Faith over Fear

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1, 2, 3 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 and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. We're glad you are here with us. We are going to have a hopefully a very helpful episode today, one that we hope will maybe not so much challenge, but it might challenge some.

Hopefully, it will be edifying to all. And so, you know, we do this each week and we sometimes get reviews, bud.

And we got a review. I think I might have missed this because it says it's from August 17th. And today's

August 21st. So, didn't miss it too far, but I just happened to notice this yesterday.

So, but the thing that's puzzling me with this review, bud, is I thought that we got one from this person before.

So maybe he just gave us two. But it's from Cardinal One, which name sounds familiar.

Maybe he did the apologetics live. I don't know. But that's why I thought maybe we saw this review.

But here's what he says. It's a five -star review. Informative truth with love. Andrew does a great job preaching the truth of the gospel and love.

I always learn ways to bring up spiritual matters when speaking with others, plus how to handle questions that may come up.

He has, and he also has interesting guests. Love the input from bud also!

In Christ Grady, Colossians 3, 15 -17. So, thanks for that,

Grady. I guess he's a Cardinal. No, Cardinals is a baseball team or basketball team,

I think. I'm just glad Roman Catholics are listening. Praise God. Yeah, I didn't know if it was a Roman Catholic thing or if it was some...

No, Grady, I'm kidding. I'm assuming he's like, isn't a Cardinals, isn't that like a baseball team?

I'm just checking because I'm not sure. I don't know. You don't know either. Someone is going to email us, bud, and be like, how do you not know that they're like a football team or something?

I'll be like, yeah, I don't watch team sports. Shoot me. But maybe they're like a sports team and he wants his sports team to be number one.

That's how I'm going to assume that. It's not a Cardinal thing like Catholic Church. Why do you have to go there? Poor Grady.

That's what I thought at first. That's the grading of Grady. I apologize to Grady.

Good morning, Andrew. Good morning! That's kind of like Vietnam. I don't know if it's the

Harriers in the morning or not. Yeah, well, when folks are listening, it may not be. It is for you and I, and here's the thing.

I've been struggling with this past two weeks talking to people with anxiety.

For my church, I plan on tomorrow when I get up before my sermon.

I may do a sermon before the sermon, and that may not be so good. But I've just been really concerned with folks and the issue of anxiety with everything going on in the culture.

And so I just want to kind of give some things to my congregation to edify them, to encourage them in these times that we live in.

So much of the focus is on negative things. So much of the—whether it's the news, whether it's at work, whether you talk with family, just the world seems like it's falling apart, and people are so focused on that.

And I wanted to do something for my congregation to kind of just do a reset of, hey, let's remember from where we've come.

We were enemies of God, destined to hell. He regenerated us. We have eternal life.

It's something just simple that we would be able to get our minds kind of right in that sense.

And so I was like, all right, we'll do an episode on faith over fear, which, by the way,

I think I mentioned it when you and I talked about when

I went out with Justin Peters, but there was a woman with a mask. If you remember, Justin wanted a picture of this mask.

This woman had a mask that said faith over fear, and he really wanted a picture. So I walked up to her with Justin's camera, his phone, and said, would it be okay if I get a photo of that mask?

And she just said, sure. And so I take the photo, and then I turned to her and I said, I just got to ask.

I mean, your mask says faith over fear. Which do you have, faith or fear?

And she goes, I have faith, but I'm also intellectual. Now, Justin was already seated at the lunch table, and I was like, do

I really want to get into this? Because I was going to say, well, if you're intellectual, you'd understand that a mask that you're wearing that is porous to 10 microns is not going to do much to a virus that's 0 .1

microns. I mean, a lot of that's going to get through if you were intellectual. I figured.

Let me tell you this. You know, this guy's Catholic. I don't read him because of his theology, but he's just very astute.

GK Chesterton. He said, without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

That actually is a really good quote. Oh, it is. I mean, that explains a lot of what we see going on in the culture.

We haven't educated people, and now they want to take educated people and treat them as if they're actually smart. I mean,

I think Dan Bongino refers to stupid, dumb people, stupid, smart people.

They're smart, but they're dumb. I mean, they do dumb things, but you can't say that they do it because they're idiots.

It's because they're smart, but to me, it's smart, dumb people. It's the failure to distinguish two things.

Follow the science. We can all agree with that because science is like this objective thing out there.

The problem is now not to follow the science. The problem now is they want you to follow the scientists, and those guys can err.

Only some scientists. Only some scientists. You don't follow the doctors that actually treat patients.

You do the ones that do research and are politicians. Anyway, but this is the example where so much of what

I see, people are getting distracted. When you and I talked about what do we want to do, I had been kind of working on this for two weeks for my own congregation, and I said, you know, why don't we cover this?

Why don't we talk about this? It turns out that, I guess, great minds must think alike. I haven't been talking with Daryl or Virgil from Just Thinking Podcast, but they did, as usual, their three -hour episodes, but they did the same topic.

It's not—because I've seen some others doing a similar thing, and I don't think that it is anything like, oh, one's getting the idea from another.

