John 1:1-2John 1:3John 1:14Phil. 2:6Heb. 1:3Matt. 8:23-27; 28:18John 3:35Phil. 2:9-11Eph. 1:22-23John 3:311 Tim. 1:17Rom. 9:5Rev. 1:8; 21:6; 22:132 Pet. 3:10Isa. 41:4; 44:6; 48:12Heb. 12:2John 1:1, 14Matt. 5:17Eph. 2:8-9Thank you for your support: PayPal.me/lifeswordministrywww.lifewordministry.org

Day 171 Today's Reading: Ephesians 3 I knew her for more than a decade. When she finally accepted Jesus into her life, I asked her, “How did it happen? We talked about Jesus a lot, but why did you finally commit your life to Him? And then you just stopped living a lifestyle you knew was destructive. How did all this happen?” She looked at me and smiled. “You never told me what I was doing was wrong. You told me how right Jesus is. You just kept talking about Jesus.” She was saying in essence that Jesus was so attractive, why would she want anyone or anything else? That is Paul's message in Ephesians 3: "This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God's way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities. And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ." (Ephesians 3:7-8, MSG) Paul wants to talk about Jesus—“the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ.” The New American Standard Bible calls it “the unfathomable riches of Christ.” Too often we want to talk about other things. Author D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones says: “A great danger confronting us all at the present time is to keep on talking about Christianity instead of talking about the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul said talk about Jesus. Christianity has never been about encountering the right church but the right Person. I know sin is awful. But sin really speaks for itself through its consequences. Our culture may not call it sin, but they know consequences for wrong actions. We live in a society and a time that has misinterpreted and misrepresented Jesus. Why make the bulk of our preaching and sharing be about how awful something is (when people already know), when they don't realize how wonderful Jesus is? I want people to see the real Jesus and know about the real Jesus, not the twenty-first-century Jesus, not the Western Jesus, not the denominational Jesus, and not the religious Jesus. Famed Christian writer Dorothy Sayers talked about the real Jesus: The people who hanged Christ never . . . accused Him of being a bore—on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up. . . . We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him “meek and mild,” and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. Let's consider some of the impressive records Jesus inspired. I read recently about someone who took Jesus and stacked Him against the greatest painters, musicians, and philosophers of the world. These are the results: • Socrates taught for forty years, Plato for fifty, Aristotle for forty, and Jesus for only three. Yet the influence of Christ's three-year ministry infinitely transcends the impact left by the combined 130 years of teaching from these men who were among the greatest philosophers of all antiquity. • Jesus painted no pictures; yet some of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci's finest paintings received their inspiration from Him. • Jesus wrote no poetry; but Dante, Milton, and scores of the world's greatest poets were inspired by Him. • Jesus composed no music; still Haydn, Handel, Beethoven, Bach, and Mendelssohn reached their highest perfection of melody in the hymns, symphonies, and oratorios they composed in His praise. • Every sphere of human greatness has been enriched by the humble Carpenter of Nazareth. His unique contribution to the race of humans is the salvation of the soul! Philosophy could not accomplish that. Nor art. Nor literature. Nor music. Only Jesus Christ can break the enslaving chains of sin and Satan. He alone can speak peace to the human heart, strengthen the weak, and give life to those who are spiritually dead. C. S. Lewis is considered one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. The way he went from atheism to a relationship with Christ is what Paul is reminding us of in Ephesians 3. Lewis was able to put aside the contemporary and the religious Jesus and come to terms with the real Jesus. That's why his words from Mere Christianity are so important to us and help us remember the real Jesus: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: “I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. Let's heed Paul's plea to remember who Jesus is—and share those “inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ” with others.

Only Jesus Christ is our Savior --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/God-is-able-ministries/support

Friends of the Rosary: Pride is a huge sin, so is greed. In last Sunday's reading (Lk 12:13-21), Jesus Christ warned us about greed. "Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions." And yet we make our life consist of possessions, due to greed or mostly due to fear of the future. We are very scared about the possibility of getting older and having no money. It's smart to save money and work hard to obtain money. What isn't smart is to make money our priority. Essentially, because this way we won't achieve happiness, joy and peace — which ultimately is everyone's goal. Only Jesus Christ makes us joyful. Only Jesus Christ saves us from our dysfunctions, errors, and disgraceful events. As He said, store up treasures in Heaven because these ones do not perish. Ave Maria! Jesus, I Trust In You! + Mikel A. | RosaryNetwork.com, New York • August 2, 2021, Today's Holy Rosary on YouTube — Daily broadcast at 7:30 pm ET

So many people ask the questions, what must I do to become acceptable to God?  How can a person gain access to God, in order to fellowship and commune with Him?  How can a person come to know God in a real and personal way, so personal that the person can know that God is looking after and caring for him?  How can a person gain and maintain a relationship with God?  Men have tried to approach God in the past under the Old Covenant and the old dispensations: • Through prophets • Through angels • Through Great Leaders who are great men of God • Through priests • Through covenants and law or by trying to be as good as they can But, every one of these approaches to God are inadequate.  They are imperfect and incomplete.  They may tell us some things about God.  They may help us to understand God to some degree, but they don't give us the full story, nor do they reveal the whole nature of God.  They are only shadows and faint copies of the truth.  They show us only a part of the truth about God.  They don't reveal God to us, nor do they make us acceptable to God or give us fellowship with God.   In the Old Testament, the children of Israel built a Tabernacle.  The Tabernacle was a place where they sought to worship and become acceptable to God.  But, this approach to God was just as inadequate as all the other approaches.  Earthly sanctuaries and earthly worship cannot bring us near to God.  Earthly sanctuaries and earthly worship cannot make us acceptable to God.  Only Jesus Christ can bring us near and make us acceptable to God.  This is the point of this passage of Scripture, to show that Jesus Christ is the Greater and more perfect Minister of the Tabernacle.  He is the only Minister who brings us to God.   Click on the link below to hear a message on why the new heavenly tabernacle is better than the old.   This is a live recording of The Master's Class Bible Study at LifeChange Church Wichita, KS. Amen.

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Pastor Jack Graham taught about the darkness of human sin and today he points out everyone's question how do we get out of this darkness? The truth is, religion cannot save, Pastor Graham teaches. Only Jesus Christ can save. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29

“Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” John 4:13–14 There is a spiritual thirst in the soul of every human being. We try desperately to fill it with all the things of this world, but are never satisfied. Only Jesus Christ the Savior can satisfy that thirst. And that free gift of living water can only be received by simple, child-like faith. No thirsty child would reject a cup of cool water. Yet so many in their pride and hardness of heart turn their backs on the Lord Jesus. His Identity First, in John 6:35, Jesus began with the words, “I Am.” To the Jews, familiar with Exodus 3:14, this was a clear declaration of the deity of Jesus (see vv. 48, 51). He uses this formula repeatedly in the Gospel of John. Consider these statements: 1. “I Am He” (John 4:26). 2. “I Am the bread of life” (John 6:35, 48, 51). 3. “I Am the light of the world” (John 8:12). 4. “I Am the door” (John 10:7). 5. “I Am the good shepherd” (John 10:11, 14). 6. “I Am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). 7. “I Am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). 8. “I Am the true vine” (John 15:1). 9. “I Am a king” (John 18:37). His Promise Second, when Jesus says, “shall never hunger … never thirst” (v. 35), and “I will by no means cast out” (v. 37), He is using a formula in the original Greek language—a double negative—that means “Never ever!” It is the strongest possible way to state an absolute negative. Consider these examples of things Jesus says can absolutely never happen to those who believe in Him: 1. Those who believe in Him “will never thirst” (John 4:14; 6:35b). This means to thirst for everlasting life, for they cannot lose it. 2. Those who believe in Him “shall never hunger” (John 6:35a). 3. All who come to Him in faith He will “by no means cast out” (John 6:37). 4. Those who keep His word “shall never see death … shall never taste death” (John 8:51–52). 5. Those who believe in Him are His sheep, and “they shall never perish” (John 10:28). 6. Whoever believes in Him “shall never die” (John 11:26). These seven statements (two under point four) are absolute assurances that simple child-like faith in Jesus Christ, at any point in time, results in eternal life, which can never be lost. The One and Only Condition Third and finally, the condition for claiming the promises of Jesus and entering into everlasting life is always the same, by believing in Him. This is driven home by being stated 98 times in this Gospel and is declared by John himself to be the thrust of the whole book. “And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.” John 20:30–31

