Don't Quit Yet! | Kingdom

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Welcome back to the Kingdom Podcast, where we are seeking first kingdom of God. Finding out what that means, looking at all of scripture and finding our hope there.

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I'm your host, Jon Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Also the host of Theocast, which is this podcast is a part of that ministry.

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You can go to theocast .org to learn more about it. There's a free ebook there on rest. There's a community called the

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Theocast Community, where there's over 800 people who are talking about life and sharing books and prayer requests and talking about reformed theology.

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You can go there, learn more about that as well. Last week we talked about, I quit. I know it was pretty dramatic, but I could feel it that last week, and even though it's a few seconds later for me,

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I want to pick up where I left off, thinking through how do you go from quitting to being excited about life every day, not because of the successes you are feeling, not because of the progress of your life, but because you believe in who

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Christ is and what he's doing. Jesus was calling his disciples away from tragedy, away from sure failure, away from self -slavery, into a life that the world would mock, but it would give us unspeakable joy and a significance of life that cannot be compared.

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It's incomparable. But the only way for you to do this, the only way for us to experience this, is to take his words and actually apply them to your life, where you stop trying to find the easy way out and the road to pleasure, and you embrace the title of living sacrifice and that to real life is death, to die is gain, for me to live as Christ and to die is gain.

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We walk around every day realizing that my life will find its significance and I will discover joy by what

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I give away, but not by what I keep or what I get. That's how these disciples lived, not perfectly, as we will read their

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New Testament epistles, but they ended up dying in many ways with joy because they understood what they were living for.

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Most of us want to quit because we've been living for ourselves. We believe the lies of the world through its media and through people around us.

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We see what they have, we see what they wear, the smile on their face, the advertisement of their satisfaction.

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We think that's living, but it's not. It's slowly dying. The Bible tells us to live is to live for Christ.

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That's where real joy is found. No greater joy than this, than what? That you love one another.

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Jesus even says, my joy, John 15, my joy will be in you and your joy will be full. That's the work of the king, that we seek first the kingdom and the way in which it's done is to be sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others, our time, our money, our energy.

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Our work, our jobs are just a beans to an end. They're just a way to make money so that I can keep doing the work of the kingdom.

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Church becomes the priority of our life. Why? Because that's what the king says it is.

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He says that's where the means of grace are. That's how he gets his work done. That's how he trains us, how he encourages us, and he builds us up.

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But at times, because the church is even centered around self -improvement and how am

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I doing and is God happy with me, instead of us trusting in his words that there's nothing that will separate us from the love of God and that he is the one doing the good work in us and that all of our hope and rest is not found in our performance but in his performance, the church becomes a place of refuge for the self -righteous, not for the sick and the weary.

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For those who want to have their ego stroked and to beat their own chest because of how well they've done, that's what church becomes for many.

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It's exhausting for people like us. We don't want to be there. We show up and we're weak and we're frail and we're tired and we're exhausted and we want to quit.

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But when we're met by other gracious people who wrap their arms around us and they sing to us the hope of the gospel and they speak to us the hope of the words of our king and they remind us that we are not in this world to be praised by men, but we are in this world to show others the praise of the king, now that's refreshing and that allows us to go from I want to quit to I can do this one more day because my life is no longer about me.

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That's the hardest thing about the Christian life is to get out of the way. It's just to get out of the way. How do I get out of the way of this?

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So hard. Well, for the next few moments, I'm going to speak to people and some of you are going to write me off and you're going to go on to another podcast, that's fine.

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But if I can just get one or two of you to hear what I'm saying and to take you out of the pits of despair and put you in the joy of your king and that you will be able to suffer the greatest loss that you could possibly imagine in this world, but yet know there is a significance for your life.

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What I'm about to tell you will not remove pain, sorrow, or death, but it will give you the capacity to go through that, through pain, sorrow, and death, with dignity and hope, and more importantly, with a purpose behind all three of those.

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Because God has not left us here to fend for ourselves or figure it out. He gave us a book and he says everything you need for life and godliness,

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I've already given you. Everything. This is 1 Peter chapter 1. Everything you need.

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And 2 Peter, he says it twice, to a church that is being persecuted because of Rome, these false gods that they worship, they believed are true and are true, we'll get to that later.

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They were killing off Christians because they would not turn away from the one true

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God and turn to their gods. They were being brutally tortured.

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Peter writes to them and says, everything that you need for this life has been given to you. Do not waste your energy trying to earn

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God's love and favor, dear child, you have it. You see, we as Christians, we're not dealing with suffering as they would have.

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We spend all of our energy self -righteously trying to promote ourselves. Look how well we have done. Well, those who are trying to survive death because of their faith, they don't have time to be self -righteous.

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They don't have time. This is why Peter says, don't worry, dear child. For those of you that are going to suffer for your faith, just keep your eyes on him.

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He'll give you the strength, he'll give you the hope, he'll give you—because they have already lost everything. And to them,

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Christ becomes everything. Because without him, as Peter says, where will we go? You have the words of life.

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What's interesting about the Christian faith is that we want it to be physical, we want to be able to grab hold of it and do with it as we please because of our flesh.

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But we are told that the Christian life is lived by faith, believing in something you cannot see and something you cannot touch, and believing in a book that is thousands of years old.

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But this book does not call you to live by faith blindly. This is not a blind faith.

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For those of you that feel like you want to quit and at times Christianity seems so far -fetched because it's blind, it's not blind, let me tell you a story.

