The Purpose of Man, What We Believe, Part 19

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ChumbaCasino .com. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. God's will is seen different ways.

There's an aspect of God's will where he lays out a plan and part of what we'll see in Scripture is he does have a will that he is going to make happen.

But he makes these things happen by working through people. Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host,

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the

Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the president and executive director of both

Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community, joined by my sidekick here, Bud the

Wiser. How are you, sir? Greetings. I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me today.

So Bud is maybe a voice you're hearing if you listen to Christian podcast community because he now has two of his own podcasts because he's just not busy enough.

The Bud Zone where he does lots of interviews, and a really bad one coming up and, you know, just released,

I think. So sorry about that, folks, if you're listening. Skip that last one. It hasn't dropped yet. It's closed.

Well, it hasn't dropped since we recorded it. By the time this drops, it'll have just dropped. That's right. Then we have your other one,

Is Truth for You, with your pastor Andrew Smith and the preaching ministry. It's his, but you're the guy that interviews him, so you guys do all the...

I mean, all he does is preach and then show up to a microphone and talk. You guys do all the hard stuff, right?

Yeah. Like preaching, that's just easy, right? Well, what we're gonna do today on The Wrap Report is to continue our study looking at the doctrine of man.

There's a lot in this. We're gonna get into some issues. Well, we're gonna get into some issues of the creation of man.

I know there's nothing there that's disputed at all. Just a little, maybe.

Some people believe in some theories like evolution. Then we're gonna get into, well, kind of the nature of man.

What does it mean when we say that man is sinful? Is he born that way? These are the things that we're gonna have coming up for you today on The Wrap Report.

But before we do, I want to let you guys know of two big announcements. We have an

Israel trip coming, Striving for Eternity and CARM, Christian Apologist Research Ministry, Matt Slick.

He and I are gonna be hosting a tour to Israel in February 2023, from February to the beginning of March.

And so it is a 13 -day Israel trip. There's a lot of information about this trip, and I do not want to take all the time to tell you that here, so I'm gonna give you the website to go to.

Go to 2023israeltour .com. 2023israeltour .com.

You'll get all the details there. It is an expensive trip, and I get that. It's about $5 ,000 if you fly with us, a little over $4 ,000 if you don't.

Now, if you do sign up, just know that we're trying to keep the cost down.

However, it's just an expensive place to go. So what's included? If you fly with us, either out of New York or LAX, your flight would be included in that price.

But your hotels, the bus driver, the bus, the guide, you have to have an Israeli guide there. We have an archaeologist that is coming with us that's gonna be joining us for parts.

That actually gets us in some areas where you need someone like that to be able to go see certain sites. So it's gonna be 13 days.

Your breakfast, your dinners are included, one lunch is included, the hotels all included.

So I know it's expensive, but it is a once -in -a -lifetime opportunity, and this will change the way you read your

Bible. So I really encourage you to go to 2023israeltour .com. Another thing is, if you are looking to evangelize specifically to Mormons, we are running a sale on the book

Sharing the Good News with Mormons. If you pick it up at strivingforeternity .org, we're giving 35 % off when you use the coupon code

LDS. It stands for Latter -day Saints. Now, you say, well, I really don't evangelize Mormons.

Well, there's 24 of us that authored this, all taking a different tactic on how to evangelize, and many of them are good for anybody.

My tactic that I wrote on is open -air evangelism, and you'll see in there, you could use that anywhere, not just with Mormons.

So a really good book to have on hand, gives you lots of great ideas for starting conversations to share the gospel.

So I encourage you to get the book Sharing the Good News with Mormons at strivingforeternity .org at the store, and use the coupon code

LDS. But let's get into our topic for today.

What we're doing is going through the section on Striving for Eternity's website, what we believe that, folks, if you want to follow along, just go to strivingforeternity .org.

Hit the About button under there. You'll see what we believe. Open up the section on the

Doctrine of Man, and we're gonna read the second and third paragraphs here, and we're gonna hope to get through all of this, because they're packed with a lot of stuff here that's gonna open up some discussion.

Yeah, they really are. The second paragraph is one sentence, so I'm curious to see if we'll make much progress through that.

You're saying we might just get one paragraph because it's that long. We might get one sentence done, but, you know, this might be highly exegetical.

Here is the what we believe, beginning paragraph two. God's intention in the creation of man was that man should glorify

God, enjoy God's fellowship, live his life in the will of God, and by this accomplish

God's purpose for man in the world. Parenthetically, you reference Isaiah 43, 7,

Colossians 1, 16, and Revelation 4, 11. Paragraph three. The sin nature is that reality that has been imputed directly from Adam to every individual since Adam, except Jesus Christ, referencing

Romans 5, 12 through 19. The whole human race exists seminally through Adam as the head, thus there is a seminal universality of humanity.

