WWUTT 837 The Son Gives Life to Whom He Will?

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Jesus Christ shows us the Father. He is the way to the Father. He is how we have a relationship with the

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Father. You might notice that a false version of Christ does not point to the Father when we understand the text.

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You're listening to When We Understand The Text, committed to sound teaching of the Word of God. For questions and comments, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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And don't forget our website, www .tt .com. Here's our host, Pastor Gabe.

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Thank you, Becky. We continue with our study of the Gospel of John, Chapter 5. And as with yesterday,

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I'll start with verse 19 and read through verse 24. So Jesus said to them,

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Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the

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Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the

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Father loves the Son, and shows him all that he himself is doing.

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And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. For as the

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Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life, to whom he will.

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The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the

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Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the

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Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.

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He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

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So I wanted to come back to Jesus' statement about the Father loves the

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Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And the point that I made yesterday is that Jesus shows us the

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Father. This isn't the first time we've had that said to us in the Gospel of John, but it's another statement where that is illustrated.

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If we want to know God the Father, look at Christ. What is the Father like?

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We see it in Jesus, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, as the

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Apostle Paul puts it in Colossians chapter 1. So everything of God is in Jesus Christ.

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Philip, later on in the Gospel of John, he's going to say to Jesus, if you would just show us the

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Father, then we would believe. And Jesus says to him, Philip, don't you know me? If you have seen me, you have seen the

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Father. And as we had stated in John chapter 1, no one has ever seen God the Father.

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The only God who is at the Father's side, referring to the Son, he has made him known.

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So Jesus shows us the Father. We have not seen this Trinitarian dynamic of God illustrated in this way in the

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Old Testament. Now, given that Jesus has shown us the Father and we have the

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New Testament that unpacks that for us clearly, then we can go back to the Old Testament and we can see the distinctions.

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Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Well, this appearance here is actually Christ, this spirit moving here.

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That's actually the Holy Spirit. You know, we can see those things now in the Old Testament, given that we are followers of Christ and he's shown us the

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Father. But in the Old Testament, that was veiled. His his personal nature was not clearly perceived.

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He is God. He was known. He had showed himself to his people, Israel. But the distinctiveness of God was not seen.

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So there was there was the what of God. He is one God. But the who of God had not been revealed.

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That's Jesus, who is the one who shows us that now, whenever we start talking about Trinitarian doctrine, this nothing terrifies me more than this.

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This is the scariest doctrine to unpack because I'm always scared

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I'm not going to do it right. How do you properly convey the Trinitarian nature of God, who is one

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God, three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all uncaused and eternal and equal?

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But yet there is a distinctiveness about them and they are without division. These things are complicated and it's a scary doctrine to enter into because I'm so afraid that I'm going to make it something crude and we shouldn't do that with God.

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God is holy. He is above us. He is excellent and amazing. So I always want to know how

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I can come to the text and exalt God, not bring him down to some kind of human absurd level.

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And we risk doing that whenever we are embarking on the doctrine of the Trinity, because God is

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God and we are not. We can't fathom the complexities of God in this way in his infinite nature because we're such finite individual beings.

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So God is eternal and he's triune. He's one God, but he's three persons.

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But you can't be one person and three persons. You know, you're a human being, but you're one human being and you're also a person and you're one person.

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But God is one being and he's three persons. And the reason why we can't fathom that or wrap our minds around it is because we're not

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God and we're not going to understand it until we get to glory. I believe it was yesterday that I quoted also 1

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John 3 too. We will see him as he is because we will be made to be like him.

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Then we'll understand these concepts when we enter into glory and we see God face to face.

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But now we don't see those things clearly. They are mysterious to us.

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As far as knowing who God the father is again, we see that through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

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He reveals to us the father. We have the love of the father because we have faith in Jesus Christ.

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God the father has shown us favor because Christ has called us to himself.

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And just as the father raises the dead and gives them life. So also the son gives life to whoever he will.

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That's John 5 21. That's essentially where we're going today. For as the father raises the dead and gives them life.

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So also the son gives life to whom he will. So these two, the father and the son are not different in will for the son does what he sees the father doing and he submits to the will of his father in heaven.

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Yes, the three persons of God are distinct, but they are all of like mind and purpose.

