Book of Romans, 14:2-3 - Freedom in Christ | Handling Doubtful Disputations, Pt. 3 (04/03/2022)

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I'll come up and sing, try to get Ben to do it, try to get

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Matt to do it. And so I've decided

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I shall do it. No, I'm kidding. We'll just have extra time in the Word today.

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How about that? Great to have Georgette with us. And Richard, thanks for coming today and visiting with us.

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And we've got lots of folks out ill today. It's an early summer cold, isn't it?

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It's not even summer yet, but it's going around. So I hope you guys can stay clear of it.

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But just all it is. And it lasts about a week, though, unless you're

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Charlotte. And it'd be probably four days, four or five days, hopefully. She has a strong immune system.

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We'll see. So I hope the rest of you guys can get by without this one. But if you don't, you shall survive it,

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I would think. Well, I think it was a fantastic Sunday School lesson this morning,

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Bill. So much of the Bible comes alive when you start seeing the prophecies fulfilled in the newspaper, as they used to say.

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Of course, now I know it's not newspaper anymore. But for 100 years, I would say it that way.

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But we see it so much. Even this Russian war going on now, you read

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Ezekiel 38, 39, you think you see that war. There will be a

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Russian war in the end times, maybe even before the seven -day tribulation period.

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Scholars have some disagreement on the exact location of what they call the

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Russian war in the Bible. I personally don't think it's Armageddon. I think it is a different.

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When it's prior to that, I've thought that pretty much ever since I started studying the

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Bible. And I still think that. So I don't know that this is it, though, because Putin looks almost too weak for this to be it.

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Because in the biblical Russian war, they literally break out and head all the way down south towards Israel.

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But what you see is 5 6th of the entire army is destroyed before it gets there by something nuclear.

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And the way you can tell, the scripture talks about bodies that they couldn't approach for weeks.

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And then it took months to clean up after the war. And you couldn't touch the bodies.

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They were radiated. It's amazing to see. Now, maybe

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China gives Russia the support it needs. And it is strong enough. We don't know. But this could be 20 years out in the future, 25 years in the future.

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We don't know. But it is something that we're watching with a lot of interest. Because it doesn't seem to make much sense.

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And it is interesting in Ezekiel that it says that this leader from the north, Moscow directly due north from Jerusalem, by the way.

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But this leader from the north is a person who seems to, at the last minute, have a change of mind.

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And then he does this attack. Well, if you look at Putin up until now, you didn't see this coming, really.

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None of the Western world saw this coming. So it's like he had a change of mind, like something changed his mind.

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And he decided he wanted to do it for no really great reason. His reasoning is really strange when you read about it.

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Saying he's going to stop fascism in a country whose leader is a Jew, that's really interesting logic.

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But it's just so bizarre, isn't it? So we've got so many things going on around us.

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I was reading a paper Georgette wrote. And I think you're going to,

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I didn't even talk to you about it. I don't know exactly what you're going to do. She may get it published. I don't know what she's going to do with it. But it talks about some things going on in her world and the pharmaceutical world and things a lot of people don't know about.

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And they can really affect you. It can affect your whole life when you start to see the ugly underbelly of things going on in the world system that Satan is the little

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G -God of. And here we live in it. And right at the end of your Sunday school lesson, you quoted that beautiful passage in Philippians.

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Think on things that are lovely. Think on things that are of good rapport. If we don't focus on that, we will be just so down all the time in these days.

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It's going to be one thing after another moving forward. And I don't say that I think we're in the seven year tribulation period, but I think we're in the foothills as if they are the mountains.

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We're in the foothills headed up that direction. And you're going to see more pestilences. You're going to see more bigger and stronger earthquakes.

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You're going to see all the things Jesus talked about, rumors of wars, wars and rumors of wars.

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And he said, and yet be not troubled. These things must come to pass. The end is not yet.

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And then he names the things that have to happen before the end of the age comes. And some of those things have now happened, but not all of them, right?

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So we keep watching. If we see one of the two mosques on the

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Temple Mount destroyed, we'll probably go find us a nice cave to hide in or something, because we're getting really close at that point.

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They start building the temple. You got three and a half years to figure out what you're going to do. And then three and a half years into that, when you see the

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Antichrist offer a swine, a pig on that altar, you'll know, it's too late if you hadn't already taken measures.

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So that's coming up and all of it to usher in the second coming of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, which is the most magnificent, positive thing that's ever happened in the history of the world.

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And that's what we had to look forward to. But yet we tend to focus on the negative, scary part, don't we?

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But the Bible says very clearly that the Lord has ways of protecting his own through times like that.

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And, but we do have, it's kind of conditional. We have to read the scriptures and do what he says to do, but he says he will protect us.

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So the thing is, by and large, the church is not even watching for it because they bought it into a lie that we won't be here during that, which is not true.

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We shall be. The greatest proof of it is that Paul said very clearly that we who remain, we shall rise up and be changed in the air.

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But he said very clearly, not until after the resurrection. And the resurrection is the last thing on the chronology of the end times.

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It's the last, it's the end of the church age. So it happens at the end, not in the middle, not prior, but at the end.