The nature that each person, with the exception of Christ, possesses is the sinful nature passed on from Adam to each generation.

By this nature, all men are guilty with race, guilt, through Adam. The sin nature is inherited, and each person is guilty at the point of conception.

Okay, so as we look into this first part, God's intention in the creation of man, so we could just stop right there, what are we saying?

This is eliminating the idea of evolution. People will say that evolution is a natural process.

Now those who would believe in what is referred to as theistic evolution, in case you ever hear that term, is the idea that God used evolution to create man.

But what is evolution? Evolution is the idea that there's natural processes that could occur in what we do see is adaptation.

Now this would be considered evolution as well. So let me give some specific terminology, and I'm going to define them so we can use these when discussing with folks.

Christians will often talk about terms of micro evolution and macro evolution.

Those terms really would be, scientifically they're referred to as special evolution or general evolution.

So special evolution or micro evolution is what we see in science.

We see small changes. We have DNA of a mother and DNA of a father.

As they have offspring, the offspring gets a combination of DNA. If there is a trait within the

DNA that is stronger, that gets passed on to the children. If there's one that's weaker, it could lose that information.

This is one of the things we know with DNA. You lose information. You say, wait a minute

Andrew, you're saying there's no way to gain information in the DNA. Well actually, yes there is.

There is a way to gain information in the DNA, and the way that is is through a mutation.

So mutations do occur. We get additions to the DNA, and basically have to remember, mutations are most often harmful.

And so those are that we end up seeing this special evolution or micro evolution.

And what people extrapolate is that the fact that we see it in these small changes must mean that general evolution or macro evolution must also be true.

That you can actually see one kind of animal change into another kind of animal. In other words, you start with two pairs of wolves.

You put one up in Alaska and one in the Sahara Desert. What's going to happen after many generations is those in Alaska are going to lose the information for short hair.

Why? Because the short haired dogs are going to die out earlier. And so the trait that's going to be passed on is long hair.

Opposite in the Sahara. So you end up seeing that that is a loss of information that can occur.

That is special or micro evolution. What we don't expect is that at some point a dog gives birth to a cat.

Now I like to word it that way folks, because when you're talking to people that believe in evolution, they'll say that that's ridiculous.

Well actually what they usually say, the way I word it to make it really be ridiculous is, I don't expect to kiss a frog and it become a prince.

That's a fairy tale. Give it millions of years instead of a kiss and we call it evolution. Therefore evolution is a fairy tale for adults.

But you think about that. A frog should be able to give birth to a human being over millions of years.

And people say, well that's not the way it worked. No, no. But it could be that way. Can't it? Because their idea in this natural process is frogs would just be reproducing and they would gain information that would eventually lead to different types of animals, kinds of animals, to eventually become human.

Now it's amazing that when you word it that way, the evolutionists tell you you're being ridiculous.

And yet that is actually what the process is. That one type of animal can become another kind of animal.

Now I'm saying kind because that's the biblical terminology. In scientific terms it would be in the family level.

Roughly about that. But we have the dog kind and the cat kind and things like that.

And we don't see the mixing of them. We do see many different types of cats. But we don't know where it started.

But what we do know is that they all have certain elements that are watered down for the original parents.

So what is it saying when it says God's intention in the creation of man? This first states that God created man.

He's the one that did this. This wasn't through a process, a natural process. So people say theistic evolution.

They're trying to say God used the natural process. That can't be. God didn't use the natural process.

He created. He directly created Adam and Eve. And so the first thing that this just mentioning the creation of man eliminates the idea of a natural process, which eliminates both theistic evolution and evolution.

Now we're dealing with the biblical view. By the way folks, if anyone ever challenges you when it comes to the creation of the universe or the creation of man, just remember, scientifically there is only one source that we have for the creation of man.

Why do I say this? Because well, when it comes to science we use the scientific method, which means you have to be able to create a scenario.

You have to be able to observe the scenario and you got to record that and be able to repeat it.

Well let's see. Who was there when man was created? Oh God!

And he wrote it down in the Bible. And he not only created Adam, but he created Eve. So he even repeated it.

So the only scientific source we have for the creation of the universe or the creation of man is Genesis chapters 1 & 2.

So if you want to appeal to science, they actually can't appeal to the scientific method for their arguments.

They're appealing to a historical science, what they believe back in history based on what they see today.

We have the only scientific record of the creation of the universe and the creation of man in Genesis 1 & 2.

So right off the bat, by saying that God created man, we're eliminating certain things in this doctrinal statement.