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The son is not doing anything contrary to the will of the father. Otherwise, he would not be showing us the father and Jesus brings us to our father in heaven.

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Therefore, whenever I embark on teaching on the Trinity, I know that I'm safe if I rely on the words of Christ because he shows us the father and what he says about himself and what he's also said about the

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Holy Spirit. These things are true. And when I stick with these words, I can avoid falling into anything crude or any irreverent examples when

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I make God who is holy into some sort of manlike form that he's not meant to be.

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And you might say, well, yeah, but isn't that Jesus isn't Jesus the God man, very God and very man,

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God in human flesh, certainly, but God condescended himself. So it's not for me to condescend

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God. I can't bring him down to my level. But what Jesus, who is God in human flesh, has shown us about God.

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These are the words that we need to rely upon when it comes to understanding who God is. Like I said,

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I want to come back to this topic again today, and I'm going to approach it a different way. I want to share some words from a false teacher so that I can have an example of what

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God is not. You're going to hear somebody describe God, all three persons,

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Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and Father. And what you're going to hear her say is exactly not what

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Jesus is saying about himself and about the father here in John five. This is

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Kim Walker Smith. She is one of the worship leaders at Bethel Church in Redding, California, and she's going to talk about a vision of God that she had, not just of the son talking to her, but also a vision of the father.

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I'm going to play the first clip where it's just her and Jesus. This is about two and a half minutes long, and then

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I'll comment on it at the end. I had felt so much shame in my life.

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I had grown up believing that I was a mistake, that God meant to make a boy, and I came out a girl, that my family wanted a boy and were disappointed that I was a girl.

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I just had these lies that came in as a child that kind of stuck with me, just believing that I was a mistake and that how much could you love a mistake, and he doesn't really love me very much, and he's just trying to make the best of a bad situation.

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These are the kinds of things I believed about the way that God saw me and the way that he viewed me. And all of a sudden, out loud, in the natural, outside of my vision,

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Anthony Skinner's up on the stage, and he says, you need to ask God two questions. You need to ask him, how much do you love me, and what were you thinking when you created me?

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And he says the exact two questions that I had thought in my head, except he has said it out loud over the microphone, and I think, everybody's heard you.

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And it's not like Anthony said, hey, you, Kim, down there. He was probably just having a moment of obedience with the

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Lord and had no idea why he was saying that. And then there I am down there having this encounter, and then

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I thought, well, now I have to ask because God probably heard him. He just said it out loud.

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So I work up my tiny bit of courage, which was probably about that much. And I just say,

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Jesus, how much do you love me? And immediately, he sat me down, and he reached out his arms like this, and they're going on forever and ever, and I'm looking, and I can't see the ends of where it is going on forever.

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And he's going, I love you this much, and he's cracking up and so joyful and happy.

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And I start crying and laughing and crying and laughing. I'm like, what? You love me that much?

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I can't even see the ends. It's just going on forever and ever. And you know what's funny is

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I immediately had this thought, he speaks my language. If he had said it like that to anybody else, they probably would have thought, this is weird.

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But for me, this is kind of how we relate, this kind of fun and silliness.

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Well she certainly got the silliness part right. That much is true. But notice that this vision of Jesus that she had did not point her to the

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Father. When it came to understanding the love that God had for her, what she's relying upon is some therapeutic form of Jesus that's extremely crude.

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In fact, it's so crude, it's stretch arm strong. Jesus with his arms stretched out so far in either direction, you can't see either way.

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And he's kind of drunk for some reason because he's got his head rolled back and he's just cracking up at her. I would take that very offensively if Jesus were to show up and start cracking up at me.

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But apparently that works for Kim Walker Smith. And furthermore, further on that point, it doesn't work for anyone else.

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Neither will it sustain her on a day when she is experiencing something more significant than self -esteem issues.

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How is it that we know the love that God has for us? Jesus points us to the

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Father. Just go back to John 3 .16, very basic gospel verse.

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For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but has the gift of everlasting life.

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Who is the subject in that verse? It's God the Father who is started in the verse.

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God the Father so loved the world he gave his son to die on the cross for our sins.