You know what I think it is, is that we're kind of going through a phase. We went through some of this stuff with COVID. Everyone was talking about COVID.

Everyone started talking about elections. I think a lot of Christians are now realizing there's a problem with all this talk from the culture and what's going on in the culture with being woke and the

Black Lives Matter, the elections, the economy, Afghanistan, all this stuff,

COVID. I mean, everything that the Word of Faith prophets missed in their prophecies for 2020 and 2021,

I mean, all of it. They missed all of it, okay? All those things, people have talked about it, we've talked about it, and I think that a lot of people are starting to realize, okay, it's time to move on.

It's neat to see in Christendom, I'm seeing that with a lot of folks.

Just throughout, people are starting to go, wait, let's deal with this.

Well, you can't let the media of the society become the media of the sanctuary, and what you're going to lead us through here in this discussion is really going back to the foundation.

Don't forget who you know. Don't forget what you know. This is the foundation of our hope.

It's a person. It's Christ, and we have no need to fear these things.

In fact, this is a glorious time to be a Christian. I mean, the Lord is making it so easy to give a testimony, to give a witness to the gospel with what's going on.

You know, it's interesting you say that because I actually think, and I've said this here before, I think this is the best time to evangelize.

Oh, absolutely. Because everyone's afraid. They're either afraid of the virus or they're afraid of socialism, but everybody's afraid, but the

Christians should not be afraid. The Christians should not be afraid. We should not be living in fear.

We have faith over fear. And so that's what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about faith over fear, but before we do, bud, what

I'd like to do, if I can get this queued up, what I'd like to do before we do that,

I'm going to speed this up just a little. I'll do this at, I guess I can only do it at 1 .5,

but I want to play something to introduce some folks to something that's going to be coming out really soon.

And I will admit, the music behind this is really cool. So bud, take a listen.

Greetings. I'm Bud Alheim, here to invite you to the Bud's Own Podcast. Perhaps you've heard about it already, but we're living still in unprecedented times.

There's widespread pandemic panic. Fifteen days to flatten the curve has taken almost two years, which didn't happen, but has managed to be replaced with the blossoming of an apparently bulbous, tyrannical boil in an it's not over yet, bad joke sort of way.

The visible church itself has not been immune to this pandemic of fear. Church after church has had to pull out their dusty old commentaries to find out, hopefully, what

Romans 13 actually means as they try and grapple with who exactly is Caesar and what exactly can he do. Evangelicalism has stuttered, sputtered, and spewed out, as expected, every conceivable response to the current cultural quandary in which it finds itself.

And frankly, very little of that spewing seems to have exhibited the theological tone of faith buttressed by such words as to live as Christ.

In other words, many faithful saints have been watching the goings -on of God's judgment on the country and His chastising of the church because, after all, judgment starts at the house of the

Lord. But these faithful saints may not be hearing anything but the dreary and dismal diatribes of secular media, which are often echoed in the media of the sanctuary.

But in the midst of these unprecedented times, here's what faithful Christians know. These times are not unprecedented to God. In fact,

He orders these times. Surely, you've heard of Providence. Nothing is unprecedented. God remains on the throne, orchestrating every single molecule, including the

COVID ones that populate this universe. The Lord is, believe it or don't, still building His church. The ministry of faithful saints, though regularly disregarded by the big

EVA media, is ongoing. His Word is going out. Saints are increasingly being conformed to the image of Christ. Sinners are being saved by the power of God in the gospel.

This is why I'm inviting you to join in listening to my new podcast, The Bud Zone Podcast. The Bud Zone is not about me.

It's about our buds in the faith who are doing the faithful work of ministry, regardless of how unprecedented the times may be. We will be speaking with saints from around the country, and maybe even around the world, to hear just how the work of the

Lord isn't being thwarted by the circumstances of our times. Join us by listening to The Bud Zone Podcast when it first airs on Thursday, September 2nd.

We're a proud member of the ChristianPodcastCommunity .org, where you can find many other faithful, edifying podcasts to encourage you in the faith, even in these unprecedented times.

Thank you, and God bless you. We hope you'll join us on The Bud Zone Podcast. So did you know about that,

Bud? You got a podcast coming out on your own! Yes, thank you.

You know, that had basically just—it's as if you knew what the topic was going to be, you know, when you first dropped that.

Because, I mean, we could have just ended right now. I mean, you just gave—right in that three minutes, was it? Yeah, three -minute thing that I sped up a little bit.

But in that three minutes, you just answered everything we want to cover in this podcast, so we could just say goodnight. Folks, so you know,

Andrew texts me and says, You got to get a trailer! So I rush upstairs when I get home from work one afternoon, and that's what it was.

I did that because he's like, Oh, we got to get your RSS feed. Well, it's part of getting set up.

This is how you set it up. But you are having—so, folks, you could go and subscribe to The Bud Zone Podcast.

It's there, available now. Wherever you get podcasts, it should show up. If it doesn't, let us know.