Heavenly Father, we thank you that because of Jesus Christ, the person, the work of Christ, his life, death, burial, and resurrection, we can approach your throne, the throne room of grace, and we can do it boldly, courageously. Not because we are righteous in and of ourselves, but because we have been given a righteousness that is not our own. It's been reckoned to us, counted to us. We thank you for that. Jesus, we, in your throne room, we humble ourselves. We don't deserve to be in your presence, but we glorify you. We're so thankful for your presence. We pray, Holy Spirit, now come minister to us from your holy scriptures and help us meditate on the beauty of justification by grace through faith.There's nothing that we can do to reconcile ourselves with you. The wall of hostility that's in between. There's nothing we can do dismantle it, so it's only by grace that we come to you. And it's only by grace that we remain in your presence, so Lord, forgive us of any sin and pride, selfishness, self-absorption, law breaking. We repent of all that and we ask that you purify our hearts. And your word promises that blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. We want to see you with the eyes of our souls. We pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.The title of this sermon is Justified By Faith. We're in Romans four, one through 12, continuing our servant series. The question before us is, do you understand grace? Do you understand God's grace? If not, you don't understand what it means to have a relationship with God. And one of the ways that you know, if you understand grace, practically is, do you view your walk with God in terms of I have to, or I get to. This morning when you woke up and you're like, ah, church today. Do you say, ah, I have to go to church again? Did it come with a feeling of drudgery? The sermon's going to be too long again. Or did it come with the sense of delight? The sermon is going to be so long, praise God. Praise God, I get to listen to God's word. I get to worship God. I get to serve God. I get to take up my cross daily and follow Jesus Christ.Well, the reason why you can say that is because of grace. We didn't deserve to be justified. We did not deserve righteousness. We don't deserve the presence of God. We deserve eternal damnation. Everything else on top is icing on the cake. Praise God. A lot of people view the Christian faith as if I keep the commandments, I do a great job of following God then I am accept, then I am blessed, then I'm honored. Then God will give me the things that I want. If I keep his commandments, then I love God. And then he loves me. But that's not how it works. John 14, 15. Jesus said, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. It all starts with love. It's a heart full of love toward God. That's the energy. That's what propels us forward.And where do we get that fuel? We get it from the gospel. When you run out of fuel and you will, you do. Do you ever run out of fuel? You ever feel like you're running on empty spiritually? I feel like that all the time. And then you have to go to the cross and you say, "Lord, please fill me up. Fill up the gas tank of my spiritual resources. Fill my heart with love." And when he does, then that gives you the energy to be obedient to the Lord.The last few weeks, we've established that we're all guilty before a holy God. Our only hope is not just to be forgiven, but it's to be justified. When you're forgiven, God says not guilty. When you're justified, God says you're innocent as if you had never sinned. And there's absolutely no way for us to be justified and for God to remain just other than the cross of Jesus Christ. There's absolutely no way anyone, even in the Old Testament, the godliest of saints, there's no way that they can be righteous before God, not even through keeping the law. Was Moses in a relationship with God because of his obedience to God? Well, that's not where it started. It started with God choosing him by grace. How about the prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, were they in a relationship with God because of their moral performance? No. God chose them and poured out his love on them. They were justified by faith and God. And not even Father Abraham was justified by works. He was justified by faith apart from works. Romans 3:28. That's the stream of thought. That's where it begins before we enter our text.For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. This is only way to have a relationship with God. Apart from justification, by grace, through faith. This is the doctrine of justification. Sola fide. If you study the Reformation, there were the five solas. One of them is sola fide, only by faith, by faith alone. You say, "Was Abraham a Protestant?" No. You say, "I thought Abraham was a Jew." Those are all man-made categories. Abraham was a pagan and God chose him and said, "I am going to bless you." And Abraham, all he did was believe and God attributes accounts, reckons righteousness to him. That's our text today, Romans four, one through 12.Would you look at the text with me? "What then shall we say was gained by Abraham our forefather, according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works as wages or not counted as a gift, but as his due. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and who sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, but also for the uncircumcised?We say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised so that righteousness would be counted to them as well. And to make him the father of the circumcised who not merely circumcised, but also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised."This is the reading of God's holy and inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts. What a text before us. The context is that Paul has given us the theology of justification by grace through faith. He does that in the end of chapter two, beginning of chapter three, the whole thing, chapter three. Now he turns to historical example of like, this is the theology, now let me show you a real person that all of us know, and he points to Abraham who was known to the Jews as the father of the faithful. And by the way, Abraham is considered one of the most honored people to have ever lived in all of human history.The Jews point to him as the father of the faith, the Muslims point to him as the father of their faith, Christians point to him as the father of their faith. Salvation for Abraham, how did it come? That's the question before Paul today. A lot of people think that salvation in the Old Testament occurred by keeping the law. If you kept the law good enough and when you didn't good enough, then maybe an animal sacrifice, but it was all works. Works was the way that you saved yourself. That's what a lot of people think today, that the Old Testament, that was bad cop, Father God. That's the God that punishes people. That's the God that just throws stones from heaven. Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone. That's the old. And then Jesus comes and he's the good cop. He's the good dad.God's the same. Abraham was not saved because of his moral performance. He was saved because he believed God and righteousness was counted to him. He looked forward to the promise of the Redeemer, the Messiah will come and he will pay the penalty for sin. The lamb of God takes away all the sin of the world. They, the Old Testament saints, looked forward. We look back. They look forward at the promise of the Redeemer. We trust in the work of Christ. A lot of people think the Old Testament is a separate book. The New Testament is a new book for, partially because old and new, that's why I say Hebrew scriptures and New Testament, but it's one book book. It's one continuum. It's one God. It's one people saved by grace through faith. Paul destroys this whole idea that there's a separation of bifurcation by pointing to Abraham, that Abraham himself was justified by grace.Romans 4:1 through 2, that's our text. "What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh." But he's saying, we're Jewish. Paul was Jewish and biological descendants of their forefather, Abraham, through DNA. For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before. And I love what Paul does here in this tremendous teaching point. He's saying Abraham did a lot of incredible things, but not one thing he can point to that he did and say, I am proud of that thing I did because that's what ingratiated me into God's favor. No, the very moment you point to something in your theology and say, "You know what, I did that", that's the very moment that you can discern that your theology is manmade, because true faith, pure faith humbles us in a way that nothing else does.And this is a temptation for Christians who have been walking with the Lord for a while. You've gone through spiritual battles. You have spiritual accomplishments on your resume. You've led people to the Lord. You've done great things. You've been faithful for a long time. There is a temptation to say, "Yeah, I did that. I did that." The very moment you do that, you lose grace. Grace is a gift from the Lord, is to humble us completely. So Christians, be careful with pride. If God shows you salvation, it's not because of anything great in you. A lot of people think, "Oh yeah, yeah, God saved me because he knew I was going to be a great pick, a trade pick. I was going to be a great, I was going to do some great. God knew."First Corinthians literally says that if God chose you, it's because you're a loser. We're just a bunch of losers, we're losers. We're moral failures, just spiritually bankrupt. And that's good for us to stay there. Verse three. "For what does the scripture say?" That's the most important question. The scripture says, "Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due." So Abraham believed God, he didn't do anything yet. In Genesis 15, he believed God. And it was counted to him. It was credited to him as righteousness.Do you ever have a negative balance in your Venmo? It doesn't feel good. Does not feel good, if you use Zelle. Sorry, I don't. You know what does feel good? Getting a Venmo payment that you were not expecting. And the bigger the amount, the better it feels. And that should cha-ching sound is one of the most satisfying things. I keep my sound on my phone just in case, just in case. Well, Abraham had a huge negative balance in his spiritual Venmo. He was a pagan worshiping idols, [inaudible 00:13:28]. God picks him. Guy who has no faith background. God picks him and counts, accounts, credits to him a righteousness that is not his own. Question, when your pay hits the account, doesn't matter when you get paid, biweekly, end of the month, when your pay hits the account, how do you feel? Do you consider this a wage or a gift?Well, it depends on how hard you worked. If you worked really hard that month, and then you look at your pay and you're like, I was working way too hard. I was working way too hard. I got to chill out. That wage is not enough. If you did nothing that month, if you did not a thing, not a single thing, you pretended to work, work from home. You pretended to work and then the payment hits your account. I wouldn't know this, this is hypothetical. It feels so good. You're like, "I can't believe they're still paying me. I did nothing all week. I did nothing all month. I can't believe it. It's a gift. It's all grace." Well, that's how we should view everything from God, Christians. Everything, everything, everything, every day, every, every good gift comes from the Father above, so when you get paid, you should look at it and you're like, that's a gift. Praise God.I try to tell the IRS that. Everything's from the Lord so it's not taxable if it's a gift. But I haven't gotten anywhere with that. What did Abraham do when God justified him? He did nothing. It doesn't say, Abraham obeyed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Before he obeyed, he believed. And faith is not works. The objection here is, that's not fair. What do you mean, we can get an alien righteousness imputed to us? Like I'm not just saying not guilty, I'm saying your slate is just completely wiped clean. You're righteous when you believe in Jesus Christ. And anyone who's been in the faith for a long time, there is a temptation after a while that when you see someone who's been living a sinful life and then they repent of their sin, and they're justified by grace through faith, there is something inside that irks you, and you say, that's not fair. I have been slaving away for years being faithful to the Lord and this person just repented and all their sins are forgiven. There's no penance? There's nothing? All of your sins are forgiven? Yeah.Who is the most evil person alive? Like if we could snip one person and everything changes, who would that be? Does a name come to mind? Well, it depends on what your political persuasions are, but let's say it's Putin. Let's say, or Bill