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Everything you believe in history that to be true has come to you by eyewitnesses. If you believe that Nero or Napoleon or George Washington are real human beings, the only reason you know that to be true is because someone saw them, wrote it down, and it was copied over time, and over time you have the opportunity to read it in a history book or a biography.

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That is true. This is how we accept what they have accomplished, what they did, what they look like.

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This is true of the men who watched Jesus walk with them for three years, watched him do miracles, then die and rise from the grave.

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They documented it, and it wasn't a lie that they all collaborated on so that we could have something to believe in.

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Men are not tortured to death for lies. They eventually are going to give up for a myth. But these men were tortured, and those who taught underneath them were tortured to death.

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We have the eyewitness accounts, not only of the New, but the Old Testament. You're not called to a blind faith, you're called to a faith that has been proven to you.

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A book that has been examined and believed, and thousands of people have been tortured because they saw the truth.

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We hold it today, standing in the line of hundreds of thousands of believers before us who by the eyewitnesses said,

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I saw the man, I know it to be true, he is God. And if that is the truth, then everything else in that book is true, that there are demonic beings, there are spiritual powers that are at war with us that want to stop the book from circulating.

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They want to stop the truth from circulating. They will twist, they will mold, they will manipulate, and they will kill and destroy.

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As Jesus says, the evil one has come to steal from you your joy, to kill away anything that would remotely look like hope, and ultimately destroy

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Christianity. But he can't do it. Why? Because he who is greater, he who is in you is greater than he that is in the world.

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So in many ways, I want to show you the door, the wardrobe opening up into the kingdom of like Narnia.

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And I want you to walk through it and just say, just if possible, that the real world is not one that you feel with your flesh, with your eyes, and you see it with your eyes, but the real world is one that you see with your faith, that you look to the pages of your

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Bible and it tells you that the king is sitting on the throne, even though you can't see it, you know that it's true because they saw the king who was on the earth and he told them of the kingdom that is coming.

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That there are real angels and there's a real hope and a real God who hears your prayers and that he moves based upon your prayers and that people go from death to life, no hope to eternal life because you speak words to them.

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You open up your mouth and start speaking words and all of a sudden what's called the gospel comes out of your mouth and people go from death to life.

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You can support those who are on the front line of proclaiming the gospel by praying for them, by giving them money, by being there to support them and uplift them.

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You may not be the one who heralds it, but you're a part of the kingdom. You see, the Christian life becomes more valuable than anything else that we could ever imagine because it has nothing to do with how you look, how you feel, what your bottom line is, whether you have cancer or not, what gender you are, what your background, matters not.

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The king commissions all of his children and he does not qualify who those are.

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As a matter of fact, he says it's going to be the weak and the frail and those who are belittled and looked down upon.

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That's what we need to learn more of. We need to be filling our hearts more and more about this kingdom that we live in, the kingdom of heaven, where our king is.

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We need to learn more about the warfare that happens when Paul says you're not wrestling against the person that's persecuting you.

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You're not wrestling against flesh and blood. It's the power behind them. There are actual powers, actual gods and spirits at war.

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This is why Paul says beware of the doctrine of demons. First John says test the spirits to see what – you are in a real war.

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This is why at times we want to quit because the war is getting the best of us. And the tactics they use, they use our flesh against us.

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In order to put our flesh to bed and put it away, we need more of the Spirit, which means we need more preaching and teaching of Christ in our hearts and our minds.

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If you really are exhausted and you want to quit, maybe, just maybe, you've been looking at life through the eyes of your flesh and not the eyes of the

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Spirit. But what if you believe that there really were angels and demons and gods?

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There were real principalities and powers and they are at war and they're going to lose and they know they're going to lose.

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That's why they're chaotically trying to suppress you and discourage you. So your discouragement is their victory.

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You wanting to quit is them winning. But we're not going to let them win. Why? Because Christ said, there's nothing that will separate your love from me.

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Even your discouragement, even your depression, even your anxiety cannot separate you from the love of God. Why?

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Because he chose to put it on you before the world began. And you'll be able to go to the next person who is depressed, who is enslaved, who is confused and without the truth and be able to hold their hand and say, do you know there is a world beyond this world and there is a hope beyond this flesh and there is a

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God who will save you. Can I tell you about him? See, that gives us purpose for life.

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Our jobs and our relationships, all of that, the different places that God has put it in, they're all just opportunities for us.

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They're opportunities. Seek first the kingdom of God literally means don't let the physical world get in play in front of the spiritual one.

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Because what we hope for in the spiritual realm will become sight. The one we put our faith into, which is

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Jesus at the right hand of the Father, will become sight. We will see him as he is and we will become like him, 1

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John tells us. It's exciting to think about. So as we continue to walk through this journey,

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I want to peel back the physical layers of our Bibles. And I want us to start thinking about the spiritual realm that is there, because that's the only way you can make sense of this life and not want to quit.

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Because there's nothing in this physical realm that is powerful enough to keep you going when you start to experience suffering and death.

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When your children and your family members and you start thinking about what's going on in this world, it's horrible.

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But when you realize it's one because Christ wins and you're on the winning side, and if you look past the physical and look into the spiritual, where the hope of the gospel remains, you can wake up tomorrow morning and say,

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I'm not going to go off of what I see and what I feel. I'm going to go off of what I hear, which is the gospel truth.

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What I know to be true, written in his word, and for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of people have believed before me and have successfully been a part of this kingdom work.

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And I too will be a part of that army until God takes me home. We're going to continue this conversation again next week.