But it is part of the Christian Podcast Community, a new podcast coming up. Bud will go solo. He's going to—so this is like the, you know—

I don't know. I've kicked you out of the nest. You're now on your own. Are you still going to be— Everyone's asking, Are you still going to be here? Yeah, I had a brother this past week say,

Oh, are you still going to be with Andrew? Like, unless you know something, I don't know. Well, he did ask you, because I reached out to him and said,

Aaron, you want to be a co -host? I need a new co -host. Mine is flying the coop. No, no.

I love Aaron, but the puns. We should have Aaron come in here once, just so people understand the number of puns he could do in an hour is more than people can count.

I could transition anything to the gospel. He can transition anything to a bad joke. It's a spiritual gift.

It's a spiritual gift, yes. So let's talk about the fear of God. And I'm going to give a link, Bud, back in the day.

Let's see. How long ago is this? 2019. You used to do a daily blog article on Striving for Eternity called,

Come Let Us Worship. And you did one called, The Fear of God. It was weekly. It was every Sunday.

I kind of looked forward to it. It was something I looked forward to. I'd do my devotions, read that article, go to church.

It made Sunday a wonderful day. Now, I have one less thing to look forward to on Sundays, but I can still read the old articles.

So I'll link to the Fear of God article. We'll talk about that a bit. But Proverbs 1 .7

says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

And actually, the phrase, the fear of the Lord or the fear of God, appears 32 times in the

Scriptures. Now, you looked up in this article and you said it was 150 times the word fear appears. And let's talk about first with fear because I think people have misunderstandings of fear.

We think of fear as a negative thing. We think of fear as something that anxiety, something that should be avoided, and yet we're commanded to fear the

Lord. So there must be a difference here, Bud, between fear, the fear that we think of when we hear fear of the

Lord. We shouldn't be afraid of God, like He's going to come down and punish us or something.

There's got to be some differences here with this idea of fear of the Lord and fear the way we think of it.

So let's first start with worldly fear. Bud, when we speak of worldly fear, what is it people are thinking of when we are looking at the culture right now?

What are some things you think that people are afraid of? Well, I mean, for almost two years now, the fear of sickness, the fear of disease, the fear of death, the

Lord has made that abundantly front and center. Like we mentioned earlier, it's a great thing.

It's a good time to explain the hope of the gospel and call people to repent and believe.

But those are the fears, and they're legitimate fears for the flesh. In the spirit, no.

See, and there's a distinction that you've just made there, right? So we have a lot of things going on in our culture, whether it's

COVID, it's lockdowns, it's masks, it is the economy, it's the complete collapse of things.

You look at what's going on in Afghanistan. We'll talk about that in a bit. But you look at all this stuff, and there are things that are causing many

Christians to lose their focus. They're starting to watch the news and have the woe -is -me attitude and start to worry about, well, am

I going to be able to survive? You know, I have someone that, as you know, I've been predicting the stuff that's going on now for years, probably decades.

Just looking at the way things are laying out, looking at history, being raised in a, you know, going to Hebrew school a generation after the

Holocaust, we're taught to look for the signs of another persecution against the Jewish people. It's just that now in America, it's against the

Christians. And we're seeing this. And many are having fear, fear over their job.

Businesses are now requiring vaccines. I have, the past week or so, have gotten more requests from people, hey, can

I get a religious exemption for vaccines? Why? Because their workplace is demanding it. And so people in my congregation are asking me if they can get, you know, religious exemptions.

And so this is something that hasn't really been an issue before now. All of a sudden, this is an issue. This is what's getting a lot of people wondering, am

I going to lose my job? Am I going to have to get a vaccine that I don't want to do? All these things are running through people's minds, and it's causing people anxiety.

Spoke to one couple who hadn't really paid attention to news before all this, just recently starting to pay attention to the news, looking at things politically, and just going,

I fear for my children. The children I have to raise in this time, it's going to be so different than how

I was raised. Part of that is, guess what, bud? The way we were raised is different than the way, you know, our kids were raised.

It's just, that does change. Not maybe to the extent of what we see going on right now.

And we could sit and be in fear of that, but the scriptures tell us to fear the Lord. And I think there's a difference there.

When it comes to fearing the Lord, the best illustration that I've ever thought of, and this came from a friend of mine, he put it this way.

You're walking down the street, bud. You're thinking, maybe you and your bride are walking down, talking about what color to paint the house.

You want to paint the rooms. You disagree. She wants like a hot pink, and you want something that's more toned.

You want just a tan or blue, because I can't picture you in a hot pink room. But you're having a discussion on this, maybe even to a level of argument, or you're discussing your 401k, whatever it might be, your retirement.

And all of a sudden, some guy steps in front of you, puts a gun to you and says, give me your money.

Now, are you afraid? Of being shot? To live is Christ. Yeah, we'll get to that verse.

But no, there's a fear there, right? There is. What happens? Are you worried at this point about what color to paint the house?

No. I got to admit, I probably wouldn't have been beforehand. You wouldn't be thinking about your retirement either, right?

No, not at all. What does that gun end up doing? That fear ends up, because of the gun, you have a fear.