This is what the doctrinal statement is here for, to say not only what we do believe, but eliminate what we don't. But now notice,

God's intention. God had a plan. Now I know, folks,

I get it. There's many who, you know, but I'm sure you've seen the gospel tract and many of you listening, you've probably seen it.

God had a hole in his heart. Well, okay, they don't say it that way. Right?

You had the God -shaped hole in your heart, but is it really that God created man because he needed fellowship?

Did God need any fellowship? Did God need man? Let me think.

This is a hard one, Andrew. You're not supposed to give me these difficult questions. No. Not at all.

No, God does not need us. God had fellowship within the Trinity. He created us to put his attributes on display.

He just chose to. He didn't have to. But he did have an intention. What was

God's intention for creating man? Now some would say, well, God's intention was to make us suffer because there's suffering in this world.

Well, suffering in this world comes with God giving Adam and Eve the free will to choose.

We'll get to that in the next paragraph, what that actually means. Maybe if we get to it this week. You might.

But folks, Bud does not believe we're gonna get through one sentence if you haven't picked up on this, and there's a chance he's right.

But what we end up seeing is that God had an intention, and it was not to make man suffer, but that comes with not being a puppet, by the way, folks.

If God didn't give us a will to choose to sin, we would be puppets. That'd be the argument then.

We have no choice. God gave us a will. But what was the purpose of it? Well, we say here,

God's intention in creation of man was that man should glorify

God. That's the first thing. Some of you may be familiar with catechisms, where it's a question -answer type of thing where you train children, and the shorter catechism asks, what is the purpose of man?

And it is to glorify God. This is right where we're getting this from, and this is the first thing, because this sets everything in place, folks.

People have asked me why I think the church is so anemic in our culture today.

This is the answer, right here, because people have lost what

God's intention for man is. God's intention for creating human beings was not to glorify human beings.

It is not to glorify self. It's to glorify God. That is our purpose.

Our purpose is that you and I would glorify God in everything that we do.

Now, that radically changes a lot of different things. It should. It should radically change the whole way you think about life.

Definitely change the way people go about church. Now, Bud, I know you're in a solid church, but I also know you've been in other churches.

Have you been in churches where most of the singing, where you're supposed to have the time where you're singing praise to God, and most of the songs are about self?

Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. That's one of the things I think you and I talked about.

You really don't even have to wait for the preacher to get to the pulpit, if there is even a pulpit in some of these churches, rather than just a stage.

You really just need to listen to the music, and you can tell immediately what kind of environment you're in.

Is it one that's worshiping in reverence before God, and you're worshiping

God? Or is it one that's, wow, this is an experience about me and for me and designed for me?

No, that's not what worship is. You can call it worship, but it's not. You know, even some of those songs, what you end up realizing is the songs that are about God are about what

God did for me. Yeah, yeah. So understanding why God created us, this ends up changing even the way we're going to look at church.

What are we going to sing? How are we going to view life? Our life is to glorify

God. Isaiah 43 7 says, everyone who is called by my name and whom

I have created for my glory, whom I have formed, even whom

I have made. Now, notice the way that Isaiah is saying this. What's grounding this? It's the fact that God created us.

That gives him the right to say, I've created you for my glory, and therefore that is our purpose.

He's the creator. He gets to dictate why he created us. Yeah, and I would just add to that, kind of tagging on to the comment that you made, that that reality, that this was the intent of God to glorify himself.

Certainly you can go back and look at Genesis 1, like 26, in my image, so there's a lot inherent in the image that man is made in, in the image of God, but that it ought to affect every part of our life.

Paul in 1st Corinthians talks about whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all of it for the glory of God.

Verse 31, I think, but everything about our life should be done for the glory of God, to the glory of God, in light of the glory of God.

And it's because he's the creator, right? That's what gives him that right, that he deserves the glory, because some people argue that this seems selfish.

God is selfish. He wants all the glory for himself, but he has that right.

Just like a parent has the right, sorry, government, sorry, I know you think you have the right to own children, to tell children what to do, you know,

Disney thinks they have the right to tell our children, you know, what to do or how to live. The reality is parents have that right, because the children are the offspring of the parents.

That's what gives the parent that right to instruct their children. It's not the government's role, it's not the village role, it's the parent's role, okay?

It's not Disney's role or anyone else's, it's not the teacher's, it's the parent's role.

This is a statism -free environment. Yes, I mean, but you see how understanding this, it radically changes the whole way of people's thinking, right?

A statist type of thinking is, well, it's for the betterment of the state, but where does the state get that right?

They don't. The parents have that right by being the parents.

God has that right because he created us. Colossians 1 .16 says, for by him all things were created, both in the heavens and the earth, visible, invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

Everything that's created has been created through him and for him.

Because it was created through him, that's why it's created for him. So God has the right to demand from us that we glorify him because he is our creator.

