10 Years of Beholding God | Anthony Mathenia, Pt 1

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Reading Well I: Principles (Originally published 11.25.21)

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm John Snider. We're doing something a little different today.

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We are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically study.

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And you're about to watch the interview that we recorded with Anthony Mathenia. If you've done this study, you know that at the end of each sermon there were clips of interviews and only about 15 minutes of each person was able to make it into the series.

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So we have a lot of material that we've never put together and made public, and that's what we want to do now.

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Anthony's a pastor in Virginia, and he has served as a missionary in Ethiopia. And Anthony has been a very close and dear friend of mine for many years.

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This interview, being too long for one podcast, is going to be spread out over two, and this is part one.

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Yeah, the way A .W. Tozer makes the comment, the most important thing about a person is what he or she thinks when they think about God, is true.

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I may phrase it in a different way. I would say that what you or I think about God affects everything that we are and everything that we do, and that's exposed or revealed everywhere that we look.

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I mean, all the decisions that we make, that we see other people making, the root issue there is what that person believes or doesn't believe about God, who they think

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He is. We see that not only in individuals and families, larger denominations, churches, corporations, in all across society, there's nowhere that we can look where human beings are concerned that doesn't scream, this is what

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I think about God, based on how they're reacting or what they're doing, how they're functioning in the society and in culture.

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For me, learning about God, there have been different seasons where God has taught me at different times, more or less, or different aspects concerning Him and who

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He is. One of the particular times that I remember most vividly was a time that was very difficult based on the physical circumstances that I found myself in, and He had me devotionally in the

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Minor Prophets, and just reading about the bigness of God and how

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He dealt with His people, the seriousness with which He warned them, but yet the kindness always that He offered in the

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Gospel and the redemption that He promised and that He guaranteed for the people who were His own, was wonderful for me, and I still think about those days with fondness and still return often to the

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Minor Prophets because of the fondness that I have for those times that God was really teaching me and restructuring the way that my mind worked concerning who

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He was and how He deals with His people. I see evidences of that for sure all around, you don't have to look far to see.

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In my estimation, the situation concerning American Evangelicalism all around us is a great picture of what the

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Apostle John records for us in Revelation chapter 3 in Jesus' words to the church at Sardis.

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There is this sense in that we have a name, that we are alive, yet as Jesus says there, we're dead.

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We're doing all these things, He says, I know your deeds, I see what you're about, you're going through all the motions, doing all the right things possibly, but you're dead.

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There's no life there, and that is the exact thing,

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I think, that the Lord would say to American Evangelicalism by and large. Of course there are encouraging works all around and there are healthy churches and there are people that are serious about God and His honor and His reputation, but by and large we have bought into an unhealthy perspective concerning the local church, and as a result we are going to great lengths to create all these things that are just plastic or a foe on the outside.

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So it looks like life, but inside the reality is we're still dead.

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There has not been regeneration, it hasn't happened, God hasn't breathed life into us.

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So in order to usurp that or get along without it, we've gone to great lengths, which includes all kinds of other things that we've done, primarily in the direction of entertainment or a man -centered approach, pleasing men, felt needs approach to ministry.

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There's a large tendency in American Evangelicalism, in churches today, to look and try to diagnose the problems, and rather than seeing through all the way to the core issues, the root issues, we tend to just see the problem in the extremity.

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Using the illustration of a body, we see a problem in the hand that may have its source within, and so we merely try to treat the fruit of the issue rather than tracking back all the way to the source and dealing with it.

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And I think the fundamental issue there, the reason that we're so tempted to go with the quick fix is because we have lost the focus in American Christianity of looking solely at the sufficiency and the supremacy of Jesus Christ.

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Our tendency is to look at man. We begin in the wrong place. We don't go and see that God has said

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He will build His church on His Son, on the name of His Son, the solid rock of Jesus Christ, and the gates of hell will not prevail against us.

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So when we see a problem here or a problem there, either socially or culturally or within the church, we attempt to do some quick fix, putting a band -aid, if you will, on it, rather than doing major heart surgery, which is what is required if there's going to be any lasting effort.