That fear encapsulates your entire thinking. You're completely and utterly consumed right now with that situation.

Anything you were thinking before, gone. You're not thinking about that. You're consumed with what's right in front of you, because that's what fear does.

So fear is not always a bad thing. Fear of this world, as you just mentioned, fear of this world, and worrying about the things of this world, and putting that above the things of Christ, well, that is going to be a bad thing.

Why? Because we're supposed to put our minds on Christ. So fear of the world leads us to the world.

What then becomes the thing that completely encompasses our mind, completely encapsulates everything we're thinking?

The world. What are we going to think of then? The world. But fear of the Lord, then every thought is captive to Christ.

And when every thought is captive to Christ, then the things of the world grow strangely dim. We're not worried about those.

We don't think about that. Now, we do think about it, but we think about it in light of eternity. And that's what we want to do in this episode.

We want to get each of us thinking about eternity, that we would have the fear of the Lord, that all of our anxieties and fears of this world would dissipate for the love of Christ that would so compel us that we would be just in all of our thinking, all that we're doing, thinking of everything in light of Christ.

That's the goal of this episode. I'm going to try not to preach. But you brought up, when we were talking in the pre -show,

Mark chapter 4, which I'm preaching through the book of Mark, and we've talked about this on a previous podcast, maybe

I'll link that in the show notes, when we looked at Mark chapter 5 with Jairus' daughter.

But we talked about some things as we looked through that, and let's bring that up.

Let's start with Jesus walking on water, or sorry, Jesus calming the water.

This is Mark chapter 4, verse 35. Now, there's some areas,

I'm going to dig into this section, and then what I want you to do is give the overview, and it seems weird that you dig deep and then give the overview, but I don't want to dig into all the sections.

I want to just give some things I like about this passage, Mark 4, 35 to 41, and then

I want you to give this overview of how you're viewing the ending of Mark 4 and Mark 5.

But this is interesting, so we see that in Mark 4, they were leaving, they go over, they get into boats, this is verse 36, leaving the crowd, they took along with him, with them into a boat, just as he was with the other boats with him, and verse 37, and there arose a fierce gale wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up.

Now, let's deal with some things here. The Greek for a fierce gale, the gale of winds is like a hurricane, hurricane strength winds.

The word for fierce is mega, huge, it's a super storm, a super hurricane, so much so that the water's coming over the boat.

Now remember, at least four of these disciples are fishermen, they've been used to being at sea, they've been used to being in storms, that would desensitize them, so the fact that they get scared, it tells you this was not a normal storm, it's a super storm, almost like a supernatural storm, so much so that it takes seasoned fishermen and they're scared of it, because verse 38,

Jesus himself was in the stern asleep on a cushion, and they woke and said to him, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

So it tells you, they thought their life was over. Jesus is asleep, they think things are overdone, they are afraid, they're fearing for their lives, and Jesus was asleep.

Now how could Jesus be asleep in a storm like that? Very simple, because he was where God's wanted him to be.

When we look at our life, there are times when it seems like everything's falling apart around us, and yet, for these disciples, being in the center of a storm was exactly where God wanted them.

In other words, it was God's will that they be in the center of a storm. And sometimes, being in the center of a storm is being in the center of God's will.

It was for the disciples here. God doesn't say, I'm going to prevent you from ever having hardships in your life, that I'm going to take care of all the storms.

There's not going to be a storm, disciples. Why? I mean, this is not the word of faith message. The word of faith gospel, where everything's prosperity and comfort, and God wants everything that you want, and comfort for you.

No, this goes counter to the word of faith. This is a message of the

Bible that sometimes being in the will of God means being in the center of a storm. Being in the center in the case of everything around you seeming like it's falling apart.

That may be God's will. The question is not to fight it, but to say, what does God want to teach us through this?

What is it God has for us to learn? And so as we look at this, we end up seeing that Jesus in verse 39, he got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, hush, be still.

And the wind died down, and it became perfectly calm. It's interesting with the

Greek here because the word calm means it was still. But that word perfect is the same word used for fierce, mega.

It was a mega calm. So it went from a mega hurricane to a mega calm. This was a supernatural thing.

Jesus did what couldn't be done within nature. Just take this storm. Now why does it say perfectly calm?

Because what happens when you have the wind pushing on water? Well, you get a wave, and that wave ripples until it breaks and then dissipates.

What it seems to say here is that it just immediately became calm. There was no ripples of the wind from the waves.

They just stopped immediately. And then Jesus, and he said to them, why are you afraid?

How is it that you have no faith? It's very interesting because what you see in verse 41 is they became very much afraid and said to one another, who is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?

They were afraid of the sea, but you know what got them more afraid? They were more afraid of the

God in their boat than the storm that was outside their boat.

This is the reality. Christ encapsulated their thinking. They were completely captivated by what he was saying and what he just did, and they had a different kind of fear, a proper fear.

But they were very much afraid because they just realized, wait, what did we just see? Who is this?

This is God. I mean, this is just such an incredible story for us.

And the Lord, it's just amazing how he does this. Verse 40, just epic.