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So we gotta do the things we have to do to be ready. And there are a lot of people that disagree with that.

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I remember when I used to, because I grew up believing a completely different way until I decided to study it myself, rather than taking people's word for it or reading.

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I've read all the books. I know what the books say about it, but you gotta ask yourself, okay, do the books fit the scripture?

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Because the scripture is the only authority, right? Not the textbooks. The scripture is the only authority.

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So it's all gotta fit. If it's God's word and it doesn't contradict, it all fits. It's all woven throughout all of scripture and it fits.

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And that's where we have to study. Today, we are continuing our study in Romans chapter 14.

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If you turn to that chapter, we almost finished up verse one last time.

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I thought we were actually gonna get into verse two, but we didn't quite get there, but we certainly will today.

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So I will read Romans chapter 14, verse one, and give you a little review of what we talked about on that verse, and then we'll go into the next verse.

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Let's pray first though. Father, thank you so much for your word. Thank you that you have not only given it to us, breathed it into this world, and that you're the author of it and the protector of it, and that you promised to preserve it to the last generation.

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Thank you that you have, because where would we be if you hadn't given it to us? Thank you so much that you also gave us your spirit.

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You gave us the water of the word and the spirit of God, not only in our salvation, acting in our very salvation, but also in our growth, in our growth in grace, from grace to grace, and in this walk, in this life.

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And help us to use your word and help us to walk in the spirit and to be salt in life.

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We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. That's one of the things you talked about in your paper, would be in salt.

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It's exactly what we are. Well, it says, him that is weak in the faith, receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations.

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So that sets the tone for the whole chapter, of chapter 14 of Romans. A lot of it is talking about doubtful disputations.

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And we've talked about in a couple of previous Sundays, I'm gonna give you three points that I've already given you here.

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First one is, we have these things called imperatives. Even in the New Testament, we're under grace, not law.

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And yet, if you look at the grammar in the New Testament, there are a lot of imperatives, such as where the

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Lord would tell us to live a certain way and not to live another way. And it's in the imperative in the grammar, which means it's like a command, okay?

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So it's like how he wants us to live. And so a lot of this chapter is talking about imperatives.

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But what's interesting about it, is that legalists will come into the church and create imperatives that number one, don't exist.

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They're not in the scripture. Or number two, they take scripture and twist it and take it out of context to create an imperative that's not an imperative.

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Or it's not for us. Maybe it was for Israel during the time of the law, but it's not for us now.

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And they'll take things out of context and create new imperatives. So we have this huge list of rules that we have to keep to be good

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Christians. And you see billboards out there on the highway, a true Christian obeys. Well, yeah, sort of, depends on what you mean by that.

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Because I don't know anybody in this room in this small church. So I know everybody pretty well, including myself.

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I don't know anybody that obeys all the time. So if that's true, none of us are Christians. So the legalists want you to think it's all about doing this, doing that, not doing this, and especially the nots.

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Like you can't do that. You can't do this. And I'm an authority on it because this church, the founder of this church back in 1980 was a fundamental independent

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Baptist legalist. And Charlotte and I were young in our 20s, we were just not, we didn't know that was not right.

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We didn't, took us a while to figure it out. And our kids grew up through part of it. And so we learned what it's like to be on that side of the spectrum.

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And it's not the place to be because the law kills. It's grace that brings life.

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It's the spirit that brings life. So the first thing we have to watch out for is we must examine any perceived imperative.

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If some person brings it into the church, it's something you gotta do, or you can't do this. We have to examine it by its context.

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If they do try to show us that it's in the Bible, then we have to study the context and make sure that they have that in context.

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We have to ask who's being spoken to by this passage. Who is this about? What's the primary interpretation?

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What's the secondary, the primary application? What's the secondary application if there is one?

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And you have to ask all the questions that are included in the 10 rules of proper Bible interpretation, and you don't wanna cheat on those.

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And once you've done that, you can decide, is this really something that we need to think about obeying in this area or not?

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Secondly, we must ask the question, is this imperative actually even found in the scriptures?

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Because many of them are not even in the Bible. Little rules that legalists like to make in a church, they're not even in the

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Bible. I will say probably most of them, they get from a scripture that they have abused or misused on purpose, but some of them are not even in the

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Bible. And the third thing is the word of God is the only true test. It is the only true authority. So those are the things we've sort of covered out of this passage.

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We've looked at quite a few interesting parallel passages like Philippians 2, 12 through 16, do all things without murmurings and disputings, holding forth the word of life.

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So it shows us you always come back to the Bible and you hold that forth when there's a legalism problem in the church.

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You say, okay, let's see what this says because we're not gonna go by what you say. We're gonna go by what this says properly interpreted.

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And then in 1 Timothy 1 verses three through seven, we talked about the fact that it brings out that nearly always, and also verse seven, 1

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Timothy 1 through four, I guess, four through seven, it always comes back to people that are trying to bring you under the law.

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For example, that one says in verse four, to not give heed to fables.

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Those are things that people present as a Bible truth and it's not even in the Bible, it's a fable. And there's a lot of that going on.