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And I think time and again we're seeing, as a result of the past decade or two decades of these pretty poor diagnosis and wrong approaches to trying to fix

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Christianity, all of that's beginning to implode, if you will, now as we gaze across the evangelical landscape.

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So at the root of that, the real problem, the psalmist nails it in Psalm 50 when he says, you thought

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I was altogether like you. And that's really our problem. We think that God is just like us.

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It's a problem if we think that He's anything like us. But we've fashioned a God in our own imagination.

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We've made Him to be just like us, to like the things that we like, to overlook the sins that we want to overlook, that He's okay with coddling the pet sins that we're so attracted to.

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And it's just absolutely contrary to what the Bible speaks of. And God again and again reveals

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Himself as high and holy, lifted up above the heavens, so high even above the heavens, the psalmist says

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He must stoop just to behold the thing in the heavens, much less condescend all the way to the point of earth.

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Now it's glorious that He's done that on our behalf, in the person of Jesus, that He's been robed in flesh like yours and like mine, in order that He might walk this earth, being our great high priest, suffering in every way, tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.

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Yet we, because God has condescended in the point of man, we have taken this

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God -man of Christ Jesus and brought Him down morally and in so many other ways to our level of thinking,

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He must be like us, He's become like us because we're so great, when the fact is

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He's become like us because we are so incredibly needy. He stooped to our level to rescue us, to lift us up, not to bring

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Himself down. So it takes a complete restructuring of our thinking and believing that what the psalmist says is true there.

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There's a great danger in us thinking that God is altogether like us, or like us in any way whatsoever.

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He's completely different, transcendent, supreme in every way, has ultimate authority.

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All power belongs to Him, all rights. He's sovereign over the created universe.

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He upholds the universe that He's created by the Word of His power. He stretches out

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His strong right arm of Christ Jesus and saves His people from their sins. And yet somehow we are still so prone to think that He's like us in any way at all.

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So it takes a complete restructuring of our thinking and our functioning. The foundation of who we are has to be based and built on Christ Jesus who is

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Lord. For me, the importance of focusing on Christ and having

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Christ on the forefront of my mind and the goal of my life is incredibly important.

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But what I have found to be the most helpful in that are the Scriptures. Because from Genesis to Malachi, in the

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Old Testament, from Matthew to Revelation, on the pages of the New Testament, we have revealed for us

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Christ Jesus. The Old Testament prophets were screaming about the promised

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Messiah who would come and rescue His people. And the life of Christ revealed for us on the pages of the

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Gospel, the letters talking about the supremacy and the glory that belongs only to Jesus.

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Nothing is going to move our hearts forward except for the way that God talks about His Son.

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I mean, He Himself is the Word of God and it's revealed for us on the pages of the

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Scriptures. What Saint Ignatius said, apart from Christ, let nothing dazzle you.

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We ought to be dazzled by only Christ. But the only way that's going to happen is if we're putting Christ before us continually, always seeking to do everything in a way that's pleasing to Him.

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When Paul wrote to the church at Corinth and said, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God, that should be a great encouragement to us that everything we do, all the tedious, mundane tasks that we're responsible for, day after day, moment after moment, as humans, as men and women and boys and girls, we can do them as unto the

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Lord. We can do them with Christ and His honor on the forefront of our mind. It is possible for us to do everything that we do as unto the

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Lord or in a way that's pleasing to Jesus. When Saint Ignatius says, apart from Christ, let nothing dazzle you,

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I think we have a major misunderstanding in our culture of thinking that we need to think about Jesus and all these other things are distractions and they keep coming in and rooting out

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Christ and so we end up being consumed with the temporal rather than the eternal, when our goal ought to be to be so dazzled with Jesus, so amazed with the reality of who

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He is that He is the great distraction, that He's a great distraction to everything else around us because of the attraction that He is to our soul.

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He's the only thing that does our heart good. So we find ourselves going again and again back to Jesus and being amazed with all that He is for us.

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From my perspective, the reason that the Scriptures are so misused isn't because we have a wrong view of the

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Scriptures. I mean, some people do, granted. But primarily, the problem begins with what we think about God.