He said to them, why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith? Notice what he's doing there.

He is recognizing their temporal fear, but directing them, what? To an eternal faith.

Wait a minute. We've got to return to our foundations. You want to conquer fear? What are your foundations?

Well, for the Christian, our foundation is faith in him. And then you see he's transitioned them from that fear of the natural to the fear of God, the fear of deity.

Who is this? It's incredible. It deserves a lot more attention in the church right now.

I'm glad you're doing it. Great, calming assurance for the believer in that text.

So why don't we go over it? The fact that we see here that this helps us to understand a couple things.

One, that sometimes God wants to teach us something through difficulties in our life.

Instead of having anxiety over it, we need to do like the disciples and get our eyes fixed upon Christ.

That gives us a fear of the Lord. But you noticed something when we talked about this, this whole idea of things that people fear, and yet Christ overcomes each one of them in Mark 4 and 5.

So why don't you give that overview? That's the bigger kind of context if you sort of back up from the text and look at what is the

Lord doing here. And it starts in Mark 4 with the calming of the storm in verse 35.

So you've got that little narrative there. And then you go directly into chapter 5 where you've got the

Gerasene demoniac and he heals him, he casts them out. You've got the swine story and they go over the cliff and all of this, and the people are afraid again of what he's done.

And now the townspeople are asking him, leave us, go somewhere else, don't stay here.

But you see him calming the storm at first, which is his power over nature. Then you see him casting out this man with the demons, the legion.

That's his power over the supernatural, over the spiritual realm. And then when you move even further, you get to Mark 5, starting about verse 21, the narrative of the woman with the discharge, which is sickness.

It's disease. And what does he do? He heals that. And then you conclude chapter 5 where he is raising

Jairus' daughter from the dead. So in just this short section of Mark, you see

Christ's power over nature. You see his power over the supernatural. You see his power over sickness and disease.

And you see his power over death. And this is our assurance. This is our comfort.

He has overcome the world. You know, you go to John, and just before that great high priestly prayer, he tells the disciples,

I've said these things to you that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart,

I have overcome the world. Well, Mark has just given us the narrative of these four categories. How can we not have faith that he chided those disciples in the boat?

Ours is an eternal faith that is grounded in the nature, being, and power of Christ, who is

God. We forget our foundations. I was going to suggest, you know, what

Spurgeon had said about, you know, the sovereignty of God is the pillow on which we, you know, go to sleep each night.

This is where our comfort is. We know our God. None of these things can frustrate us.

As long as our perspective is right, and that's the thing, right? So let's look at a perspective.

Let's get an idea of when we speak of this, I think that for many, it's difficult to, you know, for them to realize that, gee, how do

I do this? How do I have this kind of attitude like you're saying?

Well, okay, so let's look at some things. If we could, let's start in the book of Philippians, alright?

So I want to look at Philippians chapter 1 because I think that Paul provides for us a way of viewing this.

And, you know, just so you have the background here, Philippians chapter 1, Paul is, he's in prison.

The gospel is being preached. He is being attacked by folks.

While he's in prison, he's sharing with the whole Roman guard, and yet there's people outside of prison, people that profess the name of Christ, who are in some way speaking ill of him.

Maybe they're saying that, hey, Paul's in prison because he wasn't being used to God. He's on the shelf. God's done with him.

Whatever it is, they were saying some false things, and Paul is going to address that.

And this perspective that he has shows you that, because we're going to look at some things he ends up saying, but the perspective that he ends up having tells us how we have to focus on things.

We focus on what God is doing in this world rather than what we're doing. This is going to fly in the face of people that are trying to build platforms for themselves, build names for themselves.

I was talking to a brother this week, and we were talking about these people who are so fixed on trying to make a name for themselves.

They'll attack other Christians. They'll do whatever to try to get what they want.

You know, they want to get a big church. They want to have a big ministry. They want to have a bunch of followers, so when they say things, people are going to like it.

And they're so focused on the likes and the clicks and the downloads and all that stuff.

I said to this brother, I said, I'd like to take all those people that are the platform builders focused on themselves and building what they're trying to build, their kingdom on earth.

I'd like to take them all and stick them in Afghanistan right now. And their perspective is going to completely change in a heartbeat, because what's going on in Afghanistan right now?

In Afghanistan right now, they're going through house to house. The Taliban is going house to house looking to see if you have a

Bible app on your phone. And if you do, they're taking you for torture or killing.

I was talking with Matt Slick this week, and we're discussing, and maybe we're going to do something together on this, but it's a very interesting question, one to think about.

And we may discuss this either on his show or on my show, but is it a sin to remove the

Bible app from your phone in that situation? Are you denying Christ? If you start removing the

Bible app, what is overriding? Is it the fear? You could say, well, it's just I'm preserving life so that I can continue the gospel.

There's a lot of things to that. But you know what you're not going to be worried about anymore? How many likes do

I have on Facebook or Twitter? How many reposts or how many followers do I have? Do I have enough people supporting and doing it?