Gates, if you don't like. Well, what if Vladimir Putin today comes into, today's Easter in Russia, in Estonia, the Orthodox tradition. What if he goes to church today? What if he listens to my sermon? He says, "Oh, all of my sins can be forgiven? All I need to do is repent and believe in Jesus Christ? And then he repents and he believes and follows him the rest of his days. Is it fair for God to just forgive him? Is that fair? No, it's not fair. It's grace. It's so much better than the fair. If you want fair, then you have to pay for your own sins for all eternity in hell. That's fair. Well, if you want grace for yourself, then grace has to be available for other people as well. That's how grace works. This is what St. Paul is getting at.In verse three is a citation from Genesis 15, where God appears to Abraham and tells him that he will bless Abraham greatly. This is Genesis 15:1. "After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great. And Abram said, oh Lord God, what will you give me for I continued childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus." What he saying is, God's like, I'm going to bless you. I'm going to give you so much favor. And Abraham's like, God, I already have money, I have livestock. I have cattle. I have money. I have gold. What are you going to give a man who has everything? Well, Abraham didn't have everything. He didn't have a son. He didn't have progeny. And he said, God, I'm childless. I continue childless.Verse three. "And Abram said, behold, you have given me no offspring. And a member of my household will be my heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him. This man shall not be your heir. Your very own son shall be your heir. And he brought him outside and said, look toward heaven and number the stars, if you were able to number them. Then he said to him, so shall your offspring be. He believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness." By the way, this is a stupendous promise. Abraham, you're an octogenarian. He's probably in his eighties at this point, close to that. You don't have a son. I promised that I will make a great nation out of you. And through you, I will bless all the nations as a promise of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. And Abraham say, I don't have a son. And God takes them outside. He said, "Look at all the stars. You're going to have more children than the stars in the heavens." How many is that?And Abraham believes, fully believes. There was absolutely no doubt. He even asked God, "God, how will I know?" Verse seven. "He said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. But he said, oh Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?" I shall possess it. He believes. How will I know that I shall possess it? He believes. God puts Abraham to sleep and gives him a tremendous theophany, which is a vision of God. And God swears by the highest thing by which he can swear, promises by the highest thing that he can promise by. He promises by himself, he swears by himself and Abraham believed, and it was counted, reckoned to him as righteous. On what grounds? On future faithfulness? Is that what God was saying? You're going to be faithful in the future.He wasn't faithful in the future. He sinned time and time again. Cowered before people, lied to kings that his wife was his sister. No, he was counted righteous because God chose to count his faith as enough to make him righteous. People have made this text, Romans 14, problematic by pitting it against James two. So our text says that you're justified by grace through faith. And then James two seemingly argues for the opposite, that we're not justified by faith, we're justified by work. That's the superficial reading. So I'm going to read it and then we'll engage and we'll show that there is no contradiction, but they are saying basically the same thing from different perspectives.Verse 14 of James two. "What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith, but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking a daily food and one of you says to them go in peace, be warmed and filled without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead." I like James. He was a half brother of Jesus Christ and he was a pastor in Jerusalem for a long time. I like James because he gets straight to the point. You think you have saving faith? You're telling me, you love God. You don't even love people who are in need. So no, you don't love God, and no, you don't have saving faith if your heart isn't moved to help people and their practical needs. That's what he's getting at.Verse 18. "But someone will say you have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one, you do well. Even the demons believe and shutter." What a savage. He says, demons are tremendous theologians. They know everything there is to know about God. Satan is the greatest theologian. He knows the Bible better than any one of us. They believe and they shudder. Well, what's the difference between a demon and a Christian? The difference is love for God. Doesn't matter how much you know about God. If you don't love God, then you're not a child of God.Verse 20. "Do you want to be shown you foolish person," Savage. "that faith apart from works is useless. Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works when he offered up his son, Isaac, on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works and faith was completed by his works. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God and it was counted to him, his right and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And in the same way not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body apart from spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead." A lot of people point to the text and they say, there it is. That's the smoking gun against the doctrine, justification by grace through faith.Verse 24. James two. "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." That's a clear repudiation, right? That's a clear contradiction in the holy scriptures. And what makes things even more interesting is both Paul and James use the same historical figure, Abraham. And they use the same Greek word for righteousness in Romans and James. Are these texts contradicting each other? No. They can't be because both books are written by the Holy Spirit. First, we need to establish authorial intent. What did James mean? What does the author mean? Which is an important question whenever you study the Bible. Don't study the Bible just to say, what does it mean to me? Whenever you read the Bible and you say, what does it mean to me, your putting yourself in a position of authority. No, no, no, no. That's not how you read holy scripture. You read holy scripture, study under it. Intrepidation that the God of the universe would choose to speak to us through the text.What's the authorial intent? Well, thankfully James comes out and tells us the question that he's trying to answer. Verse 14, what good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith, but does not have works. Can that faith save him? What he's saying is if your faith does not change your life, then you did not have true saving faith. Because to believe in Jesus Christ is not just intellectual ascent of like, yeah, I'm going to believe some facts about God. In my mind, I know these things about God, therefore I am a Christian. If your faith, if your Christianity only stays in your mind and does not penetrate your heart and stir your heart, you're not a Christian. You're not a follower of God.Does God care about the facts of our faith? Yes. We take doctrine seriously. We read holy scripture, we study it. What does the word say? In fact, God cares about the facts of our faith. God also cares about the feelings of our faith. God cares that our hearts are stirred with love for him and for people. He wants our hearts full of zeal for him, so that we live in a manner worthy of knowing God. And if you don't, then your facts are woefully ineffective in saving you from God's wrath.Verse 19. "You believe that God is one, you do well. Even the demons believe and shudder." They believe they wouldn't submit. You believe tremendous. Do you love God? The full phrase the reformers used is, justification is by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. Because what it means to believe in Jesus means to recognize him as a holy God. And you realize that you have sinned against him. And to really believe in him is to repent of your sin. And repentance means that there's a change of life. It's a change of mind that leads to a change of heart that leads to a change of direction in life. And the moment you exercise true saving faith, you change. You become a brand new person, a new creation in Christ. You're filled with the Holy Spirit. Everything changes.You know, I can tell if someone's a Christian just by looking them in the eye in public sometimes. I was on the TV the other day, and I saw this little old lady, I could tell by looking at her that she was a believer. You can just tell. There's a different person. There's a peace. There's a calm. There's a joy. No longer, you're a Christian. If you're faithful, there's a suffering. A lot of people profess faith. They don't possess the faith because it doesn't change them. Works must flow from our faith, but they're never the grounds for justification. They're confirmation of justification. I remember when my daughter Sophia was born. I was 26 when I had a kid. Wow. That's nuts, and awesome. And I remember I was deathly afraid of infant sudden death syndrome. I was like, you're telling me there's a thing where a baby just dies and you don't know why? They're like, yeah. That's not good.So at night I would wake up and I'd go up to her crib and I would listen. And to see if she's alive, what did I look for for proof? Did I go to her birth certificate and say, oh yeah, she's alive. Here's proof. No. What did I look for? Is she breathing? Is there heartbeat? Well, that's what James is saying. Works is the heartbeat. Works is the breath. Christian, do you have works? That's the sign of life. That's not the origin of life. The origin of spiritual life is justification by grace through faith. The proof of saving faith is a life of obedience to the Lord. Would Paul have a problem with what James is talking about? No, they're completely on the same page.A lot of people say, Paul, all he preached was justification by grace through faith. And that leads to licentiousness where people just take cheap grace. And they're like, all right, I can be forgiven anytime I sin, so I'm just going to keep on sinning and just come back for Jesus for forgiveness every once in a while. Paul starts off Romans with his thesis. He's the guy who preached grace, grace, grace, grace, grace, justification by grace through faith. But in Romans 1:5, his thesis is, this is why I'm writing to, and this is why Jesus chosen him. Through whom we have received, through Jesus, we've received grace and apostleship. To bring about what? The obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations. He said, we receive grace so that you receive grace. We receive grace to be obedient to God. That's the apostleship. And we extend grace to you. What's the purpose of that grace? So that you live a life of obedience.This is First Corinthians 15:10. One of my favorite verses where St. Paul is like, I am what I am by the grace of God. I love that part. A lot of people stop there. I am what I am by the grace of God. And then he continues. He like, but the grace of God was not in vain in me. It wasn't empty because that I worked harder than all of them. He's talking about the other apostles. Just kind of a savage thing to say, because those apostles