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A lot of people are a new uprising and wanting to go to the apocryphal books and count them as if the authority there is the same as the

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Bible and put it equal because well, each were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So they're equal.

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Well, no, they're not equal. And so when you start talking about fables as if they're authoritative scripture, you get in trouble.

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And I've had friends that I've had to talk to about that. And they're doing that nowadays. And in endless genealogies, we talk about how a lot of the apocryphal books talk about, it lists names of angels that do not appear in scripture.

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It's just as likely fiction as anything else, but there are people who will spend hours talking about these named angels that are not even in the word of God as if it's part of scripture.

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Well, it's exactly what Paul foresaw and warned us about to not take heed to people that want to talk about fables or endless genealogies of angelic beings that don't exist.

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These things minister questions rather than godly edifying, the Bible says. And then it ends up saying that these people are desiring to be teachers of the law.

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So what does it all come down to? They're legalists. Why? Because if you can add a new genealogy and say, well, now you need to memorize the names of these angels to be as spiritual as I am, because I can name them.

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It's that simple. It's silly. It seems silly, doesn't it? It's exactly what's going on. So we talked about that.

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And then we went into 2

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Timothy 2, 15 through 16. And we talked a little bit about this amazing passage where it talks about rightly dividing the word of truth.

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You have to understand which dispensation the passage is in or you'll try to make it say something that's not even applicable in the church age and things like that.

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So those were interesting discussions. Now, in 2 Timothy 2, verse 19, last time,

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I think to me, the most important part was where he talked about it, spoke of a thing called the foundation of God.

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Remember that? It said, nevertheless, the foundation of God stands sure. And then it named what it was.

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And the first thing it talked about was that the Lord knows who are his. Well, what is that?

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That's predestination, election, foreknowledge, the calling, regeneration, all these things that people don't want to talk about today as part of the foundation of God is that this is sure

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God knows those that are his, number one. And the second thing was that the church needs to depart from iniquity.

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I would call that, if you want to give it a big idea, the sanctification. And those are the two things listed there.

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So the first one, foreknowledge, predestination, has to do with the cause of salvation.

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The second one, sanctification, has to do with the effect of salvation. It takes both the cause and the effect for it to be real, for it to be the whole foundation of the

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Christian faith. But it's listed right there in 2 Timothy 2, 19. So he talked about that in quite a bit of detail.

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And we talked about how it tells us that what the Christian needs to do is he needs to be separated, he needs to be sanctified.

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He is fashioned by God to be fit, to do what he's going to do here on this earth, and he needs to be prepared.

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So that's kind of where we were. So that brings us to, there was one other, couple of other little parallel passages under that verse, verse one of Romans 14.

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Let me just touch on those, and then we'll go to the next verse, because we didn't talk about this last time.

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There is a passage in Galatians 2, verse four, that fits with everything we've been talking about in verse one of Romans 14.

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And it says this, and that because of false brothers, unawares brought in, who brought them in, by the way?

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Yeah, exactly. They're brought in by Satan. So because they're false brethren brought in unawares, what does unawares mean?

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It's an old English word, but I mean, we don't use it that way, but what does it mean? They sneak in and we don't think they're false.

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We think they're good preachers and teachers, right? So we have that going on here.

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And why did they come into the church? Well, from their viewpoint, it says they came in secretly to spy out our liberty.

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What does that mean? That means we're not living under Moses. We're living under Jesus. We're not living under law.

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We're living under grace and we are free. And as Paul said, all things are lawful for us. Yeah, not all things are expedient, but all things are lawful.

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And they want to come and say, yeah, except for this. He said, you need to be worshiping on Saturday because that's the actual

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Sabbath, not on Sunday. And they'll bring that in and make a big deal out of it. That's what they do.

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So they are spying out your liberty and where they see it, they want to demolish it because that liberty is what brings you joy and life and an actual relationship with God rather than living under a set of rules, which is no relationship at all.

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It's a religion. And there's a big difference between man's religion and a walk with God.

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By the way, if you have a walk with God, you don't need the list of things to do and not to do because the

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Holy Spirit will tell you, I don't want to listen to that music with you. Turn it off, right? You don't have to have a list of which songs you kids can listen to.

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You don't have to have a list telling you which place you can go into and which place you should avoid or you should buy stuff from and not.

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You don't need people making lists. Ask the Holy Spirit, do you want me to walk into this place and will you go with me?

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And if not, I'm not going in there. That's how we live. Now that's a relationship, but it's a continual moment by moment throughout the day, deciding to be spirit -filled rather than walking in the flesh.

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People don't like to live that way. They'd rather have a list of rules. So Satan easily slips these people in to seek out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus.

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You see, we don't have any liberty when we're not abiding in Christ. That's why we like to let them bring the law in and the rules in, because we don't abide in Christ very much sometimes.

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We just, you know, like to get up and pray and take Jesus' hand and say, it's not about you going with me today.

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It's about me going with you. What are you going to do today? I want to do that with you. See, we don't approach it that way. We say,

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Lord, go with me today as I go do my thing. Listen, he's not the disciple. We are, right?