In Revelation 4 .11, Bud, that you referenced earlier when you were reading it, states this, worthy are you,

O Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and because of you will they exist and were created.

Notice how John is explaining this in Revelation. He is rooting it in the fact that because God created all things, that gives him the right to receive that glory because everything that exists exists because of him, because he created it.

So when we talk about God's glory, this is essential to understand.

It's essential to understand because if you get this wrong, you know, we were mentioning, you look at the applications with the statists, right?

What's the problem that they have? The problem that they have is they have this idea, who owns the children?

The state rather than the parent. And that is a core issue that becomes something that causes such a divide that we have even in our country right now, is the question of who has the right to instruct the children?

Now look, I don't agree with the way some people instruct their children. However, it is their children.

They're not my children. Now if it's coming to where they're abusing the children,

I think we need to stand up. By the way, folks, when you're trying to teach a five -year -old about sex, you know, all this stuff going on with genders,

I put that in the category of abuse, okay? It's grooming. That's what it is.

And so what we end up seeing is as we look at this stuff, we have to be aware that the parent has that right because they're the parent.

And we get into all kinds of issues when we don't realize that we were created for the glory of God, but not just the glory of God.

But that is the necessary starting point to understand the rest of this. To understand the rest of what we're gonna argue here, if you don't have this part right, you're going to have problems in the next.

And this is why when we're joking about the gospel tract that I argue that God has a human -shaped hole in his heart, because that's really how they word it, that, oh,

God needs our fellowship. If your starting point is man and glorifying man, even though no one ever says it that way, then you're gonna come to the point that God had a need and God needed man.

When your starting point is that we were created for God's glory and God didn't need us, then when we get to the next section, which is that God's intention in the creation of man was that he should glorify

God, second one, enjoy God's fellowship. Now, notice how this is worded.

And this is a key, this is worded very specifically. It's God's fellowship that man enjoys, not man's fellowship that God enjoys.

That's a huge distinction there. We did not put that in there lightly, because we're again trying to address this whole idea of who is at the center?

God. God is the one that's at the center. And so it's

God already has the fellowship within the Trinity, and he does not need man's fellowship, but he created man to enjoy the fellowship he already has within the

Trinity. He's welcoming us into that fellowship. It's not that he needs the fellowship with us.

Folks, I don't know how much clearer I can put this, but maybe you could think of a way.

God? Well, let me ask it in a question. What does God need? The answer?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. God doesn't need anything.

He is. We need him. He doesn't need us. And so when we look at the fact that we enjoy

God's fellowship, it's the idea that God already has that fellowship. We get to enjoy that, right?

So back to the catechism question. What's the chief end of man? Let's test

Bud here. You're the Reformed guy. You should know all these catechisms, right? Oh, well, you know, yeah, to glorify

God and enjoy him forever. And that is exactly what we're listing here, is that shorter catechism answer, right?

So the glorifying of God, enjoying him forever. We enjoy him forever because we first glorify him.

And we can't glorify him until, well, we'll look at the Doctrine of Salvation in months to come. But we have to first be his children, which not all of us are.

I know this surprises folks sometimes, but I don't know if you've run into it. I know I've run into it, especially with Mormons who will say, well, we're all

God's children. That's not what John 1 .12 says. But to those that have the right to be called the children of God, well, who has the right to be called the children of God?

Those that believe in his name. Not by blood, not by, you know, so it's not by your works, your genealogy, your wishful thinking, but of God.

It's God who does that. And so what we end up seeing is we were created for fellowship, but a lot of people think that we are created for the fellowship that we share as human beings.

And that's not actually what we're saying here. We're saying that we get to enjoy God's fellowship. He created us so that, yes, we get to fellowship with one another, but that's just a foretaste.

For the believer, the best relationship we can have here on earth is just a foretaste of what that fellowship with God is like.

And that's what we are created to do, is to enjoy His fellowship. So glorify

God and enjoy Him forever is covered. But anything you want to add on the fellowship? No, I think you've covered it.

The important point is that God did not need us, and this is grace given to the creation man to enjoy

Him. It's not reversed. Correct. And getting this, we're kind of pounding this, folks, for a reason.

If you get this wrong, you get a whole lot of other things wrong. There is a whole lot that we see in Christianity right now where the focus has become on getting a big church, having numbers in the church, trying to get those numbers up there, and because of that, what ends up happening is they're sitting there, and instead of saying, what glorifies

God, it's how do we get people's into the pews? And so that radically changes the way we do church.

That's gonna then affect the way you're going to live your life, because a church that's focused on just getting people in the door to get big numbers in there so we can get a big budget and be able to do more things for God, well, if you have left that first issue, is anything else you're gonna do, you're really gonna be on the right path?