Do I have enough clicks and downloads? You're not going to worry about any of that. You're going to worry about am

I denying Christ or standing up for Christ, right? When you know that the

Taliban is going to come, they're coming house to house looking to take Christians, to kill Christians.

They don't want any Christians in their land. And you think it's not going to completely change things.

But this is what Paul ends up saying. So Paul is imprisoned. He's glad because he's saying the whole guard, verse 13, the whole guard is hearing the gospel.

And he's glad about that. And he says that in verse 14 that his imprisonment has encouraged people to speak the word of God without fear.

So him being in prison, he sees this as a good thing because what's happening, even though prison doesn't sound like a good thing, especially back then.

It wasn't the prisons we have today in America. Prison was bad. Well, he sees this and says, but it's good that I'm here because I'm here.

People are emboldened to speak the word of God without fear. You see, he looks at his circumstances.

He's not going, oh, woe is me. He's looking how God is using this in the world, how

God is using this with other believers, how this imprisonment of his is furthering the kingdom of God.

That's what helps him when he says the rest of this. He speaks about these people that are saying things about him.

Verse 15, some to be sure are preaching Christ even from envy and strife, but some from goodwill.

The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am appointed for a defense of the gospel.

The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives, thinking to cause me distress in my imprisonment.

So let's stop there and look. He recognizes that he's got people who are bad -mouthing him, who are saying things about him because they want to hurt him.

They want to use his imprisonment to say things. He probably can't really respond as well.

He can't see him face -to -face. It gives them an opportunity to spread seeds of discord wherever they want, and he's hearing rumor of that, and so he addresses it.

And he may not address it the way you might think. I mean, how are you going to respond when people are sowing seeds of discord about you?

The natural response we want is to defend ourselves, right? We want to be able to defend that.

And he knows that it's out of selfish ambition. He acknowledges that. It's not pure motives.

But what is his mindset? Is his mindset, Oh, Lord, woe is me, these people. I was such a faithful servant of yours.

Look at what I've lost. I was a teacher. Now I'm imprisoned. He doesn't say any of that.

Look at what he says in verse 18. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth,

Christ is proclaimed. And in this I will rejoice. Yes, I will rejoice. You say, wait a minute.

What? That's right. He can rejoice even when people are slandering him.

Why? Because even though they may be slandering him, the gospel is going forth. People are hearing about him.

People are hearing about the gospel. They're hearing about why he's imprisoned. And people are being emboldened to share the gospel.

Is he rejoicing in what they're doing? No. Can we rejoice in what's happening in the world around us?

We say, well, how do you rejoice, Andrew? How do you rejoice when you have a president of the

United States that seems to be just destroying everything? I mean, this guy can't seem to mishandle, or this guy can't mishandle, let me reword that.

This guy mishandles everything. I was trying to say he can't handle anything, but that might seem like more of the same elder abuse that, you know, they're doing to him in the media, like putting him up on camera when he can't get words together.

I'm starting to sound like Biden. He does these interviews and they have to cut out all his things when he couldn't remember things.

Ignorance is the pandemic. Yeah. I mean, this is, we look at this and are there things that we go, wow, this is horrible.

People think that Trump won the election, it was stolen from him, that they pulled off a coup, they're blaming him with it on January 6th.

We could get into all that, but you know what? Like or hate Mike Lindell, I'll at least say this, he has an interesting perspective with all this.

He says, thank God that Biden won. You go, wait, what? How do you thank God that this guy who is so evil and doing everything that's anti -God, how do you thank

God? He says, thank God, because had Biden not won, a lot of people wouldn't have woken up to what's going on.

You look at everything that's gone on. Did they steal an election? They had to do that with over so overwhelming numbers that they had to stop the counts.

And then you get 138 ,000 votes all over Biden. That looks really, really suspicious. Both parties have been cheating in elections for centuries.

I mean, ever since there's been voting, there's been cheating. But never to the level in America, at least, where it was so obvious.

Why was it so obvious? Because it had to be so that they could pull it off. And so you look at this stuff and you go, well, now even the left is starting to wake up.

You look at Afghanistan and even the media is starting to come after Biden. They're doing what no

Republican has been able to do. Wake the masses up to what's going on with the Democrat Party.

He's like, we should be thanking God. He calls it a miracle of God. Now, granted, Mike seems to be very focused on America, you know.

But I do want to point out that there is things we could sit there and take a step back and go, what is God doing through this?

One of the things that we mentioned earlier, God is giving great opportunities to share the gospel. But are we taking advantage of it?

Bud, what do you think? No, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think the principle is there. We have to back up in what we understand both of God, his sovereignty, his real sovereignty, and his providence.

He has a purpose in mind. And Scripture kind of gives us this overall picture of here's what

I'm doing. And we see from its history, the recorded, revealed history of Scripture, it often means things that we don't really like.

We don't like temptation. We don't like trials. We don't like afflictions. We don't like suffering.

But these are the very things that God has used throughout all of scriptural history and since.