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So it's really difficult to live a genuine Christian life in Christ, to walk in Christ, to be holding his hand throughout the day.

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And that's the only way you can walk on water, by the way, is if you're holding his hand. And when you let go, you can't.

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And if you let go and you can't, then you need a set of rules like stay in the boat. You see my point?

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So here he says, and that because these false brothers come in.

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Now, what do you think the word brethren means? Like, are they

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Christians? Or does it mean a Jewish brother? Most of the legalizers when this was written were

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Jews. So is that like Paul being a Jew, who's the penman of this, is

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God inspired him to write. But I mean, Paul is a Jew and most of these legalizers are Jews. Is that what he means by brother? Or does he mean that they appear to be

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Christians? I think it means they appear to be other Christians. And you would think that they are.

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That some are and some aren't, because there's two types of false preachers. There's the one that were foreordained before the foundation of the world in the book of Jude, that were ordained to the blackness of darkness forever.

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And they're just, they were sent by God to test his people and to see, you know, to ferret out false believers and all that.

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Who knows all the purposes for that, but it exists. Those are on that way to hell.

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And then there are others who are just, they haven't, like they're teaching something they heard another person teach and they think it's true, but it's not, they hadn't figured it out yet and they will change and repent of it.

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There are those. So some of them are saved. Some of them are not. The point is, they're at a point in their life where they want to take our liberty away and bring us into bondage, verse four says.

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So Galatians 2, five says, to whom we give place by subjection, not for an hour.

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So Paul wouldn't let them be in the church for one hour and he'd get rid of them. Now, see, we don't do that because we'd like to build numbers.

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Now you can see, we have done that here. It's very effective. There are no legalists in this room today because of it, but Paul would not put up with these people.

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He would take the word of God and he would slap them around with it a little bit and say, okay, where do you find that?

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Show me that in scripture. And when they couldn't do it, he'd ask them to leave. Or the elders of the church or the deacons would ask them to leave.

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He wouldn't endure these people even for an hour. But it's kind of interesting where he says, to whom we gave not place by subjection, even for an hour.

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What does this mean, subjection? Well, the Greek word means subordination. And what that tells us is the very thing that I've observed is when they come in, especially if they say

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I'm a Jew or I'm part Jew, usually I'm half Jew, they are now putting you, just by saying it, they're putting you as a

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Gentile under subordination. You need to listen to me because I know the Bible better than you do because I'm a Jew.

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And they make you feel that way. And that's where they start. That's the starting place. Paul says, don't allow that.

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Do not give place by subordination or subjection, not even for one hour, so that the truth of the gospel might continue with us.

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So apparently if you let these people come in and take control within a very short period of time, you won't even see the true gospel being preached.

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The true gospel of even how to be saved will be changed because it'll be, well, yeah,

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I believe in Jesus and, and they'll add at least one thing. Well, that's one thing too many, right?

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To whom give place, not even for an hour. But of these who seem to be somewhat, now what does that mean?

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They always seem to be important people. Maybe they've had a huge following at some other place in the country where they built a huge church.

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And now they're going around in evangelism. And because they built a church from six people, Ben and I were talking about one earlier today, years ago when

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I was a young preacher, he built a church in Atlanta, Georgia from six people to the largest church in Atlanta. And I went and heard this man preach.

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He was amazing. It's just amazing preacher. He never moved. He kept his hands right there.

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And he was such a great speaker that it didn't matter. He didn't need to move around and do anything.

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You'd listen to him for an hour and a half and think it was 20 minutes. Curtis Hudson was his name and he's in heaven now, but he said some things that I bought into as a young preacher and preached for maybe 10 years and then found out later, it's not even true.

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It's not the right, this passage he was talking about. It's not what it meant. A little embarrassing on my part.

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Ben and my son, Ben goes and finds these old tapes when I was 25 and he's got them back there. And he says, dad,

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I heard one today. You need to hear it. I said, no, I don't need to hear it. Just delete it. Just delete it.

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And Bill knows a lot of them and Brayman. Sharon heard all of them. Yeah, you've heard these sermons that Ben is laughing about back there.

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Barely older than I was when I preached them, wouldn't you say? Yeah, you do. Yeah, you would love that.

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Ben has the ability to destroy his dad. He's got lots of power. And the greater part of my inheritance, actually.

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So here in verse six, they seem to be somewhat. They're big, they're bigwigs, right?

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They're bigwigs. Look what Paul says about them. But these who seem to be somewhat, whatsoever they were, and this is in parentheses.

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Paul is murmuring a little here. He says, but whatsoever they were, it makes no matter to God because God accepts no man's person.

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I like the fact that he used scripture to say really what Paul was saying. They don't mean nothing to me, right? Well, he actually says that.

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Let's keep going. He says, whatever they were, it maketh no matter to me. No, I couldn't see that.

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Let me put my glasses. He did say me first. It makes no matter to me. Then he says, God accepts no man's person.

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So he gives the scripture to back, why it doesn't matter to him. For they who seem to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me.