I mean, you're doing all this and we're gonna do this so we can do the work of God, but the work that God has for you to do is to glorify

Him, and so you just skip that initial thing. Yeah, you're on a road, you're just on the wrong road because your starting point was off.

Once you got onto the wrong path, it doesn't matter how long you go on that path, you're just still on the wrong path.

The path that God has for us is that we glorify Him, and so everything we do should be on that path, saying that we start with that, so if you don't have a big church, okay, are you glorifying

God? That's the question, because once you have people in the church who say, well, we got to get people in here, well, what are we gonna do?

Well, we're gonna come up with music that's gonna get people revved up and they're gonna feel good. Okay, okay, that's good, okay, but not everyone sings really well.

Okay, well, we need some people up there on stage that they're gonna be the ones to do the singing, because that way everyone feels good, and you can, if you don't sing well, you could just sit there and listen to them sing and get the emotional vibe going, yeah, feeling good, but then what's gonna happen when you come to a sermon?

Well, a sermon can't be that convicting, because you just got all the emotional vibe going good, because we got to get people in the pews, so what's gonna happen when you start doing convicting message?

Well, that's gonna totally kill the vibe, so what do we got to do? We got to be motivational speakers. You see,

Joel Osteen has a lot of people in those pews, well, they're not really pews, but in the chairs. Yeah, in the chairs.

But they're not glorifying God, because it may get people motivated, it may do wonders for people's emotions, but what it isn't doing is what

God calls them to do, and that's the difference. We're emphasizing here that the necessary starting point is that we were created to glorify

God. Everything else follows from that. Everything else flows from that. So before we get into the next one, we'll take a time just to give a word to our sponsor,

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I don't know. People say it's like sleeping on a cloud, but I don't really know what sleeping on a cloud is like, because I've never kind of done that.

I always thought if I tried to sleep on a cloud, I'd just kind of fall to the ground. Yeah, gravity.

But I can confirm it is a wonderful night of sleep. All right, so as we get back to this, the first thing that we were created for,

God's intention, was we were created for His glory, so we would glorify Him. Second, that we enjoy

His fellowship. A third is that we live to live His life in the will of God.

So we are to live, in this case, our life, right? Man was created to live His life in the will of God. So there's two things here.

One, God's will comes before our will. Now, you are gonna have that sense, if you start with that we're created to glorify

God. If that's not your understanding, then you're not going to be looking to God's will first.

You're gonna look to our will. Now, this enters a question, though. So Bud, let me ask you, when we talk about the will of God, this gets into an interesting dilemma for some.

Some people say, well, if God has a will, that means He must be either controlling everything, so He determines everything and we have no say in anything.

It's just God's will just forces everything. There's those that will go to that extreme. There's those that would say, well, if God wills something, like He wills all men to be saved, it means that all men will be saved, even if He doesn't force it to happen.

And then there's some who will say, on the other extreme, that, well, God has a will, but it's just kind of wishful thinking.

He doesn't really have a plan for it. He doesn't really know how it's gonna happen. It's just His desire. Which one of those or none of those would you say are right?

What is this idea of a will of God? Well, you wrote your doctrinal statement, but my presumption would be that what you're speaking to there is the decorative will of God.

He has given us decrees. He has given us instructions. Because I thought when you were speaking to this, you're gonna go off into a lot of people think this is sort of navel -gazing mysticism and that's how

I determine what I feel God wants me to do, and I had a vision, or I got a dream, or you know.

Not at all. He's given decrees. He's given ordinances. He's given laws. He's given mandates and commissions and instructions, and all of that is in the revealed

Word of God. So you have to go to Scripture to determine, how do I live my life according to the will of God?

That's it. Yeah. We first have to know that God's will is seen different ways.

There's an aspect of God's will where He lays out a plan, and part of what we'll see in Scripture is

He does have a will that He is going to make happen, but He makes these things happen by working through people.

There's times where He will lay things out knowing the way people are. I talked about this last night.

I was with a couple, and they were a young couple. They're thinking of having children, discussing kids, and raising kids, and one of the things

I said is that when our children were little, we told them what to do. Our will became their will, because we're the parents.

Yeah. But as they got older, we changed that, because we wanted them to think and make choices on their own.

So I told the story of how my son at one time, he wanted an allowance. All his friends in school had an allowance, and we just took care of things.

Now our kids had chores. They didn't get paid for doing chores, and he decided he wanted an allowance. And I said, okay.

I gave him a choice. I didn't tell him no. I gave him a choice. I said, all right, that sounds reasonable.

How much should you get? I think he came up with $300 a month. This other couple had the same reaction, like, wow.

And I said, well, that sounds reasonable. I think he was surprised by that. I thought we were gonna negotiate down.