worked really hard. And Paul's like, I worked harder than all of them. Wasn't me, it was the grace of God in me. Starts with grace, ends with grace. I am what I am. Grace [inaudible 00:30:30]. He received the grace to be obedient to the Lord. That's the point. If you receive grace, it's to be obedient to the Lord.James and Paul both point to Abraham, but at different times in Abraham's life. Which is important, because if you're walking with the Lord on a daily basis, time goes by and you're in a completely different spot spiritually. Like if today you walk with the Lord and tomorrow you walk with the Lord and the next day you walk with the Lord, if you come back next week, you should be in a different spot spiritually. And the more you do that, the more you string these wins together, just faithfully daily following the Lord, a month goes by, six months goes by. You should be a categorically different spiritual being, human being, filled with the spirit in a completely different.Your character should be different. Your hopes, your dream, your passions, different purposes, asking for God's will in a way that you've never asked for God's will. Not just praying for stuff. A lot of people just pray for stuff. God send me this. God send me that. God help me pay my rent. God help me get a job. God help me get a girlfriend. God help me. God help me. God's like, can we talk? Can we talk, like you and me? Can we talk? What's on your heart? Can you just ask what my hopes are for you, not just give me what your hopes are for you? That's what happened with Abraham. Paul points to Abraham. Genesis 15. This was before Isaac was born. And all Abraham could do was trust God. All he had was God's word. That's all he had. You know, he trusts God. And then James points to Abraham in Genesis 22. This was well after Isaac was already born.Abraham had raised Isaac, fathered him, cared for the infant that Isaac was, loved this little boy. Taught him how to walk. Probably taught him to ride a camel, I don't know. Taught him to work. Just poured out his love on this kid. And then God comes to him when Isaac is already, theologians tell he was probably a teenager, and God says, take your son, your only son whom you love with your whole heart, the son of the promise, he says, and I want you to sacrifice him. And Abraham does not argue with God. He does not say, God, how could you, how dare you? Who are you to tell me to sacrifice my beloved son?And Abraham goes on a three-day journey with his son, night and day, just traveling to Mount Moriah. Climbs the mountain, finally gets to the top, ties up his son. Picks up a knife and he's about to slaughter him and God sends an angel of the Lord who stops him. And the angel of the Lord says, Abram, now we know that you fear God. He didn't just believe in God. He feared God so much so that he was willing to obey God to the point of sacrificing his most treasured possession. And then God sends a ram that's caught in the thicket in the thorns and that's who was sacrificed. And that's a prototype of Jesus Christ. Crown of thorns. Jesus Christ, the lamb of God takes away sin in the world.So how did his faith grow from Genesis 15 and Genesis 22? Just daily walking with the Lord. And that started that journey, that space, that spiritual journey started by just believing God day one. God, I believe. And it was it to him as righteousness. Verse four of Romans four. "Now to him who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness." Paul, wait, what? What did you just call Abraham, the father of our faith?Verse five. God who justifies the, what? Let's say that word together. Justifies the ungodly. You called Abraham ungodly? If Abraham is ungodly, what hope is there for any one of us? That's the point. There is no hope. There was no hope for Abraham apart from Jesus Christ. There's no hope for any one of us apart from Jesus. We're ungodly. And the word here in the original is wicked. Someone who was wicked in the sense that they violate the first four commandments. The first table of the law. First commandment, thou shall have no other the gods before me. Abraham had other gods before him. Guilty. That shall not make any idols. He made idols. Who were the Chaldeans? They're all idol worshipers. Thou shall not use my name in vain. He used God's name in vain. The Sabbath, obviously wasn't even a category for him. Broke all four commandments, did not love God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind, ungodly, wicked. And God counts him as righteous just because he believed God. He believed God's word. And God's like, all right, you're righteous, you're in. You're in. That's all it takes.And this is what separates Christianity from every single other religion, because this is pure religion. Pure religion means it's from God completely with no manmade categories, fallen lenses of interpretation. You know that when there's a manmade category in a religion or a worldview or a faith, when people start thinking things or teaching things like this, like if you do more good than bad, then you'll go to heaven. That's the premise on which every single other religions based on. If you're more good than bad, then God will forgive you of your other stuff and you go to heaven. This is American religion. Most American religions have you ever, I've been listening to country music lately. It's very soothing.Country music has a lot to do with Christianity. They talk about Christianity all the time. They talk about church on your porches or drinking beers, watching the sunshine, sunset, sunrise. That's all I need. That's God for me. God will forgive me. God is love. Man, I don't have to do anything for God. I can live any way I want. That's not Christianity. We don't teach that you can earn your salvation. If we did teach that our building campaign would be so much more effective. Raising money for a building would be so easy. You guys are all sinners. You're all sinners. We found a way for you to atone for your sin. For a gift of any amount to our ministry, your sins shall be atoned for. We forgive. We forgive. We'll set up a little confessional booth. You can share all your, oh, that one. Nope. That's $50,000. There's no way. That's some wickedness, you know? No, no, not even Jesus can save you.This is how the Catholic church before the reformations, this is how they built all their beautiful buildings in the Vatican, et cetera, et cetera. They literally had a saying that because of purgatory, like when your loved one dies and they go to purgatory, because you're not sure where they went. They went to hell. But they created this category called purgatory where like, nah, just in case, just in case. And they had this saying that when a coin in the coffers rings, a soul from purgatory springs. Catchy. Raised them billions in today's USD.This is like, why do you think there's names everywhere? Be like, make a donation, put your name in stained glass. Make donation big enough, we can give you a hall downstairs named after you. No, atone for your sins. No, you can't atone for your sins. Only Jesus Christ can atone for your sins. Abraham did not work, but believed in him who justifies the ungodly and his faith was all it took for him to be counted as righteous. And that same could be done for us. It was done for Abraham. And then Paul points to David. In verse six, just as David also speaks of the blessing. It's the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart for works. "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and who sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin."He's talking about David after his egregious sin, commits adultery with another man's wife and then creates a way where Uriah, Bathsheba's husband dies in the field of battle orchestrated by David. And then he's confronted by the prophet, Nathan who calls him out and David knows full well what it feels like to have God's displeasure wrath, disfavor boring down on your soul. That happened for a year. He tried to pretend like it wasn't there, but it was. The wasting away, the inward groaning, his strength sapped like on a hot summer day. And then David writes Psalm 32 about repentance and about the greatest blessing that there is. He speaks of the blessing. What a blessing this is, the one who God counts righteousness apart from works by forgetting sins, forgetting lawless deeds, covering sins.Scripture said is that the omniscient God of the universe who knows everything and never forgets a thing, the moment we repent, it says he casts our sins as far from us as the east is from the west. How far is that? God chooses to forget our sin, chooses to forget our sin. Just forget it. Just forgotten. He chooses to forget our sin. Doesn't bring it up again. Satan does. Satan's the accuser. God chooses not to bring it up. What does scripture talk about when it talks about blessing? What does it mean to be blessed by God? A lot of English translations, they take the beatitudes and they take the Greek word Makarios, which means blessed, blessed to the pure in heart for they shall see God. Well, a lot of people, they say, oh, Makarios means happy. Happy are those who weep and mourn, for righteous. What? What? Happy? You know the word, happy's not in the Bible? I've been meditating on that this week, because the world promises happiness. And I look at the Bible, I'm like, It's not there.There are things that make me happy. I have a slice of pizza, I'm happy. Two slices of pizza, really happy. Three slices of pizza, four slices of pizza, no more happiness. I just feel sad. Just, what did I do? Fitness, fitting this whole pizza in my mouth. Scripture promises joy. And the way that you get joy is from the presence of God. And you get more of the presence of God by fighting sin, which includes suffering. So you're telling me that the weight of the path of joy is suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. For the joy that was set before him, he took up the cross.No happiness, but blessedness. Blessedness is proximity to the presence of God. One of my favorite benedictions is Numbers 6:24 through 26. This is Aaron, the great high priest, praying a prayer of blessing over God's people. And he says, "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. And the Lord, lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace." This is parallelism. Each stanza as saying the same thing in different words. The Lord bless you. It's parallel to, the Lord make his face shine upon you. So it's blessing when God's face of delight is turned toward you. The idea is reinforced with the third line, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you. Why, why? Why? Because blessedness is always in terms of your proximity to the presence of God. That's the greatest thing you can experience.The greatest blessing is the presence of God. That's what heaven is. Heaven is just the presence of God. There's nothing in the way of the presence of God. Adam and Eve rejoiced when God came in the cool of the day, they being in his presence and the light of his countenance. And then when they sinned, they were banished, exiled from what? The garden? From the presence of God, from blessing so all they had left was curse. To be cursed by God is to have God turn his back on you. His grace and peace removed from you. So to be blessed by God, to be welcomed into his presence. And how can we get this blessing? Only if our sins are removed from us. Blessed are those, verse seven, whose lawless deeds, that's breaking God's law. Lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Covered with what? Covered with what? Covered with the blood of Jesus Christ who bore our sins upon himself. Covered with grace. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.This is the greatest blessing that there is. This is the greatest blessing that we have to offer you. That the very second you come to the Lord and you trust in his word, that all of your sins will be forgiven if you repent and follow Christ, you have a righteousness that's not your own. All of your sins are forgiven past, present, and future everything. Your eternity is secure. This is the greatest blessing. And for whom is this blessing available? Verse nine, is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised, where we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. So the question is, did God attribute righteousness to Abraham because of Abraham's faithful act of obedience and circumcision? A lot of people get this right and they say Abraham was circumcised. He was not circumcised. There was nothing passive about his circumcision. God comes knowing the guy's 99 years old. He says, you're going to circumcise yourself.Commendable? Yes. Courageous? Oh yeah. Noteworthy? Definitely. Enough to justify him before God? No, not even that. Abraham believed God's word of promise and it was counted to him as righteous. The circumcision doesn't justify anyone before God. Baptism doesn't justify anyone before God. The sole instrument of justification is faith. And here he says, circumcision is a sign and it's also a seal. And that's what baptism is as well for us. Circumcision was a sign of the old covenant and a baptism is a sign of the new covenant. Both are signs, both are seals. Verse 11. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised so that righteousness would be counted to them as well. He's saying that circumcision was a sign. It points to something else. It points to, supposed to point to inward reality that your heart has been circumcised by God, your heart that's covered with sin and hardness, disillusionment, cynicism, and God circumcises all of that, makes your heart tender, and now you're saved. That's the sign. Baptism is similar. It's an outward reality of something that happens inside. This is why we practice baptism at Mosaic. I get up and I say the same thing right before baptism. I say, baptism does not save you. You're saved by grace through faith. But baptism's an outward sign of an inward reality, it's like a wedding ring. It's like a wedding ring. Does my wedding ring make me married? I have two wedding rings, one wife, two wedding rings because in Russia, they wear it on the right hand. It's a sign that we're married. Praise God. Outward sign, inward reality.And the same way, it's a seal. And this is fascinating because the New Testament Greek word for seal goes back to the signet ring of a king. When the king writes a letter or decree and he takes wax and he puts at the bottom, that's the signature. And he puts his signet ring in, this is a message from the king. Well, what's our seal, Christians? We are sealed with the Holy Spirit. We have the blessing of God's presence every day. When you repent of your sin, God is with you. He fills you by the power of his spirit. This is why it's so important to pursue righteousness, daily righteous, practical righteousness, positional righteousness that's given to us. But practical present righteousness of pursuing God, because the closer you get to God, the more power of the Holy Spirit you get.We're not save. We're also sealed. Abraham received the sign of circumcision, a seal of righteousness of faith. Verse 12 is the kicker. And to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised, but who walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abram had before he was circumcised. Walked in the footsteps. When Adam and Eve sinned against God, before they sinned against God, they used to take daily walks with the Lord. You ever take a prayer walk? I love prayer walks. Imagine taking a prayer walk and God's right there. That's what they did every morning. They walked with God. The Hebrew word was Halakah, walked with God. And then they were banished because they stopped walking with God. And then scripture says that Enoch, Enoch walked with God and he was no more. Walked with God. God found a righteous person that walked with him.Noah walked with God. The prophets walked with God. Then Jesus Christ comes, the great Messiah. And what does Jesus Christ say? Hey disciples, what do you say? Follow me, follow me. What does follow me mean? That means on a daily basis, you walk with God. Halakah. you walk with God. Wherever he goes, you just follow and you walk. Let's go, Lord. I'm moving. We're moving forward following the Lord, in the footsteps of the faith.In conclusion, Jesus Christ paid it all. Paid it all, suffered all. Finished. It's finished. He's won. I'm meditating on the phrase, it's finished. On the cross, Jesus Christ, before he dies, before he breathes his last, he said, it's finished. What's finished? What's finished? And then it says that the curtain that separated people from the Holy of Holies in the temple, thick veil, it was torn from top to bottom as if God, just licked his hand, just tears it up.What happened? Now we have access into the presence of the Holy of Holies because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. I don't know where you are in your faith, but today I challenge you, take a step closer to the Lord, just one step closer. Wherever there is a place of disobedience, one step closer. If you're not even sure that you are a Christian, if you're not sure that you are a child of God, today, all you have to do as, we're going to worship now. We're going to pray. In your heart of hearts, pray out, cry out to God. God, save me. God, have mercy. God, give me grace. God, I believe in you. I trust in you. And then God will give you the greatest blessing that there is. Your sins are covered, forgiven, no more are they counted against you and Christ's righteousness is counted to you.I'll close with Titus 2:11 through 14. We'll pray and then we'll worship. "For the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people." And what does the grace do? Training us. Grace trains us. It's not just fuel, but also trains us. To do what? "To renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Declare these things, exhort, rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you. Amen." Let us pray.Heavenly Father, we thank you for this blessed, blessed word. And we thank you for the greatest blessing that there is, which is the blessing of your presence. Holy Spirit, we welcome you right now. As we worship you, I pray, let us worship you from our heart of hearts with everything that we have because you're worthy of worship. We thank you Jesus for grace. And I pray that you make us a people that take the grace and that we do not take it in vain, it does transform us. And I pray that it trains us to become powerful men and women of God doing incredible things for your name's sake, for the sake of your kingdom. And we pray all this in the beautiful and powerful name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Pastor Dave hosts today's episode of Worship Wednesday and shares his thoughts on "Only Jesus Christ" by Citizens. Scripture Referenced: Proverbs 14:12 & 2 Corinthians 5:17 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/0kSQUrp0Cr01XDLmDDeBlV?si=69c3e3307571459b

Only Jesus Christ is able to transform your life. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/God-is-able-ministries/support

One of God’s purposes in our suffering is to cause hidden corruptions to surface so we'll be humbled and repent. If a godly man like Job needed to repent, how much more do we! - Sermon Transcript - Turn your Bibles to Job 42, the text you just heard read. This morning as we do so, as we turn to Job 42, we come to the final chapter in this great book of Job. God, in his kindness to his people in every generation, has enabled us to walk with Job in his agonies, to feel the anguish of his soul as he lost all his possessions and his 10 children in a single day. Then the second wave of sorrow that came upon him, to lose his health, to the point where his body was ravaged by disease and his friends could scarcely recognize him. Then as Job's friend sat and discoursed with him, and he began to converse with them, his deep and bitter questions began to come to the surface. Under the intense pressure of pain, internal attitudes of sin toward Almighty God were exposed. Fundamental to his bitter questioning of God was his unshakeable sense of his own righteousness. "How could God deal so unjustly with me, such a righteous man?" Only when God shows up in a whirlwind and speaks powerfully to Job, does Job see the greatness of his sin and his own views of his self-righteousness instantly melts like a snowflake on a hot griddle when God shows up, when God begins to talk to him. And by the time God is done speaking with him, Job repents, deeply and comprehensively repents. Friends, I think this is the whole point of the book of Job for us. As we read it, we're able to walk vicariously together with Job through his sorrows. If we have any empathy at all, we feel his pain. We understand how our sorrows are definitely less than his. We've not gone through anything to that degree, but we have a similar tendency to question God in the midst of those sorrows, to charge God with wrongdoing. Before we suffered, before we walked through afflictions, we thought we were great people, we thought we were righteous and pure. Only in the fiery oven of suffering and sorrow do the inner corruptions begin to rise to the surface. God uses pain and trial to show us those inner corruptions. God means to humble us, all of us, deeply. And this amazing book of Job is a tool in the hands of the Holy Spirit to bring us to repentance. As we come to Job 42:1-6, we have a stunning and timeless display of repentance by this great man Job. It is the end of a very long process that the mighty wise and loving God has been working in him. And in the passage today, that work has reached its level of completion, according to the plan of God. Job has deeply repented of his sins. Now, the basic idea of this sermon today is a how much more argument for all of us. If a godly man like Job needed to repent, how much more do you, and do I? How much more do we need to repent? I don't imagine any of you is thinking that God's up in heaven, boasting about you in particular as the one person on planet earth he'd like to commend before Satan. I don't think you have that kind of boldness to think you're the one person. Maybe you do. I don't know how such an attitude couldn't come to the surface at some point, but you know that we are lesser people than Job. And if a man like Job needed to repent, then how much more do I, and do you? "If a godly man like Job needed to repent, how much more do you, and do I?" As I've quoted to you many times before, this is something that captures me, I think about it every time I write a sermon, every time I preach, John Calvin's words in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which says, "Nearly all the wisdom that we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves." We've heard that many times before, but then Calvin, in the institutes, goes on to make this powerful observation about human pride. This is what he wrote: "Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy. This pride is innate in all of us, unless by clear proofs, we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity." Calvin goes on to say this: "And I, to which nothing is shown but black objects all the time, all it ever sees are black objects, judges, therefore something modeled or off-white or dirty white as pure whiteness itself. It's all we know." So when we compare ourselves to others horizontally, we think we're pretty good people, not as