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What do you think it means in conference? Well, they had big mega churches, not the same, didn't operate the same.

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But I mean, I recall several sermons where they preached 5 ,000 or more people to us right here in this church.

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That's a mega church, right? So, you know, they spoke in conference. Also, it can mean that they spoke with other bigwigs and they all stuck together and they all said they agreed to say the same things and believe the same list of rules you need to be keeping.

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He said, none of that matters because Paul said, this is all that matters. And it ain't in there. So you don't get to stay here for more than an hour and then you have to leave.

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Pretty cool passage that deals with all of these same things.

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All right. Now, 2 Timothy 2, 24, let's turn there. And this is sort of the end of Romans 14, one, the little verse we started out with.

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This is the last parallel passage I had for that, but it's probably the most important. And a lot of you have heard me speak on this in the last couple of years, a couple of five, 10 times probably, because I was in the den sitting there and Charlotte was having a quiet time.

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She likes to read Charles Spurgeon. I don't know why she didn't just read my old sermons, but she likes to read

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Charles Spurgeon and then she'll usually listen to this and she'll read it to me.

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And we both benefit greatly. He was such a wonderful preacher, prince of preachers.

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But one morning she chose just to read me a Bible verse instead of, and it was this one.

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It was 2 Timothy 2, starting with verse 24 and going down through 26.

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And you've heard me tell this story and she reads it to me and I'm thinking, why is she reading this to me? And I have the opportunity, especially because of trade way now, where we go out across the country, almost every major city in the country and speak to groups of 50 to 200 or more people.

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And they all come from Christian radio ads and things. So they're supposed to be brothers and sisters and most of them are wonderful.

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Really, truly, I've never met such large groups of wonderful people as we've met through trade way.

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And you get to meet some of them because a lot of times when they come to a Dallas meeting, they'll come visit here Sunday and you get to meet them.

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They're just great people, all right? But there are those who have different beliefs than we do here.

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And I'm not bashful sometimes with why we believe what we believe. And so I'll get into some discussions with people.

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So usually in a break, in a break in the meeting or if it's bad enough, I'll like to raise their hand in front of everybody and ask a question like that.

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I'll say, you know, I can't answer that in five minutes. Let me take you to lunch. And I'll take him to lunch and we'll have these talks. And Charlotte knows it and she has sat through a number of them.

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And so I think that's why she read this to me. And it says, and that because,

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I'm sorry, 2 Timothy 2, 24. And the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men.

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And I'm thinking, why is she reading this to me? The servant of the

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Lord must not fight, but it's gotta be gentle to all men, apt to teach and patient.

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And I'm thinking, okay, I'm listening. Thank you very much for choosing this passage. And she keeps reading and it's in this verse, actually

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God tells us how to deal with false teachers, which is fascinating.

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And the funny thing is she started that out, those first few words. I'm going, all right. It's like, she's preaching at me, but I'm thinking,

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I'm not thinking she's preaching at me, but I'm thinking she's trying to help me. That's really what I'm thinking. She's trying to help me here.

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She thinks I need help here. And of course I don't. And, but then as she continued to read and I listened,

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I brought out, or I should say, the Lord brought to my attention so many truths that I had never seen in this passage that I had seen so many times before.

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I, it's like, I never saw it until the day she read that to me, that I talked about it for two years and I'm still talking about it.

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This was about two years ago, probably. And I'm still talking about it today because I found some truths here that I'd never seen before that if you understand them, you will be able to talk to these false teachers so much with more ease and not, you know how it gets your adrenaline up and you just feel bad about it, maybe for a whole day.

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You might even think about it for a week. Jeannie, you've never done that, have you? No, she's never done that.

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Dave, you've never seen her do that or you've never done it either. Well, you don't pretty much. Dave is one of the few people that I've ever met that kind of was already doing this stuff.

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I mean that, but made me angry every time he did it. So let's look at it for a second.

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I mean, this is amazing. So this is how to deal with a lot of what verse one in chapter 14 of Romans is talking about when you see it happen in the church.

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Here's how to deal with it. Now, the whole chapter of chapter 14 of Romans is gonna talk about it, but this is sort of a parallel passage and I think all the ingredients are here also.

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So look at it here. So the servant of the Lord, first of all, he's not, you don't look at it as a fight. Now you'll feel like it is if it's about the liberty of your church, right?

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So I'm defending myself a little, Dave Senior. I mean, that's why I get a little excited. I'm fighting for the liberty of the church.

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It's not about me and my opinion or whether I'm right or you're right or the other guy's right. It's about liberty of the church.

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Yeah, it should, that's what it should be about. It shouldn't be a fight and like who's gonna win the argument.

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That's what this is saying. It's not about the argument. So it's not about striving and we have to be gentle and that's very difficult for some of us.

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To all men apt to teach, I like that part, the gentle part, it's not so easy.

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Patient, wow, that was difficult. Do you know that it's difficult for some of us to even shut up and listen to the other people?

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Long enough to even hear what they're saying, let alone know if you disagree with it because you already think you know what they're gonna say because you've heard it so many times.

