Truths I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me (Part 4)

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How to Remain a Spiritual Pygmy (Part 5)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. Mike Abendroth, your host again.
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We are talking today about topics that are biblical and topics that are provocative. I think maybe the liner says biblical, always biblical, or still controversial, or—I don't know, you just heard it,
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I never hear it, I only hear this part that I tape. And what I would say is I'm after provocative, mentally provocative, spiritually provocative, more than I am controversial.
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In different ages and eras and epochs, things like this become more controversial or less controversial depending on the flavor of Christianity in the particular country, but I'm not after controversy.
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I'd rather avoid controversy. I like to just live my life quietly with my wife and kids, but when you speak the truth, it's going to act like a lightning rod, and it doesn't take some savant to figure out that when you talk about the truth, things happen.
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And so I've been doing a series, I thought I was just going to wrap it up last week, but I wanted to talk about a topic that hits near and dear to home, and that is things that I wish people would have told me when
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I was an unbeliever. Things that I wish people would have told me when I was an unbeliever. Truths that I wish someone would have said, listen, you're going to go off the cliff, and if you don't repent, what's on the other side of the cliff is horrible.
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Things like it's not just enough to believe in the facts. That was the first one.
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Religion, in and of itself, cannot save, religiosity cannot save anyone.
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There's no religious amount, there's no amount of religious things you could do to get any sin away from your account.
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I talked about things like everybody believes in God. There are no atheists, really, there are no agnostics, really.
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If you read Romans chapter 1, you will find out people try to deny there's a
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God by their deeds of unrighteousness, suppressing, holding under, kind of like when you used to hold your brother or sister underwater in the pool.
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That's what people do. They try to hold the truths of God underwater. They suppress them, they push them down, they try to get them out of their sight, minds, thoughts, and they don't want to realize there's a
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God, because if you're in the middle of sin and you realize you have to pay for that sin in hell for eternity, it kind of ruins the fun.
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Sin is enjoyable many times, but only for a season, and so if you can suppress that eternal resurrection out of your mind and just be a practical
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Sadducee, then it's a lot easier just to live with yourself and with your sin.
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And I also talked about how God requires sinless perfection to get into heaven.
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Sinless perfection. And the only way you can get sinless perfection is to have Christ's perfect, sinless life of obedience imputed to your account.
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God will accept you as righteous by virtue only of Christ's substitutionary obedience.
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And then, of course, our life of sin is imputed to Christ's account, imputed to Christ's account, and he bears the curse of the law in our place.
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2 Corinthians 5, he made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
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Galatians 3 .13, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
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And lastly, Romans 5 .18, so then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.
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And so we are going to continue in this series what I wish people would have told me before I was a
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Christian. So if you're not a Christian and you're listening today, that you would listen to these words and I could use them to provoke you and to stir you and to maybe make you mad enough to pick up your own
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Bible, maybe to make you convicted enough that you'll cry out to God for mercy. And so I don't want you to be ignorant to the things that I was ignorant of.
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They still were true even though I didn't know about them, even though I might have disagreed with them as an unbeliever,
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I did not get saved from my sin and saved from God's wrath until 1989 when
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I was 29 years old, and I really wasn't looking for any kind of spiritual epiphany, or I wasn't looking for some kind of religiosity.
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I knew in the back of my mind once I got married and had kids, religion might be a good thing for the family,
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Christian religion, of course, but I wasn't really looking for some kind of Savior.
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I didn't really think my sin was that bad. And so if you're a Christian today and you're listening, you might be reminded of what to talk to people about when it comes to evangelism, discussions, religious discussions, philosophical discussions, and things that you need to be reminded of as well.
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And if you're a Christian, you should know these things, maybe not as in detail as I might give them, although this will be a quick show, but you need to know certain things about what the
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Bible teaches. Actually, you need to know everything that the Bible teaches, but I'm just trying to summarize a few of these. The sixth thing
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I wish someone would have told me when I was an unbeliever is that free will is a myth.
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Free will is a myth. That is to say, if you're an unbeliever, you are not the captain of your own ship.