I said, let me do some math on that and get back to you. And he's like, okay. He was all excited for like a day.

I said, okay, so you wanted $300 allowance? He said, yeah. I said, okay. I'm gonna give you one of three choices. I can give you a $300 allowance.

You're gonna end up having to pay some bills, though. Or, you know, you can do jobs that I would pay someone else to do, or you could just have, you know, money that, you know, if you need something, we get it for you.

Which do you prefer? And he goes, well, $300 allowance. I said, okay. Let's take a look at it. You're gonna, first off, you're gonna have $250 of rent you're gonna have to be paying.

You're also gonna have to pay a food bill, because you got to pay your own bill, because you have money coming in. So that's gonna be $50 a month.

Then we have utilities. And he's like, wait, but Dad, that's all my money. I said, well, that's not my problem. You know, you got to pay your bills.

You got an allowance now. And he looks at it and says, what were my other choices? Well, your other choices are you could work, or you could just trust your parents know what's best for what you have.

And he said, you know what, Dad, I like it the way it is. You just, right? What did

I do? I gave him a set of choices, knowing which one he was gonna choose when he had all the information.

God can do that. God can work within our nature to make the choices he knows we're gonna make. That's still part of his will, even though we have a volition.

We make choices. But even those choices are still within this will of God. And so the thing, though, is what this is not saying, what

I'm trying not to say with this, is that God has this plan for your life. I know everyone calls it a wonderful plan for your life, but, you know, it's only wonderful if you go to heaven, right?

But the thing is, is that when we look at this, people have the idea of, oh, there's only one person in the eight billion people in the world, there's only one that I'm supposed to marry.

And my job is to figure out who the right person is. I gotta go through life figuring out who this person is, who did

God have in his will. It's interesting, a friend of mine, Greg Koko, will say, he talks about people trying to find

God's will, and just like, they open the Bible, look at a random thing, and say, oh, that's God's will. And he was telling a story,

I forget the story now, but he was telling the story at a church, and they said, yeah, something similar happened at our church.

There was a guy that was leading the choir, and he realized it was God's will for him to marry one of the women in the church, because he was reading in his

Bible, and it said, Grace be unto you. And the girl's name was? Yeah, you got it,

Grace. So that means he's to marry Grace, because Grace is unto him.

I know someone that had a choice between a job, and they didn't know if they should take one or the other. And it's interesting, because every

Christian that gave them counsel said, take this one that was south, but they ended up taking the one that was north. Why? Because God told them to, because they read in the

Bible to go north. And people think this is how we determine the will of God.

As if God has this path, that it's our job to kind of find this needle in a haystack, and we gotta go through trying to figure out what's the right thing.

That's not the way God's will works, folks. God gave us an ability to reason, but as Bud said, he gave us the

Scripture. That is where his will is revealed. If you want to know what God's will is, read the

Scripture. That's where you're gonna find it. And what you do is, the things that are clear that we are to obey, do that.

The things that are clear that we are to avoid, do that. Avoid that.

The things that are gray areas, well, then what you're gonna do is go through the Scriptures and look for principles of how to live.

What are the principles? You sit there and say, okay, I have to make a decision.

Is the Bible going to tell me, with some of the examples we already looked at, is the Bible gonna tell me who to marry?

Yes and no. Are you a Christian? Well, yes. Okay. Then the Bible tells you you marry another

Christian, so you've just eliminated the majority of eight billion people, right? Because they're not believers.

So just cross them off. So no, you don't marry unbelievers? Okay, God's will is for you to marry a believer.

Okay, well, that's good. That makes this a little bit smaller. Well, guess what? God's is very clear that you don't commit adultery.

So now it's limited even more. I don't marry someone else's wife. Okay, that just eliminated a bunch more.

You see, those are very clear in Scripture. Who don't I marry? Who do I marry?

Well, I marry someone that's a single believer. All right. Now, do I marry

Jane or Mary? Bible doesn't say. But you know, Jane, and I'm making up names, right, obviously, but say

Jane is someone that's very worldly. She's a believer, but she's very immature, and she doesn't show any signs that she wants to grow.

But Mary seems like she wants to study the Bible. Well, you want to have a marriage based off on God?

Which one of them is gonna have more of a view of God's glory being the centerpiece? Well, it's the one that wants to study the

Bible, right? So you end up looking at that and now that's something that we end up finding from principle.

It's not clear in Scripture, but I'm gonna look at these things and what principles can we find? And then what you do is you lay things out and say, looking at all this, at the clear instruction and the principles we find, what is the most reasonable choice?

I did this once where I had to choose between a job, and what I did was I laid out on paper all the pros and cons.