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That's not being patient and that's difficult to just listen. Maybe they have a different twist on their false doctrine that you haven't heard before or maybe they're gonna say, well,

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I don't believe this anymore. Wouldn't that be interesting? And you jump on them before they say it and attack them. Well, be patient.

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All right, so there's some of the basics, but look at this. In meekness, instructing those that oppose themselves.

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Well, now there we learn something. That's something new I learned when she showed this to me that morning because I learned all these things.

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It's like the Holy Spirit taught me all these things in five minutes that I should have seen years ago. And that is our job is not to out -argue them or to win an argument.

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Our job is to instruct them. Well, see, they don't think you're there to do that.

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They're trying to tell you how it should be. They're trying to tell you, well, you gotta keep all these rules in your church or whatever their thing is that is not biblical that you know is not biblical and they're trying to make you think their way.

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Well, they're arguing with you, right? And you're not supposed to argue back what you're supposed to do. Now watch this.

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You take this book and you rightly divide it and you open it up and you teach them in context with the proper grammar and the proper word meanings exactly what it does say.

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You instruct them whether they get it or not. Well, let me get my head of myself here.

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I don't wanna get ahead of the Lord. You don't have to worry about whether they get it or not. You teach them what the

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Bible actually says and why in the proper context and show all parallel passages if you need to just support the fact that's what the

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Bible says everywhere. It says it means this. And so all of these scriptures shed light on this scripture that you say means that, but they say it means this and you teach it to them.

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It's you're instructing, you're not arguing. And then it says you do that with meekness though. And you do that to those who oppose themselves.

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What kind of clue does that give you? That if you can, like when they ask, they're gonna ask you a hundred questions faster than you can answer them.

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So answer every one of their questions with a question. Don't give them an answer. Give them a question.

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Because if you give them a question, they will start talking. And if they talk long enough, they will oppose themselves.

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Their logic will become illogical. And you can then point that out. Well, a while ago you said this, but now you just said that.

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That's not logical. They're the opposite. And you just said you believe both. And now you've got them.

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You've got them where they at least now doubt their own position. And really from a human viewpoint, it's hard to get anyone to look at a new position as long as they believe in their position.

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So you kind of want to look for little areas there where you can instruct them in the proper way and get them talking.

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Because if they talk long enough, they'll go full circle and they will say something that contradicts something they said maybe 10 minutes ago.

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And you point that out when they do. Meekly though. Well, now, did you mean that like a while ago when you said the opposite?

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Did you mean that or do you mean this? And get them to see that they're being inconsistent. Because God's word says they always will be.

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They will oppose themselves if you let them talk long enough. Don't you think that's good information for us to have?

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So if God, this is the amazing part. If God per adventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging truth.

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Now we talked about that word Sunday school. In the New Testament usage of repentance, it means a changing of the mind.

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It means a change of the mind. So look at what it's saying. In meekness instruct, you've already seen that their logic is that they're opposing themselves.

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In meekness instruct and in per adventure, God will give them a changing of the mind to the acknowledging truth.

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God may or may not do it. So who does that tell you is in control of this whole situation?

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God, not us. God may be looking at a person and seeing I've never known them.

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They're a goat, they're a tear. I don't know them. I didn't even put them here like Jesus did in the parables.

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I didn't plant the terror seeds. The enemy Satan did. I didn't plant them. I planted wheat. And God may be looking at this person that you're talking to and saying,

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I don't know him. You know, like I'm not gonna give them repentance. They're not gonna ever change their mind.

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They hate me. They hate you. They hate my son, Jesus. And they would spit on him on the cross and no, I'm not gonna change their mind.

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Or God might be looking at this person and say, well, they're a lost sheep. You know, they're a sheep, but they don't know me yet.

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And they don't know they belong to me yet. And so, yeah, if you just keep showing them scripture,

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I'll change their mind. I'll send the Holy Spirit. Do you understand the calling of the Holy Spirit is the very thing that he does when he regenerates a human being is he changes their mind.

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The Bible teaches no human ever changes their mind to love God when they're in a state of hating

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God. They don't make that decision. They won't do it because they can't do it because they're depraved.

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And that only by the grace of God does he save some from a fallen race.

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And we look at that and point God finger and blaming for it for saving some from a totally fallen race, hell bound race.

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And we think it's horrible that he didn't just save everybody. But guess what? We're not

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God. He doesn't do it the way we would do it. He's only got one perfect plan and mankind loves to think he would do it better.

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Some people would just destroy the whole race and start over. Other people would just save everybody. And then you'd have

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Hitler right there in heaven with your little baby back there when he goes to heaven. And yeah,

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I'm sure that would work out really well too. So we all think we can do it better than God, right? But the truth is, courage adventure is a really important old

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English word there in the passage. It means God may choose to cause this person to see it and he may choose to not let him ever see it.

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Now let me, I've asked people all over the country this. I'll show them a passage like that and explain it a little bit. And I'll say, now, if you knew

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God was that way, would you still love him? And I've had tons of people stare me down with no words for minutes, long minutes without saying a single word.

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Now, now that you see God actually decides some people go to heaven, some go to hell. And he's like that.