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For the modern American Christian, God has become something other than a person and so we don't approach

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Him on a personal, relational approach. We come to the

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Bible thinking that it's like a rabbit's foot in our pocket, that if we read a good thought for the day, we're going to have a good day.

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Or if we spend a certain amount of time reading or memorizing even the

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Bible or quoting the Bible, then somehow good or karma is going to happen to us.

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And it's just completely misunderstanding what the Bible is, that it explains a person to us, a person who loves us, loves us to the degree that He gave

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His own Son and crushed His Son on our behalf in order that we might know Him and be known by Him.

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When we begin to see the Bible as our primary means to getting to know

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Christ Jesus, who is our Lord and Savior, then we will approach it with a completely different idea.

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We'll no longer go and flip through thinking, where's that verse that made me feel good yesterday? Or where's that verse that when

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I read it, I won in the ballgame or I had a successful day at work? We begin to read the

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Bible in order to know God. We ask all our own questions when we approach. We ought to ask questions of the

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Bible like, who is God? How can I know Him better? How can I better understand who

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He is, what He thinks, what pleases Him? How I can better know how to arrange my life in a way that brings glory and honor to Christ who deserves all glory and honor, both now and forever?

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In the local church setting, our only hope is to present these high and lofty views of God and of Christ, His Son.

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I mean, if we give people just flippant ideas about who God is or nice thoughts for the day in our sermons, three points in a poem, if you will, that the people aren't going to be satisfied, that they're going to leave hungry because you haven't given them real sustenance, because you haven't told them about God.

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And they have this massive void in their life that only God can fill. And so, it's like throwing little pebbles into this massive hole that only a boulder can fill.

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And we've been given that boulder. We have glorious truths in the Scriptures that we can come and lay at the feet of our people.

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They can be amazed at the glory that belongs to Jesus that's revealed there in the

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Bible. But we're going to have to approach the Bible asking questions like this, Is it true?

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And if it's true, then what does that mean for me? And we have to avoid coming to the Bible and asking questions like,

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How does that make me feel? It doesn't matter how it makes us feel. What matters is, is that it's true.

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And as a result of it being true, it has a bearing on our lives because we belong to the God who authored these

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Scriptures. He breathed them out for us in order that we would know Him and know what He expects from us as His children.

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The gospel that is primarily being believed and even proclaimed in the churches in America is so far from the accurate biblical gospel.

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And the reason that we've rearranged, if you will, restructured the whole gospel is because we have a wrong understanding of what our problem is as human beings.

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We have a wrong understanding of the graveness and the seriousness of sin.

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We think of sin as just the wrong things that we do. And we have dumbed them down to just being small problems.

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Well, if we only have these small problems to deal with, then a mediocre solution at best is going to be sufficient for that.

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So the gospel has become a mediocre solution to treat our small problems of sin, when in reality sin is the worst thing in existence.

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And sin isn't merely the wrong things that we do or the bad thoughts that we think, but it's who we are, our very core.

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It's all we can do. We only sin in action because it's who we are in essence.

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And so because of that, and because this sin is an offense to an absolutely holy and majestic God that is full of splendor, who is pure and right in all of His ways, because we are sin and sin is an offense to Him, we end up being an offense to Him.

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We never get there in the modern gospel, or rather I should say we rarely get there with the modern approach to evangelism.

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We begin with a small problem of sin and we put a little band -aid on it and that's fine. Not realizing that the deeper issue is who we are.

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We need a new life. We're absolutely dead in trespasses and sin. We're laying at the bottom of the pool as it were, lifeless, and God reaches in and gives us new life.

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That's our only hope. For God to remove the heart of stone that is rock hard and lifeless and not inclined towards Him in any way whatsoever.

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For Him to strip that out of us and put inside of us a heart of flesh.

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One that's soft and pliable and conformable to the image and the will of God that can be shaped into the image of Jesus, which is

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God's will for all of our lives that we be conformed to the image of His all -glorious

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Son. And that's sanctification, us maturing in Christlikeness, being transformed from one degree of glory into another, so that until that day when we see

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Him as He is and become like Him, because we see Him just as He is, and sin is no longer something that we're battling with.