bad as that one or that one or that one over there. That's our nature, our pride. But then, when we lift our eyes to the perfect purity and wisdom and power, and then the radiant light of God's glory, we realize how dark we really are. And that's exactly what happened to Job, but it took the intense heat of pain, of sorrow, to bring this corruption to the surface. Friends, God wants to save us. Think about that. It is the good pleasure of God to give you the kingdom. He wants to save us, and he wants to bring each one of us into his glorious heavenly home. That heavenly home is a world of pure light, of perfect goodness, but we sinners are not pure light. We are not perfect goodness. We are darkness itself, naturally. We are sinners to the core, corrupt to the core. When God therefore begins to save us, he must humble us. And he does humble us, and brings us to an initial saving faith in Jesus Christ. We realize we need a savior. And that's a humbling work. But we realize these things only at a shallow, superficial level at initial justification. At that shallow, superficial level, we flee to Christ, and we find in Christ a savior for all of our sins, but we're underestimating all of those sins. And God, in his wisdom, begins in us an education process. We are saved in stages. Justification leads to sanctification, which leads to glorification. And God, in his wisdom, chooses to leave a huge measure of corruption within our souls. He doesn't have to do that, because at glorification he'll instantaneously take it all away, at death and at the resurrection, it'll be gone. You might think you have a better plan than God. "Oh, God do it right away. The moment I come to Christ, take away all of my corruptions. What a pure life I would live then." And you would, it's just not God's way. He leaves within us so much pride and selfishness and self-righteousness and independence and idolatry and deceit and lusts. He leaves these corruptions, these seeding corruptions still within us as justified sinners. A seething world of infamy is instilled in our souls. That's why the Apostle Paul cries out against himself in Romans 7:24, "What a wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death?" That's the apostle Paul writing the book of Romans, in the middle of that, says that. Part of the wisdom of God then, is to cause us to walk for years in those seething corruptions, those inner corruptions, all the while thinking we are purer and better than we really are. In the course of time, God, in his wisdom, just like he did with Job, brings us into the crucible of pain and suffering, of sorrow and trial. And then we begin to cry out as Job did to God, "Why oh Lord, why this? What is happening? Don't you love me?" And God is burning off of those inner corruptions by first showing them to you. Then when at last, he instantaneously purifies you from all of your inner corruptions at death, and at the resurrection, you will spend eternity as pure as light. Brothers and sisters, that's where you're heading, you're going to end up pure as light. You're going to shine like the sun in the kingdom of your Father. You're going to be radiant and beautiful in Heaven. But you're not going to fall into self-worship, as Satan originally did. But why not? Because God, I believe, in his kindness, will cause you to remember what you were. What you were. And you'll spend eternity thanking God for his grace, that in the coming ages, he will show you the measure of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ, Ephesians 2:7. He's going to continually show it to you, how kind he was, and how he forgave not only your sinful acts and actions and attitudes, but just the seething world of infamy that was in your heart every day that you lived, how he covered all of it by grace. Now, God will enable you in heaven to remember your past corruptions, but it will not cause you any pain or shame whatsoever. None, because there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain in heaven, Revelation 21:4. He just wants you to know what he did for you. And you will be humble, won't you? You will spend eternity boasting in your Lord Jesus Christ. As the scripture says in 1 Corinthians 1:31, "As it is written, let him who boasts, boast in the Lord." And you will. Whatever boasting capacity you will have in heaven, and you will have it, you'll be boasting in the Lord Jesus for all eternity. That's where we're heading. I. The History of Repentance Our study today is to understand the depth and nature of Job's repentance to help us with ours. To help us with ours, so we can understand the nature of true repentance. I don't think that every element of true repentance is found in Job's statements here, but some significant things are, and we're going to walk through them. Now, before we do, I want to just give you a little bit of a biblical history of repentance. Biblical history of repentance. Repentance is the religion of sinners. Religion of sinners. Perfectly righteous people have no need to repent. They think perfectly, they love perfectly, they live perfectly, but since Adam and Eve fell into sin, there's only been one man who has ever done that. Only Jesus Christ has met that description. Only Jesus Christ thought perfectly, only Jesus Christ loved perfectly, only Jesus Christ lived perfectly. Christ alone. "Only Jesus Christ thought perfectly, only Jesus Christ loved perfectly, only Jesus Christ lived perfectly. Christ alone." As soon as Adam and Eve fell into sin, they dragged themselves and their progeny, their descendants, the entire human race, into a dark, deep pit of sin. God immediately confronted Adam and Eve as they'd eaten from the forbidden fruit, confronted them in their sin. “The Lord God said,” Genesis 3:13, “to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’” That's God confronting humans in their sin. No one can say to God, "What have you done?" But he has the right to ask us, "What have you done?" And he does. He confronts us. This began the sad history of repentance in the human race. Now, much of the Old Testament is part of that history, that unfolding story of God working repentance in his people. King David, called a man after God's own heart, was yet still a sinner with much inner corruption. And he wrote two great Psalms of repentance: Psalm 32, Psalm 51. Remember, after his terrible sin with Bathsheba, God sent the prophet Nathan to confront him and bring him to repentance. And Nathan told him a story, like a parable, or maybe as far as David knew, a real story, of some grave injustice that happened in his kingdom. Drew, he lured David into that story, and at some point David's rage was kindled against the villain in the story, and said, "That man deserves to die what- for what he's done." And then the prophet Nathan pointed his finger right at him and said, "You are the man." That moment is key in understanding God's working with his people. God, through the prophetic word, comes and stands in front of us, and exposes us, and finds our corruptions and our sins, and then points the finger at us. Each one of us. You are the man. You are the woman; it's you. I'm talking about you. David hardened his heart for a year or more against this repentance. He would not yield. He became hardened. His neck was stiff against it. And he writes about that process in Psalm 32, God pressed down hard on him. He had physical pain and disease, it seems, and difficulties, but he would not yield. And then finally he did. Psalm 32:5, "Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin." And then in Psalm 51, David makes the most important assertion that all of us need to understand about true repentance. And that is how vertical it is, how God-centered true repentance is. When he says to God, "Against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so you are proved right when you speak, and justified when you judge." So therefore true repentance is God-centered. It is God-focused. True repentance realizes that ultimately all that matters is the glory of God, the holiness of God, the sight of God. God alone created us. God alone sustains us. To God alone we will give account on the day of judgment. In God alone do we live and move and have our being. So God sent a series of prophets, filling them with the Holy Spirit, to confront the people of God in the Old Testament with their sins, and seek to bring them to repentance. Isaiah cried out against the great wickedness and sin of the nation of Israel, and sought to bring them to repentance. In Isaiah 1:16-18, God spoke to his people, "’Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you're willing and obedient, you'll eat the best of the land. But if you resist and rebel, you'll be devoured by the sword, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’" That's Isaiah, God, calling the people to repent. "Come now, let us reason together." Sadly, however, again and again, the people of God resisted this call. Isaiah 30:15, “This is what the sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. You said, ‘No.’’" Isaiah 30. So again and again, throughout Israel's history, the prophets came in God's name, called his sinful people to repentance. Sometimes they did. Sometimes individually or even as a group, they would turn. But again and again, generally, they resisted. Then John the Baptist came as a forerunner of the New Covenant era, a forerunner of the coming of Christ. And this is what he did. Again, in the same spirit as the Old Testament prophets did, he called on the people to repent of their sins. We're going to study this, God-willing, beginning in two weeks in the Gospel of Mark. Mark 1:4-5, "John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River." And then Jesus, the one he had come to prepare the way for, came and picked right up on the same message. Mark 1:15, he said, "The time has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel." Essential to Jesus's messianic ministry were his healings, Jesus did a river of miracles. Huge populations went out, and Jesus healed them all with a touch over the word. But he showed that those miracles, physical, actual miracles, were also symbolic of a work of healing that has to happen in our souls. And that is a transformation of our hearts through repentance. And so he said in Luke 5:31-32, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance." That was his work. He's come to heal our sick hearts, and to give us healthy hearts that are characterized by repentance. "I've not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance." Every single one of Christ's people who will spend eternity, radiant and glorious in heaven, will have gotten there the same way, through repentance of their sins and faith in Christ. All of them. And will spend eternity aware of that. II. The Definition of Repentance So, what is repentance? We've been talking about it since the beginning of the sermon. How would we define it? Well, the Greek word, it's a simple change of mind, to change your thoughts, your mind, to have it a new mind. The basic idea there is that sinful actions come from sinful thinking. Always. The sinful thinking precedes the sinful actions. So if you want to change a sinful lifestyle, you have to change a sinful thought pattern, a sinful mind. Some have likened repentance to a massive U-turn. You're driving in one direction, and then you turn around and drive in the opposite direction. Well, that's fine, but you need to understand what causes the person to make that turn. They think differently. It's a different thinking pattern. Something's changed in the way they approach. And fundamental to that is the concept of a new heart, a transformed heart, to have a different heart, the center, the core of our being, the part of us