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He's not like you. You had him where he loves everybody and like he just loves everybody and he died for everybody.

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And that's how you view God. But now that you see the Bible says, that's not God. Do you love the God of the

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Bible? And they'll just not say a word, walk away. What does that mean? Do you suppose they've invented a

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Jesus of their own? Do you suppose there is another gospel, another spirit and another

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Jesus that they believe in? It's a figment of their imagination. That's who they worship. Is that called idolatry or what is that called?

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But when you present the Jesus of the Bible, the God of the Bible, and you ask a person who claims to be a

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Christian, do you still love him knowing that he does this? And they can't answer it.

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Is that frightening a little bit? At least it says they've never seen these things in the

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Bible, which means their preacher never talks about it. And you have to ask why. Maybe they're one of these very people this is talking about.

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A false brother brought in unaware. He's teaching stuff that Satan wants them to hear. God didn't, you know, not teaching what

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God wants people to hear. I don't know, but I run into this a lot. So if God peradventure would give them repentance, that's a big if to the acknowledging of the truth.

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Now look at verse 26. Now it brings in the will of man. It's never just the sovereignty of God. It's always sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man are both true.

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They're always found side by side in the scripture and groups want to leave one or the other out.

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And either one you leave out, it makes you wrong. They're both true and they're both together. Because look at verse 26.

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Let's say God does peradventure allow them to change their mind a little bit about what they were thinking when you started talking to them.

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Look what has to happen next and that they may recover themselves.

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You see now that's not passive, that's active. When it's passive, it's usually in the Greek, it's usually

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God doing something to you like the Holy Spirit waking you up. That's passive from the man's viewpoint.

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God did it to you. He's bigger and stronger than he did it to you. Against your will, he saved us pretty much.

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And then he changed our will. He made us have a new want to, didn't he? He made us all of a sudden see

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Jesus for who he was because he opened our eyes is what he did. And we saw him as the shepherd, right?

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And then we wanted him. He made Jesus irresistible. So then we wanted him. Verse 26 is about the then we wanted him part.

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This is where man has to make a choice, but look how it presents it. Okay, so maybe

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God does open their eyes and they see the acknowledging of the truth and look at verse 26. So that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil who are taken captive by him at his will.

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Whose will? Satan's will. So does man really have free will or does he have a will that's influenced by either the

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Holy Spirit or God or Satan or your mama or your dad or your school system or the news? See, the choices we make are influenced.

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That's not sovereign. That's not free. That's influenced. Only God has free will. Okay, let's get that right.

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But we do have a will. We do make choices and those choices are extremely important.

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And here we see a person who's a false teacher and a godly person comes up to him and shows him the truth in the scripture and God for adventure, in this case, we assume

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God decides, okay, I'm gonna open his eyes and let him see this. And he sees the truth. It still says he's responsible to set himself free as it puts it, to recover themselves.

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All of that's active. That's something they have to do. A choice they have to make. To recover themselves out of the snare of the devil because they've been captivated by him probably their whole life.

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Wow. The whole package is in there, but it certainly shows our part, doesn't it?

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It's not our part. It's not our role to recover them. It's not our role to make them believe just like we believe.

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It feels good when, you know, all of us have this within us that we want everyone to believe exactly our system of theology and we're not comfortable till they do.

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I don't know where that comes from, but it's true of all of us. And that's why it starts out here. You have to be meek, gentle, and patient because they're not all gonna believe everything exactly the way we believe it.

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In fact, nobody does. So God's telling us, get over it, right? Because he says, it's up to me to change their mind.

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If you are right, my son or my daughter, if you are right, and I want them to see it more like you do, it's up to me to change their mind.

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And then after that, they have to decide if they wanna set themselves free from Satan or not. Now, I happen to believe from other passages of scripture that even that has to have the

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Holy Spirit's help for them even to do that. They cannot even do that on them own.

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That's on their own selves. That's terrible grammar. They own selves. They can't do it without his help.

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So what you gotta have is you've got to have the idea of where it says that the

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Lord works in us both to will and to do his good pleasure, to make us want to do his good pleasure and to do his good pleasure.

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All that's gotta be happening too. So there's a great little passage. I think it's interesting that the very next verse, even though it's in the next chapter of 2

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Timothy, right after that, it says this, this know also that in the last days, perilous times shall come.

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And then it starts talking about that. So a lot of the perilous times and the end times arises because of false doctrine being taught throughout the church so that the church gets extremely weak so that the

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United States of America gets really weak. And we're the protector of Israel from a human viewpoint.

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And we're the ones that send out more Bibles and more missionaries than anybody in the world. So if you can get the church to get weak and the pulpit weak and the home weak and the nation weak, it changes the whole world.

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And perilous times come because of that. And that's what we're seeing, I think. All right, well, that leads us for like a few minutes here to go to verse two,

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Romans 14, two. Let's see what it says. Let's look at verses two and three, Romans 14, two and three.

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For one believes that he may eat all things. Another who is weak eats only herbs, vegetables.

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So here we have a vegetarian and a meat eater. Let not him that eat despise him that doesn't eat.