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If you even when you go to a verse like Romans 5, 8, which is not Jesus speaking, but the theology of understanding that Christ died on the cross for our sins still points us to the

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Father. Romans 5, 8, God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners,

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Christ died for us. God the Father shows his love for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

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There is not a book of the Bible that points to the Father more than the gospel of John. There are over a hundred references to God the

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Father in the gospel of John. The next most is the book of Matthew. Now, there's a bunch of references to Father in the first chapter because of the genealogy, but then we get to a lot of references about God the

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Father in heaven. This is the first place in the Bible where Jesus tells us to pray to God as our heavenly father.

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For if we have been adopted into the family of God through the blood of Jesus Christ, we are his adopted sons and daughters.

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Jesus says this in Matthew chapter 7, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven, constantly pointing us back to the father.

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Matthew 25, so skipping several chapters to where Jesus is speaking in the

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Olivet discourse. In verse 31 of Matthew 25, he says, when the son of man comes in his glory and all of the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.

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Before him will be gathered all the nations and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats and he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on his left.

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Then the king will say to those on his right, come you who are blessed by my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

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Once again, even in judgment, God pointing to the father, Matthew 7, Matthew 25, it's going to be about, did you do the will of my father who is in heaven?

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Well, how do we know what the will of the father is? We look at Jesus Christ. How do we know the love that God the father has for us?

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We look at Jesus Christ. As I've heard James White say, if you want to know the love of God, look at the cross.

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If you want to know the wrath of God, look at the cross. You see both the love of God and God's wrath displayed there at the cross at Calvary.

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That's where it intersects. And God the father has poured his wrath out on God, the son who has absorbed it for us and given us his righteousness.

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So whoever believes in Jesus will not perish, but has everlasting life. It is the absolute greatest display of love we can ever find anywhere.

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Kim Walker -Smith's Stretch Armstrong Jesus doesn't help her and it doesn't help anyone else.

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It certainly will not save her on the day of judgment. We look to Christ to know the will of the father, and we must look to the true

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Christ of the Bible. Here's the next clip from Kim Walker -Smith. This one's a little bit longer. I don't know if I've saved myself enough time here to be able to respond to it, but we'll see how far we get.

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I was, months later, I'm sitting in our prayer house here at our church, and it's just a regular morning.

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I'm watching the sun come up. It's really early. I'm reading my Bible. Nothing amazing or significant's happening, except I'm just, you know, the amazing part was that I got out of bed early enough to watch the sun come up, really.

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Notice that she says very kind of casually, nonchalant. You may not even think it's any big deal, but she said,

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I was reading my Bible and nothing amazing was happening. Then she's going to go into this vision of God that she had.

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So she gets no satisfaction out of what is said in the word of God, but she needs these subjective visions.

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So it's as though Kim Walker -Smith is saying, God, your word isn't good enough.

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I need some sort of subjective feeling in my mind or in my heart in order to get the answers that I want.

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You know what? I come up with the best answers for myself better than the answers that you give me in the

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Bible. That's what she's saying. And it's a very scary posture. I wish that there was a more sense of a fear of God in these person's hearts when they would say something like this.

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Sarah Young, who wrote Jesus Calling, the Jesus Calling devotional, she's done this exact same thing.

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I just wrote a blog on this. Was it the most recent blog that I wrote? Yeah, I think it was.

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Yeah. If you go to PastorGabe .com, it's the it's the first blog that's going to come up. It's like I think

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I titled it a Christmas special, Jesus, a Jesus Calling Christmas special, something like that anyway, because there's a new

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Jesus Calling book that's come out for Christmas. But but Sarah Young has said in her writing of Jesus Calling that prayer and Bible study weren't enough and she needed more.

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And so she goes into this like transcendental listening for voices, writing them down sort of meditation and believing that what it is she's hearing in her mind is the voice of God.

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What a frightening thing to hear a person say, God, the way that you've intended communication between us, that doesn't work for me.

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Prayer and Bible study, prayer, we're talking to God, Bible study, God is talking to us. But I don't like that.

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I need something else. Be careful that your relationship with God is not on your terms, may it be on his terms.

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And again, how do you know what the will of the father is? You look at the words of Christ.

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How do you know what the words of Christ are? You come to your Bible and you study it. And God is speaking to you in this way, which is amazing over and over again.

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When I come to the scriptures, I am blown away by what it is that I read. And even more so to know that God has given this to me through his prophets and apostles.