that thinks, that reasons, that understands, the part of us that loves and hates, the part of us that chooses and rejects the core of the being biblically is called the heart. Heart does all of those things. No genuine repentance can happen without a transformation of the heart. That inner part of us that thinks, that loves, that reasons, that chooses, that's the heart. We must have a new heart. And so the prophet is Ezekiel spoke of the radical heart transplant that God does. Ezekiel 36:26-27, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you the heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees, and be careful to keep my laws." That is essential to our salvation. That's what it means to be born again: a radical transformation of the heart, the corrupt heart. Knowing that you need a new heart is essential to our salvation. It's also essential to know you can't do it to yourself. You could as well perform physical heart surgery on yourself as give yourself a new heart. It's not something you can do, but God in his grace can do it through the Holy Spirit. He can give us a new heart. Repentance, therefore, is a gift of God. 2 Timothy 2:25, it says, "And the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth." God grants to his children repentance; he gives it to us as a gift. So let me just stop and say, if you are right now, and have been for some time, a repenter, believer in Christ, thank God for his grace to you. God has granted you repentance unto life. He's given you a gift, and it's not of yourselves; it's grace from God. And he does this by his powerful Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit knows how to do it. He's very good at it. The Holy Spirit is sovereign in his work, and he's able to take out that heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. Amazingly, it is the kindness of God, Romans 2:4, that leads us to repentance. So when you see the kindness of Christ in dealing with broken sinners, women that are lavishing tears on his feet, and drying his feet with their hair, and he's so kind and gracious to them, or lepers and his heart just moves out to them, the kindness of God in Christ leads you to repentance. "Knowing that you need a new heart is essential to our salvation. It's also essential to know you can't do it to yourself. " All right. So, in summary, by genuine repentance, the sinner has a spiritual sight of sin and sinfulness. You see it for what it is. There's a deep sense of it. Not just that sin is dangerous and that it will result in consequences and judgment and even eternity in hell itself, all of that's biblically true, but that's not enough. But that sin is essentially morally disgusting, so that even if you could get away with it and not have its consequence, you still wouldn't want any part of it, because it is foul, it is disgusting in the sight of God. And you don't want it either. That's genuine repentance. So the God-centeredness of general repentance, that vertical aspect of it, "Against you, and you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight." There's also an emotional aspect to it, in which we have a sense of brokenness and grieving over the sin, and a sorrow over it. All of this results, ultimately, in a volitional aspect of turning away from a lifestyle of sin to a new kind of life. That's biblical repentance. III. The Elements of Job’s Repentance Now let's look at elements of Job's repentance. Now, as we've said, God has been doing a deep work in Job. Given how this whole book of Job unfolds, it seems that bringing Job to this level of repentance was God's loving purpose all along. Job was an amazingly godly man, as we said, a man about whom God was accustomed to boast, even to Satan, the accuser. Then Satan put Job to the test, taking away all of his wealth, taking away in one day, all 10 of his children. Subsequently, taking away his health, afflicting him with terrible sores. And ultimately God was behind all of these things. The Lord gave and the Lord took away. So ultimately this was God's work in Job's life. Job began well. Well enough. He didn't accuse God of wrongdoing. He didn't challenge God. He worshiped God. He started well, but the trial went on. We've learned this. The chronic nature of suffering, it doesn't go short time; it just continues to unfold and so stuff starts to bubble to the surface. And that's what happened with Job. He starts to say very harsh things against God. Maybe you didn't realize before you read the book of Job. You say, "Well, you know, he didn't sin against God in anything he said." Well, that was at the start friends. It just kept going. And then he starts to say some things that are just not godly about God himself. In Job 9:16-18, he said, "Even if I summon him [God] and he responded, I do not believe he would give me a hearing. He would crush me with a storm, and multiply my wounds for no reason. He would not let me regain my breath, but would overwhelm me with misery." It's like God is some cruel capricious tyrant that just enjoys crushing his children. And it culminated, as we've seen, in him directly accusing God of injustice. In Job 19:7, "Though I cry, ‘I've been wronged.’ I get no response. Though I call for help, there is no justice." He thinks he could directly challenge God in a court of law and win. He's so convinced in his own righteousness. He believes, Job 31, he goes through all of these vows and assertions of purity. And at the end of that, he says, "I sign now on my defense. Let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing. Surely I would wear it on my shoulder. I would put it on like a crown. I would give him an account of my every step. Like a prince, I would approach him." Does that sound like Job here in Job 42? Not at all, but that's where he was at. He was so convinced of his own righteousness that he would take God on in a court of law and win against God. So the very sin God accuses him of in Job 40:8, "Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?" So let's look at elements of Job's repentance. He begins with this statement in verse 2, "I know that you can do all things." So first we see deeper knowledge of God's power. Job is at a whole different level in understanding God's power now. Job knew that God was powerful before all this happened, but now that God has appeared in a whirlwind and has spoken so powerfully to him with his own voice, Job was ready to be taken to an entirely new level of his knowledge of God's awesome power. Now I think Job 42:2 may be the clearest, simplest statement of the doctrine of God's omnipotence in the Bible. You've heard often of the omnipotence of God. Well, this is the clearest statement of it you'll find. I know that you can do all things. Jesus put it this way. "All things are possible with God." Mark 10:27. Anything that power can do, God can do. Job learned this from God's words, tracing out his direct activity and creating and sustaining the universe, laying the foundations of the world, controlling the boundaries of the sea, making the mountains rise and the valley sink to just where he ordained that they should go. Controlling all the patterns of the weather, the wind, the rain, the snow, thunder and lightning. Controlling even the distant stars and the laws by which they are governed, the distant constellations. God understands those laws, rules over them. There's nothing Job can do about any of them. And then the animal world, the 10 animals that he brings out as evidence of his wisdom and power. The lions, ravens, goats, deer, donkeys, oxen, ostrich, horse, hawk, and eagle, how they're born, where they live, what they eat, what their habits and habitats are, their capabilities, how they interact with each other in a network of life. When they live, when they die, all of it in God's hands. It was at this point, as you remember, that Job repented for the first time. Job 40:3-5, “Job answered the Lord, ‘I'm unworthy. How can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer twice, but I'll say no more.’” But God wasn't finished with him. He rebuked him for thinking he could discredit his justice in order to justify himself, as we saw. He reminded Job effectively, "I'm God, and you're not." Job 40:9-10, "Do you have an arm like God's, and can your voice thunder like his?" Imagine hearing that from God. "Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor, and clothe yourself in honor and majesty." He reminded Job that he, God alone, can judge the wicked and arrogant of the world. And because Job could do none of these things, then Job cannot save himself. Then God brought forth those two last great beasts, behemoth and leviathan, whose terrifying power and ferocity make them impossible for man to hunt down, to corral, to control, or to kill. And it seemed best to me, as I walked through those chapters, to see in them the personification of demons and of Satan, that ancient serpent, that ancient dragon who is behind so much of the misery and sorrow of this world, and a beast we cannot kill. Seemed best to me just because there is no physical beast we cannot kill. But hermeneutically it seemed best to say we can't kill Satan. He's too strong for us. He's too powerful for us. But God is saying, "Though you cannot corral him, you can't control him, you can't kill him. I can. I put him on a leash. I put boundaries around him. And when I'm done with him, I'll kill him for all eternity." Job had never realized the extent of God's awesome power before. Now, as essential to his repentance, he does. He knows in ways he never did before. "I know, oh Lord, that you can do all things." Number two, deeper knowledge of God's wise plan, "I know, oh God, that you can do all things. And no plan of yours can be thwarted." The awesome power of God is controlled at every moment, by the wise plans of God. The wisdom of God controls the power of God. God is not some random, terrifying force of the universe that runs amuck. Picture the proverbial loose cannon, an old wooden fighting vessel, a sailing vessel, and a cannon's loose. And it's a heaving storm. And the deck is rolling and tossing. And the waves are random and powerful and big. And you have no idea where the cannon's going to go next. Non-Christians see suffering and evil and hurricanes and all that with that kind of randomness, but we know differently. God's awesome power is linked to his wisdom in his plan. His wise plan. And God's plans will all be executed. No plan of his can be thwarted because he's all-powerful. So essential to Job's repentance is understanding, not only the infinite power of God, but the perfect details of God's wisdom, God's wise plan. So Job losing all his wealth, all 10 of his children, and his health is part of God's wise plan for his life. It's not time plus chance. Not at all. There is a wisdom to the plan of God. Essential, therefore, to repentance is thinking differently. Thinking differently. And part of that is vertically realizing God's a better thinker than you are. Can you handle that? Can you handle that God is better at thinking than you are? Isaiah 55 says it plainly, "’For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord. ‘As the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.’" So repentance is, God, I know that you're better at thinking than I am. Teach me how to think. Teach me to think differently. So God, when he comes to you and says, "Come now let us reason together," says the Lord, follow his train of thought, not your own. Thirdly, a deeper sense of Job's own ignorance, this is the other side of that same coin. It follows the last one. Our thinking is juvenile. Our thinking is like that of little children, sometimes. One commentator in the book of Job likened Job and all of us to backseat drivers in our own lives, a 12 year-old backseat driver. And the dad is a skillful driver. Yeah, it's rainy and yeah, the road's wet, and all that, but the kids shrieking in the background, yelling at the driver to do this and to do that. He's a 12 year-old backseat driver. And God wants to say, "I know what I'm doing. I know how to drive your life." So look at verse 3, "You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my council without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." The words “you asked” are in my translation, your translation may not have them because they're not in the Hebrew, but it is a quote of what God said to him. "You said this to me, ‘Who is this that obscures counsel by speaking words without knowledge?’ So, God, you said that to me.” So basically in his repentance, he's accepting God's very low view of his own thinking. He's accepting God's evaluation of his ignorance. Essentially, he's saying back to God, "You're absolutely right. I was obscuring counsel by speaking words without knowledge. My ignorance is overwhelming. Truly Lord, I was speaking about things I knew nothing about. I was out of my depth." Out of my depth. Fourth, greater awareness of the wonder of God's ways, look at verse 3, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me." The word translated, wonderful, is really an incredible word here. It means things that are amazing. They create awe and worship. The complexity of creation is certainly among them, the inanimate universe, the foundations of the earth, the mountains, the valleys, the limits of the oceans, the weather patterns, all of those things. “It's too wonderful for me. It's beyond my ability to comprehend. And then how much less can I understand animate creation, the animals, the systems of life if a rock is amazing, and eagle is more amazing? I can't make a rock and I can't make an eagle. And so I think, oh God, your ways are wonderful. They're amazing.” Isn't it striking that Job includes all the dimensions and details of God's wise plan here, including the vast sorrow of his own life, the death of his 10 children? Though the pain is still fresh, his repentance includes their death in his word, wonders- things too wonderful for me to understand. So, when we get to heaven we will look back and remember all of the sorrows of our lives, but they'll cause us no sorrow in heaven. And will we not see the handiwork of God in every moment of our lives? Will we not see it as ultimately wonderful, what God did to get us, in a multitude greater than anyone could count, from every tribe, language, people and nations, get us all safely to heaven. Are not his ways wonderful and amazing? And so, essential to Job's repentance is to learn, not just to submit to God's wise and fatherly decrees about his life, but to delight in them, delight in them. Fifth, a vision of God himself, verse 5, "My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you." This may be the greatest mystery in all this book. Somehow we have to limit our understanding of these words. Because God said to Moses, putting him in a cleft in the rock, "No one can see me and live." Right? We know from 1 Corinthians 15, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” We cannot in these mortal frames, see the full glory of God. We cannot see God and live. Or as John 1:18 says plainly, "No one has ever seen God." So the movement in Job's life from hearing about God to seeing him is mysterious. But this is what we call in the Old Testament, a theophany. God shows up in some display of his person, some display of his greatness, and it’s overwhelming, an overwhelming experience. Now in reality, when we get to heaven, we will actually see the face of God. Revelation 22:6 says, "His servants will see his face." We're going to see God directly. And we'll be able to survive it and delight in it. It says in 1 Corinthians 13:12, "Now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror, then face to face. Now we know in part, then we should know fully, even as we have been fully known." We are heading toward a world in which we will see God face to face. Perhaps it's like it was with Isaiah, where he saw the pre-incarnate Christ. He saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted. And the train of his robe filled the temple. Isaiah 6. And John 12 tells us, Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him. So there's this pre-incarnate vision of the greatness of the Lord, perhaps. At any rate, essential to Job's repentance is the delight and overwhelming power of seeing God's glory. “I've heard of you, but now my eyes have seen.” And I want to tell you, as I've meditated on heaven for five years, the movement from hearing only to seeing also, that's what heaven's all about. Well, what's that going to be like? I mean, what are we doing here? You're listening to yet another sermon. I have to find ways to use words, nouns, verbs, adjectives to captivate your imagination for another about six minutes. And then we're done. How many of you would prefer to hear a verbal-based sermon, or to see God's glory face to face? I can't compete, friends. I'm not trying to compete. This is what we've got for now. We've got logic, we've got words, we've got the written word of God, and it's enough. But we are going to move someday from hearing only to seeing at last. And I can't wait. That's going to be delightful. I've heard of you at the ears, but now my eyes have seen you. Six, the vision of God, of himself, has nothing before God. “My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you, therefore I despise myself.” I despise myself. You're like, "Well, pastor, that's not a healthy self-image." He's going to end up with a very healthy self-image. What was happening before was the unhealthy self-image. That overweening pride, that arrogance we all have. That's unhealthy. It is healthy to be humble before a holy God, to realize we're creatures and that we're sinners. That is healthy. And for us, therefore, to despise ourselves in that healthy way, what does it mean? I think little of myself. It's not self-loathing, it's not self-hatred, it's self-littling. I realize I am a speck on the scales. I am a drop from the bucket. “You, oh Lord, are infinitely majestic. And I can't begin to comprehend you. So I despise myself as small.” It's similar isn't it, to Psalm 8, "When I consider the Heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you created, what is man that you are mindful of?" Isn't that, “I despise myself?” What are we? We're small. We're insignificant. We're weak. That's what “I despise myself.” This is what repentance is. Do you remember the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector? The tax collector stood at a distance. He would not look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, "Be merciful to me, oh God, a sinner." Genuine repentance is a deeply humbling work. And that's what opens the door for God's grace to work. Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, for whoever humbles himself will be exalted. "It is healthy to be humble before a holy God. To realize we're creatures and that we're sinners. That is healthy." And then finally, “I repent in dust and ashes.” What does that mean? I realized I was made from dust. I was made from dust, and to dust I'm going to return. It's who I am. I'm mortal. And it's also a sign of mourning over sin, of grief over sin, of turning from it emotionally and saying, "I hate my sin. And I hate what I said about you. God, all of it was false. I repent in dust and ashes." IV. Christ’s Call to Us to Repent Well, that's Job's repentance, elements of Job's repentance. Christ is standing in front of all of you, calling on you to repent. No matter where you're at in your lives, no matter where you're at in your spirituality. You may have walked in here an unbeliever. This morning, you've heard the Gospel. You hear it again. That God, in his kindness, sent his Son. The only begotten Son of God, Jesus, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, lived the only sinless life that has ever been. Died on the cross in our place, rose again. And if you repent of your sins, turning from your sins to him, you'll be forgiven, past, present and future, all your sins, forgiven. And he's calling on you now to repent and believe the good news. But you may have done that years ago and I say, praise God, your sins have been forgiven. They are forgiven, and they will be forgiven. There's still work to be done. Amen? Still work to be done. And so he's standing before each one of you and saying, “Be honest about your inner corruptions.” Say, “I know if you brought that level of sorrow in my life, I would begin to complain against you and murmur against you and question you. And so therefore, God, work in me, work in me, deep, deep repentance.” Close with me in prayer. Lord, thank you for the things we've learned from Job. We have one more sermon in this incredible series. I thank you for his experiences, oh Lord. We would not want to go through them, but we can benefit from them as we read. And Lord, I pray that we would let go of our pride, let go of our arrogance and our selfishness. And that we would turn to you in repentance, and allow you to work in us, our whole lives, a deep-seeded repentance. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

In this epic lunch hour break, the Mightiest prophets of Eternity talks about the authority of Jesus Christ to Jude sin. They start with a scripture John 5:39-40, this scripture, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees about his authority to give life and to judge sin, In other words, his deity. Yet, the Pharisees were so consumed with their legalist viewpoints. As a result, missing the Christ Jesus. When Adam fell in the garden, we all become spiritually dead. The only person who can remove us from this spiritual death is Christ Jesus, else, a man stands the judgment of God.The Mightiest Prophets also read John 9:39-40, Again putting emphasis on the fact that without him the whole world stands Judged. However, those who will listen to him, follow, accept him, and the one who sent him will be healed and be given life. The servants of the Lord went ahead and talks about John 3:16-17 with emphasis on verse 17. Additionally, talking about the need to Only Jesus Christ have the authority to give life and to judge sin.In summary, The Lord Jesus Christ came with maximum authority to give us life and to judge sin. Whoever follows him, listens to his words, and puts them into practice will be healed and have eternal life as stated in 1st Corinthians 15:50-55. And those who will disobey and disobedient as well as arrogant will be put to condemnation. The Messiah is coming and it time to put Jesus as your number priority.

We have problems and troubles in life. There are troubles which nobody can help us to solve them. Only Jesus Christ can solve all our troubles.

Many people think they need to change their lives before they can draw near to God. They need to clean up a few things. But we can't clean up our own lives. We can't bring the change God wants to bring in our lives. He had to come to us through Jesus, and He has brought us salvation through Jesus' blood. Only Jesus Christ can change your life. There's no mess you've made that He can't help you clean up. In Jesus, you are made right with God. There is nothing that God cannot do for you through Jesus Christ. There's nothing on the inside of you that would make you distant from God. He loves you just the way you are! Whatever you're facing today, God wants you to know: “I'm right here. I'm an up close and personal God. Come close to Me and know that I will help you.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.