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You are not the captain of your own destiny. God controls your destiny.
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You are not free from the world system. You are actually a slave to the world system.
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The world system influences your mind and will and emotions. Just a simple commercial with good lighting and some music can influence you.
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You are not free from your own sin if you're an unbeliever. Romans chapter 6 says that you're a slave to sin, and if you think there's freedom in being a slave, you don't understand the
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Civil War and you don't understand what it was like to be a slave back in the Roman system either. And you are not free from Satan's will and power if you're an unbeliever.
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Second Timothy chapter 2, I don't know how anybody can believe in the free will of an unbeliever by reading this verse and this verse alone.
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This verse should destroy any kind of free will that the believer, unbeliever thinks that he or she has, and it should destroy free will in the minds of a believer when he thinks, the believer thinks, unbelievers have free will.
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Oh, you know, got to leave it up to their free will. Well, left to their own free will, they are going to be doomed.
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Here's the verse, Second Timothy 2 .26, and they may come to their senses, talking about unbelievers, and escape from the snare of the devil.
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So unbelievers do not have spiritual sense, and they are captive and they're enslaved to the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him,
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Satan, to do his, Satan's will. And so they're doing Satan's will. They think they are free and get to do what they want, and they are autonomous, and they answer to no one, but they're doing
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Satan's will. They don't even understand that. And so the unbeliever's will is free to do whatever that unbelieving will's nature will allow.
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An unbeliever's nature is a corrupt nature, a depraved nature, a sinful nature, and so he freely, or she freely, can make decisions in accordance with their nature.
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And so they freely sin, that's true, but they can never freely decide on their own without external influence,
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I think I'll follow Christ Jesus. The only one that can give them that is God by changing their nature.
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See, you can't save yourself. Salvation by definition is the work of another.
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Someone else saves you. This is not auto -pistos, self -faith, this is not auto -savior either, self -savior, no.
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Salvation is something done to you. You are passive when it comes to redemption. Salvation is what
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God does for you and to you, not what you do for God, because,
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A, the Bible teaches it, that God is the Savior, that salvation is in God's hand, but it's also, from the human perspective, humanly impossible to believe.
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It's not just hard to believe, it's impossible to believe. Just like a camel can't go through the eye of a needle, a needle and thread kind of needle, you can't believe on your own.
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It is impossible. And that's why Jesus says in John 3, 3, Truly, truly,
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I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
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And so birth is the mode of our entrance into this world, into this universe, and spiritual rebirth is what is needed.
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And you don't bury yourself the first time out of your mother's womb. I've seen quite a few births in my life, and I've never seen a baby crawl out on their own.
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It's something that is done to you, you are passive. And so when the unbeliever has a will that is tied to his or her depraved nature, there is no manifest destiny, there's no being in charge, because you're a slave, a slave to the world, a slave to your own sin, a slave to Satan, and certainly you are not free from God's working power.
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And if God wants to have mercy on you, or have compassion on you, there's nothing you can do about it, because he can change your nature if he would like.
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And so I wish I would have understood as an unbeliever that I did not hold destiny in my hand.
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I did not hold salvation in my hand. I always thought, you know, I'll just die before I wake up,
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I'll just believe right before I die, I'll just kind of do whatever I want, at the very end I'll pull the cord for the escape hatch and I'm in good shape.
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The problem with that kind of thinking is, it's first of all defaming God now,
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I'll just keep blaspheming God to the very end and then he'll save me, somehow presuming on the grace of God.
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But the tragic flaw with this kind of thinking is that you actually have the ability to do it. You need to be able to cry out to God for years maybe, for 18 months like John Bunyan, Lord have mercy upon me a sinner,
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I can't save myself, I can't repent of my own power, I'm enslaved to these sins and I can't get out, my fingers, my spiritual fingers are stuck in a
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Chinese finger puzzle, and I cannot get out, somebody else is going to have to cut these things to let me get out.
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George Whitefield said, Man is nothing, he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him to do and to will his good pleasure,
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George Whitefield. And so if you believe you have a free will as an unbeliever, then you might postpone this agonizing cry for deliverance, this request that would say to God, God help me, save me, give me faith,
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I don't want to go to hell, it's not in my heart now to worship Christ and to Jesus, but change my heart.