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He has expressed to me his word in the pages of the Bible. And now

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I have it and multiple copies of it on my shelf. I can come to it anytime I want and study it and get to know the mind and will of God.

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That is amazing. It's incredible. The grace of God is sufficient. But Kim Walker Smith needs something else.

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And I'm reading my Bible and I can feel him like he's like he's walking up to me across the room and just tapping me on the shoulder.

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Kim, please ask me that question. And I'm kind of like, hey,

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Jesus, beautiful day. Good job. Kim, please ask me that question.

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And again, as he's completely irresistible, I finally fall on the floor crying.

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And it came out a little more like, what were you thinking when you created me?

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Frustration. And immediately I go into this vision. Again, these aren't happening all the time, but this moment is a big deal for me, you know.

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And I'm standing with Jesus and I see God the Father in front of me. And he has a table in front of him and he reaches in his heart and he rips this chunk off his heart and he throws it on the table.

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Now it's like Play -Doh or something, you know. And I see he creates me. And then he reaches over and he grabs this box.

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And I'm just standing watching this with Jesus going, what is he doing? What is he making? And it's, you know those boxes like little girls have when you open it up and there's the little ballerina inside that twirls and plays music, you know.

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It was like that. He puts me in there and he closes the lid and he gets like this excited look on his face, you know, like, you know, he's really excited.

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And all of a sudden he grabs the top and he throws it open. And inside I start worshiping and dancing and singing to him.

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And he goes, whoa, and he gets so excited. And he runs around the circle just yelling and screaming and waving his hands like he's just so happy.

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Why do all of her visions of God just seem like he's incredibly high? I don't, I don't,

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I don't get, I don't get this. I really don't understand the charismania pictures of God that they have.

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But anyway, so here, Kim Walker Smith has a privilege to see something that no one else has ever seen.

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Even Moses did not get to see this. And that is God the father. She gets to see

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God the father. Even though it says in John 1 18, no one's ever seen God. Unless we be confused about that.

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John says it again in 1 John 4 12. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another,

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God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

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But she's seeing these weird visions of God the father ripping chunks of himself out and creating

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Kim Walker Smith. When we actually, when we understand the theology of scripture, it is

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Jesus who is the creator according to the will of the father. Anyway, all that aside, what's going to come up later on in the clip, which

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I'm not going to get to since we're running out of time, she's going to say that the reason why God created her is because she makes him happy.

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But what we actually read in Romans three is that we've become worthless. We were made in the image of God.

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We took that image and we desecrated it with our sin and we've made ourselves fit for destruction. But God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners,

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Christ died for us. See, the whole thing about sin and wretchedness never comes about in Kim's theology.

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Everybody's just good. Everybody's just a good person. You just need to figure that out. You just need to figure out that you're good and God likes you just the way that you are.

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Well, if that's the case, he had no reason to send his son to die on the cross for our sins. We had no reason to be redeemed.

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All we had to do was overcome our own insecurities. And then once we did that, then we would realize, hey,

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I'm worth it. No, you're worth less. If you were worth dying for, then

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God's grace isn't grace. You are not worth dying for. God has demonstrated his love for you in that while you weren't worth dying for,

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Christ died for you anyway. Let's come to Romans 3, verses 23 through 26.

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For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom

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God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

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This was to show God's righteousness, not us, not our righteousness, not that we make

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God happy because in his divine forbearance, he passed over former sins. In other words, he looked past our sinfulness to the righteousness that he was going to give to us in Christ.

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It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

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And again, all of this is from the father whom Christ, the

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Christ of the Bible, shows to us, except no imitation. Let's conclude with prayer.

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Our wonderful God and father, we thank you for the love that you have shown to us through Jesus Christ, our

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Lord. Help us to have an understanding of who we are and what we are worthy of, destruction because of our sin against you, and yet who you are as a merciful and loving

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God to give your son to die on the cross for our sins so that we would not think too highly of ourselves and too little of you, but that we would, in understanding the words of John the

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Baptist, we would decrease so that you might increase. There would be less of ourselves, our egos, and our own lives so that you may reign exalted, that the peace of Christ would rule in our hearts to which we are called in one body, and we would be filled with thanksgiving, knowing that you have given your son for the forgiveness of sins, that all who believes in him are loved by our father in heaven.

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In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. For more about our ministry, visit us online at www .utt