So I had one job that was gonna pay a whole lot more. It was gonna require a lot more hours away from the family.

It was gonna be a further drive, but it would be great for my career. It would be great for making money.

I would make almost twice as much money. It was a huge difference versus another one that would pay half the money, but I was close to home, no overtime,

I'd be with my family. And it's interesting because I laid these things out, there's more to it, but I ended up talking to believers and unbelievers, and every single believer said, take the one that pays less money, and every unbeliever said, take the one that pays more money.

So what did I do there? I went and got wise counsel. And when you see it that clearly that there's a distinction between the unbelievers and the believers, it was really clear

I took the one that paid less money. Why? Because there were some principles I can apply from Scripture.

That was God's will. But this becomes the question, but how do I know it's

God's will? I have been told this in marriage counseling. I think I married the wrong person. I don't think it was

God's will for me to marry this person. My response to that is, yes, it was. How do you know that?

Because you're married. If it wasn't God's will for you to marry that person, you wouldn't be married to that person.

Which brings up a question, though, bud, and we're gonna get into this, obviously, next time because we're not gonna get through this first sentence.

No enterprise or something for calling this. You actually called this last episode, truthfully, folks, before we even recorded last time, he was like, there's no way you're gonna get through these two paragraphs.

But what we end up seeing when we look at the will of God, it's the fact that God is working this out.

This is his will. The fact that you married someone, that's who he willed you'd marry.

He works through us to accomplish this. But the thing that so many people will then challenge with, bud, is the question of, okay, so is

God the author of sin? Did God create it? When I do something sinful, you're saying that God wills through us.

They interpret that in their mind of saying God forces, God determines, and therefore

God must be the author of sin because we sin. Now, I was being really clear in this.

God works through us. It's a big distinction, and I've mentioned this before,

I'm gonna mention it again because this one doctrine is super important to understand. It is the doctrine of superintending.

The fact that God can work through a human being in such a way that even though we make choices, the choices we make are exactly as God intended them to be.

So how is it that God can be in charge of things, could be sovereign, can have this will without forcing or deterring because he works through us?

So even though we make the choices, those choices are what God intended to be, so it fits within his will.

And when there's things that where he is gonna force, there are times we see where he's gonna actually get involved and do something, where it is

God speaking, literally sometimes, right? God instructing.

You look at Israel and he's telling him, do this. But he can do that as well if he wants to, but he often worked through people.

And this is really important because this resolves so much of the debate that people have when it comes to the will of God and the will of man.

Now, all of that, even though that explains a whole lot, what's essential to understand here is that, again, the center.

First, it starts with glorifying God. Second, enjoying his fellowship.

Third, we live a life for his will and not ours. Now, emphasizing this for this reason, who's the center of all of this?

God. God is the necessary starting point. If you don't start there, everything else is off.

I mean, look, folks, you may say, but if I'm off, I'm just off by a little. I mean, it's okay that God created me to glorify him.

I'm glorifying him. I'm just doing it kind of my way. I mean, it's only off by a fraction of a percentage of this small little bit of a degree, you know.

It's not a big deal, but here's a simple thing. If you are trying to get from here to the moon, and you're only off by just a fraction of a degree,

I mean, not very much, you're never getting to the moon. The same horseshoes.

Yeah, being close doesn't help, right? It was interesting, during World War II, there were guys that were lost at sea, and they were in a life raft, and they had actually, from where they were, figured that the chance of them hitting land was near impossible.

They were trying to, with this makeshift sail that they ended up having from their shirts, try to calculate exactly where they were, and they had said if they were off by just 1%, because of the distance they had to go, that 1 % they would never see land if they were off.

Obviously, they got to land, because we know the story. We've got the story. So a fourth thing that we look at, right, so God's intention in creation of man was to glorify

God, to enjoy God's fellowship, and for us to live a life in the will of God forth, and by this accomplishing

God's purpose for man in the world. God didn't just create us for no reason,

He created us because He has a purpose for us. His purpose for us in the world starts with glorifying

God. But notice it's His purpose, not our purpose. This, again,

I know we probably sound like we're beating a dead horse, but the reason for it is because so many have a misunderstanding when it comes to this.

So many in the Church today, their focus is on self, their focus is on me, what

God could do for me, what God did for me, what I could do for God to make up for what

He did for me. It's like always a focus on me, and we have to understand this difference, because this difference of starting with God, it will radically change your life as a

Christian. You want to live a life that's holy, you want to live a life that you can sit there and hear, well done, my good and faithful servant, when you stand before God?