To do what? To distinguish the bride of Christ in the world, to glorify and exalt

Christ, and to glorify his own name. This is what he's doing. So in that view, we can thank

God, not for the instances of horror and genocide and all of the sort of thing that we see going on.

But God is at work, and he is distinguishing the true from false, truth from error, because it has created such a climate of fear.

What's the hope? Well, the hope is not for a Christian in a hazmat suit to go out and say,

Jesus loves you and has this wonderful plan for your life. No. Are you kidding me? How hypocritical does that look?

No. The hope is the gospel. Christ has conquered. I have overcome the world.

That's the hope of the gospel, Christ. Yeah, and this is the thing that we have to realize is that in light of what we see going on in the world, the true church is shining.

This is the difference. This is the thing that's going to make all the difference, folks. I mean, when we think about this, yes, we could focus on all these negative things.

This is true. We could do that. But you know what? We can also focus on all the positive. And there's a lot that we have that we can look at and say, this is what

God is doing. Well, you didn't get to it, but I mean, I just don't want to skip it, because this is kind of Paul's summary in Philippians 1 right there.

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. This is critical.

This is the Christian worldview. I want to get there, because there's more to that. Because people read that.

For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. And what most people focus on is the living for Christ.

Notice what he said. Dying is gain. His focus is on death. You doubt me?

Let's read the context. This is how we interpret it in verse 22. But if I am to live on in the flesh, this means fruitful labor for me, and I do not know which to choose.

I am hard pressed in both directions. The word hard pressed here in the Greek is the term used for what they use as the boundary, the guardrails kind of that they set up for when they're going to slaughter cattle.

And it's wide at one end and gets narrow at the other end, and they have the cattle walk through the wide end.

And when it gets stuck, it's wedged in. It can't move to the right or to the left. That's when they would slaughter it. That's the idea of hard pressed.

You're pressed in. You're wedged in. You can't move right or left. You can't move at all to where someone can slit your throat, and you're not going to hurt them or, you know, kick or, you know, ruin any meat.

That's the word he uses. He says, I am hard pressed in both directions.

Where's his desire? Having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better.

Yet to remain on in the flesh is necessary for your sake. Convinced of this, I know

I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy of the faith.

Now, I find this interesting, Bud, because what do you have here? He says he knows God's will.

He's wrong. He thinks he knows God's will. He thinks that I know

I will remain. He didn't remain. He ends up dying. So the reality, though, is what do you see?

He sees what we have in death, okay? Let me skip because I wanted to, you know, chapter 2,

I was going to look at verses 5 where we see the mindset. Well, let me just do it really quick.

I want to get to Colossians because it will fit with what we just said. We end up looking in here. What is this mindset he has?

What's the mindset that Paul, that gives Paul this thinking? What's the mindset that he wants us to have?

Well, he says, Philippians 2, 5, So the same attitude was in Christ.

What's that attitude? Who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a bondservant or slave, and being made in the likeness of men, being found in the appearance of men, and he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.

For this reason, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name.

So the thing is, is that what is he saying? We have so many people. We're just talking about the people that are platform building, trying to make a name for themselves.

What are they doing? It's all about me. It's not about you, right? The focus is on self and building self up.

What did Christ do? Christ left heaven, where all the angels are singing his praises.

There's no sin. There's no sickness. There's no starvation. He left that place to come to earth.

When it says he humbled himself, he humbled himself, it says exactly how? By becoming a man.

He still was deity, but instead of grasping to his deity, instead of sitting there when they go to put him on a cross, he had the power and authority to wipe out all of humanity.

But he doesn't act selfishly like that. He thinks about the greater good, what he's doing, what

God is doing at that moment. That he must go to the cross, because in the cross we have the atonement.

This is why he humbled himself. So instead of looking how he can promote himself and his pride, no, he humbled himself.

And God became a man, even to death, even the death of a cross, to accomplish

God's plan. God knew what he was doing. So we have to have the same attitude, that we would humble ourselves.

We are humans. We're not God who becomes men. We're wretched sinners who have been given eternal life.

We deserved eternity in a lake of fire, and God gave us eternal life. If that thought does not captivate your mind, if that thought doesn't completely get you in awe of who

God is and what he's done, for this one thought is the one thought, the one attitude

Paul had that can get him in a prison, and he can rejoice in the fact that even though people are slandering him, the gospel is going forth.

People are hearing the gospel. People are receiving the gospel. The royal guard is receiving the gospel.

People are being emboldened because he's in prison. How could he have that? How could he have the attitude that he looks forward to death?

Because he has this attitude. He has humbled himself, and he sees Christ. Christ is everything, what

Christ has done for him. He was a wretched sinner, an enemy of God, destined for hell, and God regenerated him, gave him eternal life, and adopted him into his family.

And if you have been converted to Christ, that should be our attitude. This is what gets us through anxiety.

Do you have anxiety with everything going on? Do you have fear? I don't say that there aren't reasons to have fear and anxiety in this world.

There are. But when we let that fear and the anxiety of the things of this world be what our mind thinks on, dwells on all the time, we will constantly be in a spiral downward into darkness.