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Spurgeon said, I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ, my hope lies in another quarter,
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I hope that my master will lay hold of some of them and say, you are mine and you shall be mine,
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I claim you for myself. Spurgeon says, my hope arises from the freeness of grace and not from the freedom of the will.
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If you're an unbeliever today, or if you're a Christian today wanting to help unbelievers, you need to teach them about this, so these unbelievers are forced to throw themselves the mercy of the court, at the tribunal of the gracious, merciful
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God. You cannot have in your mind, well, I'll settle accounts with God just before I die.
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You are not in charge and you need to be justified as a gift by his grace.
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Free grace, free sovereign grace, free distinguishing sovereign grace, that's what you need, this undeserved gift, this forgiveness that comes only from God, the verdict that says,
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I accept you based on the work of another. You can't decide to turn that on and to turn that off.
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Salvation, Jonah 2 .9, is from the Lord, whether that's temporal salvation back then in Jonah or now even eternal spiritual salvation.
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Salvation is not up to you, because if it was, you would choose the lake of fire every single time, because by nature you are children of wrath,
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Ephesians 2 .3. You are not sovereign. You cast no votes for heaven.
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Your vote will always be no. This whole illustration that you vote yes for heaven, Satan votes, you know,
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God votes yes, Satan votes no, you cast a deciding ballot. If that's the way things work, nobody's a
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Christian. Nobody ever will be a Christian, nobody ever has been a Christian, because, why?
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You always vote no. Satan always votes no. Thankfully, this is not a democracy.
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When God votes yes, the Father, Son, and the Spirit always vote the same, and when they vote yes, this one great
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God Yahweh then saves, in spite of sin, in spite of Satan, in spite of the world, in spite of the person and what they do.
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You are saved not by anything that you can will or do. So it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs,
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Romans 9 .16, but on God who has mercy. You must believe in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, that is true. But you, if you do, you are not born of blood, nor the will of flesh, nor the will of man, but of God.
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It is through the exercising of His will, God the Father's will, God the
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Son's will, God the Spirit's will, James 1 .18, that He brought us forth by the word of truth.
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Jesus said, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day,
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John 6 .44. So if you are listening today and you're not a
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Christian, today's the day to cry out to God for mercy, for salvation, for redemption, for reconciliation.
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You have a personal relationship with God today, but it's not a friend, it's not of an adopted child, it's of an archenemy.
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And so today is the day of your salvation. The seventh thing that I wish someone would have told me before I was saved, because I think the
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Lord would have used it in my life, although I understand how things are all set up now in God's providence, but these are important truths for people now, is that belief has an object.
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Belief, faith, has an object. You see, in our society, it's just faith.
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Oh, I'm spiritual. And people say, well, you know, I just have a lot of faith.
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His faith got him through. Well, faith always has an object, and that object is not faith.
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You can't have faith and faith. Oh, I have faith and faith. No, that object is
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Christ Jesus. Jesus alone. And that object of your faith that you must believe in, he calls for submission, obedience.
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The faith's object is the Lord, boss, sovereign, master, king.
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If you have faith in him, then in light of what he's done for sinners, you follow him.
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Listen to John 3 .16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
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Verse 18, he who believes in him is not judged. He who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed, does it stop there?
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Because he hasn't believed. He has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son, the name, all his attributes, who he is, his essence, his divine nature, his human nature, all that the
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Son of God is, you've got to believe in him, his power, his wisdom, his might, his kindness, his goodness, his faithfulness, his sinlessness, his substitutionary atonement, his virgin birth, who he is.
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Acts 16 .31 says, And they said, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.
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Believe in, believe the Greek is epi, where you rest yourself upon the object,
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Christ Jesus, not just with your intellect, but with your emotion and your will.
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To believe means to be, according to Vine's dictionary, to believe, also to be persuaded of and hence to place confidence in, to trust signifies in this sense of the word, reliance upon, not mere credence.