Then glorify God. Don't ask the question of what I can do to glorify God in the sense of, let me build this big platform,

I'm building a ministry, I'm so busy on this. No. It starts with glorifying God. But we just went to the

Sight and Sound Theater where they do the enactments of biblical accounts, and we just saw

David. So last night we just saw David. They do some great productions, if you haven't been there. I always have issue with the...

they have to take some license because they add some things that aren't in Scripture to try to build a story, and that always drives me nuts.

But it's interesting, because what kind of the final scene is, they show through David's life, and then they show him as king, and he ends up having the affair with Bathsheba, and the whole idea is he was trying to build all this for God, right?

And then Nathan comes and says, you're so busy trying to build something for God, you forgot about God.

Yeah. It was really powerful in the sense of the way they did it, because as someone that's in full -time ministry,

I know and I talk to plenty of pastors, and that's a big problem. It's like, they're so busy trying to build the

Church, what they think Church should be, and do the activities of God. So many people are so busy doing activities for God, they forgot about glorifying

God. It's a thing where, you know, I just watched a video from Paul Washer that was sent to me, where Paul Washer says, we're so distracted in life, we have so much to distract us, and all

God calls for us to do is to glorify Him. It starts by being in His Word, being in prayer.

We could do a whole lot of things, we could do a lot of activities for God, but that doesn't suffice if we're not grounded in God's Word and prayer, if we're not spending that time in fellowship with Him.

He looks at all that and says, okay, hey, you're doing all this activity, but you're off by just a fraction of a degree.

So my encouragement is, let's get back to glorifying God. That's where we have to be.

We have to start with the fact that we are created to glorify

God. Amen. Well, with that, folks, I think that hopefully this gives you a different perspective of a way we should be viewing life, and obviously next week we'll look at this in nature.

At least I give Bud some humor. You do. You do. You know, it is kind of funny, you know,

I'm teaching through First Peter at Grace and Truth Bible Church, and as I'm teaching through, we've been joking because every week

I have this intent, like, we're gonna read a couple of verses, and I got one of the other leaders, and he just goes, no, you're not.

You're gonna get through a verse. Maybe two. But we finished

First Peter, so it only took a little over a year, but we finished it. Oh, nice. Actually, this is a side note.

I finished First Peter on Wednesday. I will finish Mark this Sunday. So I finished two books at once, which means we start two new things at church.

In all the years, I've never had that where my sermon and the midweek end at the same, like,

I've had where, like, when I come to a church, I start two things at the same time, but I've never had them both end where I'm starting something new, both midweek and Sunday.

So even when you throw in a Sunday school, I haven't had that. Yeah. So where are you going next?

What we're gonna do is the next book of Scripture we're gonna look at for Sundays is gonna be the book of James.

Good practical book. Yeah. And so we're gonna look at James, basically giving some tests of a genuine faith, and for the midweek, what we're gonna do is we're gonna split, and the men are gonna look through a book by Kent Hughes, Disciplines of a

Godly Man, and then the women are gonna go through a booklet that I had written following our discipleship book that's available at Striving for Eternity, the

Growing in Grace book, one that I never actually finished. So this is the first time anyone's going through it, even though this thing was written, like, 25, 30 years ago, called

Rooted in Christ. It's kind of the start of a systematic theology, just to kind of get people ready for that, for a more detailed systematic theology.

And so the ladies are gonna go through that, and then probably take a month, maybe, of the summer off, and then

I think what we're gonna do is go through some hermeneutics in midweek. Good. Yeah.

Looking forward to it. I should say, if you're in Bucks County, Pennsylvania area and you need a good church, look us up.

Just go to graceandtruth .bible, graceandtruth .bible. We are a church plant, have started a little over a year ago, and still meeting in a home.

We're doing things very slowly because we want to do it right. We're not in a rush to try to build, you know, get into a building and build it.

We want to first get the people we have grounded, discipled, and equipped, so that when we do get into a building and people start coming, we do have people that have been coming in, but as they're coming in, we're discipling them, grounding them, so that the plan is that it's not my job as the preaching pastor to train everybody, disciple everybody, but that everybody in the church would be equipped to do that.

Long -term plan is we're gonna end up starting our own, basically, seminary -level education, so that everybody in the church would have access to that, and in the future, when

I'm no longer there, that someone from the church would have the same education they'd get at seminary and be able to just step up and preach if they're so -called.

So a little bit of a different model. But we actually got it from, oh, what's that place? Oh, the Bible. Yeah. We think it's a biblical way of doing it, and so we want to glorify

God the way He says we should run a church, not the way we think we should run a church. So it may not fit with the way that many people do church, but it's what we think is more of a biblical model.

Instead of sending people off to seminary and then they go somewhere else, we want to train people up and have people understand

God's Word. So the first thing to start with is hermeneutics. Learn how to interpret that Bible.

So with that, Bud, you know what? What's that? That's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry.

For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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