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The old man at that point not only has died, but he's been cast away and we've been robed with the newness of life that is in Christ, granted our glorified bodies when we will worship

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Him forever together, face -to -face. One of the major problems that we have in American evangelicalism is with our evangelism.

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And the reason that our evangelism has a problem is because we have this idea as humans, especially in the

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West or here in America, that all of our problems lie outside of us, that we have these external problems.

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When the gospel that's being promoted so often in our day promotes that the solution to all these problems that are without comes from within, that we need to look within, look deeper within and find the solution how to deal with it.

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I mean, it is pop psychology. It's psychology 101, if you will. Look within.

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Dig a little deeper. You have the ability to do it. Use the volitional will that God has given you.

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Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Try harder. Work harder. There is effort in the gospel that we do have responsibility.

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However, it's a complete misunderstanding to say that our problems are outside of us and the solution is within us.

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Our problem is sin, and sin isn't something that is outside of us.

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It's inside of us. So inside, in fact, that it's who we are. And what we need isn't a solution that comes from within, but a solution that comes from without.

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The Bible would use the term righteousness. What we need is righteousness. We are unrighteousness. We are unrighteous within.

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We need a righteousness from without. There's nothing we can do that is righteous. But Christ's righteousness externally robes us.

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The death of Christ justifies us. It removes the unrighteousness from us and then doesn't leave us as a mere blank slate, but he robes us with the righteousness of Jesus Christ so that then we are able to come into the presence of God.

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We are fit to enter into his presence. So it's a misunderstanding for us to think that we have an external problem with an internal solution.

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The reality is we have an internal problem with an external solution. Our problem is sin, and our solution is

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Christ, our Savior. So there are many problems with the modern gospel that is being preached in America.

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One of the major problems I've seen, I have witnessed and seen for myself because I've spent a significant amount of time traveling back and forth to Ethiopia in northeast

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Africa. I lived there for a period of a couple years, several years ago. And the gospel that's being proclaimed in America is the gospel that we are exporting.

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It's almost as if we haven't begun to understand that the gospel that's being preached in our churches that's producing such a weak faith and a miserable

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Christianity, that's what's being sent out among so many missionaries. And so going to Ethiopia, I was reminded again and again of the problems with evangelicalism in America, with Christianity in the

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West. Because everywhere I went in Ethiopia, I could tell the Western missionaries have been here.

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They've taught this small view of God. They've taught this wrong view of man. There's this misunderstanding concerning sin being something that is outside of us and having a solution from within.

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I can see that all over the churches, the local churches and the ministers within Ethiopia.

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The idea that God has somehow changed from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from being a God of wrath to a

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God of mercy. That's screaming from the lives especially of the ministers in overseas settings.

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And it only comes as a result of the poor views of God that we have believed and as a result exported all over the world.

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So it's important for us to pay close attention to what we think about God, to make sure we're getting the gospel right, that we're understanding what evangelism really is.

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So that when we do not only share the gospel with our neighbor, but when we go overseas and take the gospel to the nations, we're giving them the biblical gospel.

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We're teaching a right view of who God is, that He's majestic and holiness, full of splendor and majesty, and that He demands that from His people.

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And we're everything but that. According to the Bible, we are an absolute offense to a holy

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God because of sin. So that's the good news of the gospel. We go and share this remarkable news that yes, we are sinners, yes, we deserve hell, yes, we deserve condemnation and wrath forever, but God has sent

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His only Son to rescue us from that, to change us from that. The good news that the angels came and told

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Mary when she was expecting Jesus, you'll have a son, you'll call His name Jesus, He will save His people from their sins.

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That's the good news of the gospel. Not that we just get out of hell, or not that one day we're going to heaven, but that we will be free from sin.

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And that salvation begins now. If we believe what Romans 6 says, what

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Paul told the church at Rome there, we have died to sin because Christ died to sin and our life is in Him.

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We've been raised to walk in newness of life, both now and forever, as a result of who

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Christ is for us. I hope you found the first part of that interview beneficial, and we will give the second part next week.