When we have the light, look to Christ. Look to Christ. Now let me just ask,

Bud, before we go to Colossians 3, if there's anything you want to say about left and Philippians. Amen.

I'd like to say amen. Is there going to be an altar call? If Bud wants to...

Let's flip over to Colossians 3, and I should put an article.

Bud, you have an article somewhere on Striving for Eternity. You have a lengthy article from when you did this whole thing of your

Come Let Us Worship, but you have an article that we then shrunk down into explaining why the name

Striving for Eternity. You have the longer article somewhere.

I will link the shorter one. You see it right here in Colossians 3, 1 -4.

So let me read this and then explain this, because this is what we do as a ministry. This is our focus as a ministry, is this concept right here, what we're talking about today, that we would help you to set your mind on the eternal things and not the temporal things.

Striving for Eternity is not dealing with how we get saved. It's our sanctification. It's having this mindset for eternity.

Let's see what Paul says. Paul says this in Colossians 3, 1. We have to set our mind on the things above and not the things of earth.

That's what it means to strive for eternity. The idea of, and I know this isn't original with Jonathan Edwards, but he's most known for it.

He did research it and he got it from someone else, but the idea of having eternity stamped on the inner parts of your eye.

So when you look in your eyelids, you see eternity. What's the idea there is that everything we do, that eternity captivates us.

So that everything we're doing is with eternity in mind. So the question I would always ask, when things would go wrong, and this has opened up so many opportunities.

When I used to work in the secular field and people would, something would go wrong. I remember my boss, we had this production problem, and she's all worried and freaking out about it.

I'm just sitting there and I said, okay, we'll do this, we'll do that. There were two people that she said never seemed to worry in her group.

She had a lot of anxiety and she caused everyone else to have anxiety. One guy was a guy, he was a consultant.

He worked because he enjoyed working. He started his own consulting company just for himself, but then his wife took that consulting company and made it into a $12 million company.

So if he lost his job, he didn't care. He had no fear. Nothing at work would bother him because if he lost his job, he just went and found another.

He didn't really need to work. So because of that security, he didn't have the fear that she created for everybody else.

But there was something that I would always say, and it's opened up so many opportunities for me to share the gospel with her. Something would go wrong, and I remember this one time,

I said, are we really going to care about this 10 ,000 years from now? Now she was from India, so she's thinking reincarnation.

But she got the point. She goes, well, yeah, I guess in 10 ,000 years, this isn't going to seem like a big deal. With reincarnation, all will be something else.

I said, no, there is no reincarnation. I said, in 10 ,000 years from now, we're either going to be in hell burning forever because we've broken

God's law, or we're going to be with Christ forever because we repented and received the gospel that He, God, became a man, died on a cross as our payment for sin, that we could be set free.

And she looked at me and was like, that's a perspective I've never thought of before. Got an opportunity to share the gospel. But think about that.

Think about the things you have anxiety about this week. Just think through this past week. What were the things that gave you anxiety?

What were the things that gave you fear? What was it you saw in the news that you were worried about? Will it matter 10 ,000 years from now?

No. You know what's going to matter 10 ,000 years from now? What you did with Christ. Were you obedient to Him?

Did you share the message of the gospel with others this week? That's what's going to last for eternity.

What happens in Afghanistan today, that's not going to last. It's not going to matter 10 ,000 years from now. What's going to matter is whether people receive

Christ or not. And so that's the focus. Are we growing in our walk with Christ?

Are we being made more Christ -like? Are we being made more and more in the image of God?

If the answer is yes, then good. If the answer is yes, then keep thinking of the eternal things.

Focus on that. Because that will be the thing that we end up seeing counts for eternity.

And so I encourage you, strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

But anything else you want to add to that? I have another amen. Well, I know that we really didn't want to break up the show.

I wanted this to be something that I hope this is helpful for you. I hope this encourages you.

I hope this, if you have been struggling with anxiety, if you're still struggling, you could reach out to us at info at strivingforeternity .org.

Info at strivingforeternity .org. Let us know. Let us know how you're doing. If this has been helpful, if you're still struggling with things, contact us.

We're here to help you. This is what we do. We disciple, and we want to help you in your walk.

If this has been helpful to you, can you consider sharing it with others? Because there's a lot of people struggling.

We encourage you, if this is the first time you're listening to this podcast, follow the podcast. You can go to the Christian Podcast Community, look at the shows.

We've got like 40 different shows, so there's a lot out there. But go and check out the Rap Report podcast and follow us on whatever podcast app you have.

You can follow us so you can get more of this. We ask you, if you get value out of this, share this with others, because that's how people are going to know about this podcast.

But I want this to be helpful for you. And if it was, let us know, because Bud and I, we don't know unless you contact us.

You can even go, by the way, to Christian Podcast Community, to the show page for the Rap Report, and down at the bottom is a way to contact us.

You can email us right there if you'd rather do it that way. But we want to hear from you. We hope this has been helpful.

Hopefully it's been a little bit challenging. I just hope that this is something that will really help you in your walk with Christ.

And so I'll just reiterate again, to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. 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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