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So don't let the person who is free to eat everything, meat, vegetables, eggs and milk and fish.

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Don't let him despise the person that's a vegetarian. Now, this is a funny question, but I have to ask you because everyone in here sits on one side of that discussions.

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Have you ever had a time when someone who was on the other side of that annoyed you a little bit by talking about how they eat and what they won't eat?

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Anybody? Yeah, me, I do. You know, people, all the different categories now that we have that we didn't even have when

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I was a boy. No one knew what any of it meant, but now we have all that.

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And look what the scripture says. It says, don't let the person who eats the meat despise the one who thinks don't eat meat.

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It'll kill you if you eat meat, you'll die young, you'll have a heart attack, you'll have arthritis.

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You see it on TV all the time. All these different things. You shouldn't despise the person that believes that way.

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Number one, that's already getting difficult for me, but let's keep reading. I was telling you, chapter 14,

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I've tried to act like it was boring. Actually what it is, is it says a lot of stuff that I have trouble with.

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So here's one of them. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not.

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I am in the eateth category. Okay, I'll just tell you. Like, I like to be free to eat what

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I want to eat. Charlotte is a little bit less that way. And she helps me with that.

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She's always says it's about the choices. Right?

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It's about the choices. It's not where you're eating. It's not the restaurant. It's the choices we make.

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Well, I'm going, okay, Charlotte. I know. All right. So, but she has helped me lose like 45 pounds.

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What do you think about that? So let him that eateth not despise her that eateth not.

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And let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth for God received him.

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Now that last part is interesting. What do you think that last part means?

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Like, do you think that to God, this is a big deal? Like, it's not.

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It's not a big deal to the Lord. Whether you're a vegetarian or you're a meat eater or whatever is not a big deal.

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God can love you either way. Either way you want to go with that. You can walk with him and be just as powerful as the other person.

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That's the way it is with a lot of these doubtful disputations. And that this whole chapter is talking about.

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Things that we like to make a big deal about that God says it's not a big deal. You shouldn't even be discussing it let alone fighting over it.

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I mean, you can discuss it if you can do it meekly and stuff, but it's not like it's not like God cares about these things.

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Now, do we have a list of these things that God doesn't care about? Well, no, because they're not in the Bible. There's no list.

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So we make the list. You see the point? That's what this is talking about. All right.

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Now, where it says, you know

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God has received this person that you think is so bad because they're eating stuff they shouldn't be eating. Now I know some of this can have to do with like meat that was offered to an idol, right?

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And then later they sold it and the person, the good Christian person ate it and a weaker brother saw it and bothered him.

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And that, I know that's the context of all this historically, but at the same time it's saying

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God received that person. So you should not despise the person. The word for receive there means to take to oneself.

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In other words, this person belongs to God. God has already called this person to himself. He's a believer. He's true.

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He's real. He's God's. And most of this passage when you keep going down here past verse two and three it is concerning clear imperatives taught.

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I'm sorry. It is not talking about clear imperatives taught in the New Testament. It's talking about doubtful disputations things that are not specifically mentioned in scripture and where they are mentioned, they are taken out of context.

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And yet legalist attempt to use these things as imperative. The imperative mood is used in both

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Greek and English to express a command or an in treaty, but a strong in treaty almost bordering on being a command.

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So next time what we'll do and get together I want us to give some different examples of maybe some imperatives that are in the

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Bible where the Bible actually in the New Testament under grace actually does say do this and don't do that. So can you guys look up a few of those for me for next time?

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Okay. Like, are there things in the New Testament where Lord says, do this, don't do that.

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Live this way. Don't live that way. Those are imperatives. If we find them in the Bible and they're in the imperative in the grammar you don't have to look the grammar up.

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You can usually tell in the English if it is and bring some of those examples for me. And then what

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I want you to do is be able to give me some examples of things that people will say you need to be doing that are not in the

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Bible anyway or they're out of context. So bring me some of each and we'll talk about it next time. We will have a lot of fun.

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All right, let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you for your word and how you've given it to us, preserved it all the way until this day.

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And you give us your Holy Spirit to interpret it and to teach it to us. And you give us further, you gave us teachers in the church and gifts to men, gifts to the church, men like brother

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Otis, like brother Bill, who can take the word of God and save us some time by showing us what they've discovered that it means when rightly held up against all the rest of the scripture.

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And Lord, thank you for that. People like that all over the world that you've chosen to be teachers of the word.

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Lord, we ask to make all of us teachers in our own respect that as discussions come about in our lives, whether it be family during holidays or people we work with, that we would be salt and light and be not afraid to tell the truth and to be able to show people when they take things out of context and to know when you want us to speak up and say a word about it.

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And let us be helped by you to be meek as we do it and to be patient and to realize it's up to you to change people's hearts.

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Lord, go with us in our time of fellowship now, bless the meal we're about to have in Jesus name, amen.

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You are dismissed. We do have meals every Sunday and we have plenty for visitors.

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We hope you'll stay and join us for our meal and in fellowship time, we'll see you there in just a few minutes.