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And so you have an object, and that, when you have an object of your faith, Christ Jesus, you rest in him, you rest upon him, you trust him, and you are certain that what he says is true, what he has done is valid, what he has promised for the future will come about.
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When you receive Christ Jesus, when you believe on the Lord, you are not just having faith in faith, you're not just being spiritual like people talk about today.
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Here's this Jesus that you believe in, the Lord Jesus, and if he's the Lord Jesus, then he's the
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Lord, not just of your destiny, but you, but you. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.
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Do you believe this, Jesus said in John 11? John 12. He who believes in me does not believe in me, but in him who sent me.
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So it's not just faith in Christ, but it's the Father as well. John 14, let your heart not be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.
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See, each one of these has the belief in an object, God himself. So if you're listening today, and you say your faith is strong, and you just have a good faith, and you're a spiritual person, and your faith has really gotten you through, if your faith is not in the object,
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Christ Jesus, you're trusting in something that's a vapor, you're trusting in something that's not true, it's made up, it's a shell game with no balls underneath the shells.
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You cannot do it, it's empty set, null, void, your faith has to have an object. Problem is, the object of the
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Christian faith, his name is Jesus, and when he calls somebody, he calls them to follow him.
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And so people want to follow themselves, they want to follow their friends, they want to follow the crowd, they want to follow the Celtics, it is following Christ Jesus.
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Jesus said to them, follow me and I'll make you fishers of men. Jesus said to him, follow me and allow the dead to bury their own dead.
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He saw a man called Matthew sitting in his tax office and he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him.
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He does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Then Jesus said to his disciples, if anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.
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Jesus said to him, if you wish to be complete, go sell your possessions and give to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven and come follow me.
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That's just in the book of Matthew. How about the book of John? Found Philip and Jesus said to him, follow me.
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My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. If anyone serves me, let him follow me and where I am, there shall my servant also be.
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If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him. Now when he had said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify
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God and when he had spoken this, Jesus said to him, follow me. Jesus said to him, if I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you?
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You follow me. And so the problem with you, if you're just having faith in faith or faith in spirituality or faith in something else, faith in money, faith in mortgage payments, faith in something else, you don't see the mandatory nature of faith that has to have an object,
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Christ Jesus. The beauty you must see in the object of your faith, the preciousness, the value of Jesus Christ and his death.
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And when you have faith in an object, Jesus Christ, that's real, your life will be transformed.
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Your life will be different. You will become like the one you have faith in. Oh, not perfectly.
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You won't be Jesus Christ. You're not some kind of divine being, but you will have a work done in your heart where you'll start to really know the changes with new friends, new appetites, spiritually, new desires, new wishes, new longings, new hankerings for.
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You will be different. You will change. Your eternal destiny will change. Your relationship to God will change.
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Your friends will change. Your life will change. Your nature will change. Everything about you is different.
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Problem is, people don't want to necessarily do that. They don't want hell, but they don't want to follow
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Christ Jesus. And so I don't think there are any masochists in hell, as John Gershwin would say.
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They don't like the pain, but they still won't give homage to Christ Jesus because it's not in their nature. So now
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I'm asking you, I'm begging you, I'm saying to you, if you're listening today on WVNE, would you throw down your arms and run to the
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King who offers clemency to the traitors like you, to the war criminals like you, to those that have gone
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AWOL like you? There's an offer from the King. Lay down your arms and bow to the
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Son. Psalm 2 says, kiss the Son, lest you perish. So today's the day. He didn't just turn on the station randomly.
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This is not some kind of, well, I'll just flip around and see what it is. Here's a divine call from you.
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If you're hearing this, one thing's for sure, I know that it is God's will for you to hear this message.
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And you ought to lay down your arms, repent from your sins, repent of your sins, and have an object of your faith,
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Christ Jesus, the one who really saves, the one who really was sinless, so he could save other people.
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He didn't have to die for his own sins. He didn't have any. The wages of sin is death, and so I don't want you to eternally die.
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You will physically die, and then eternal death, separated from God's love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness.
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I don't want that. I want you to look to the only Son, Christ Jesus, and believe in him.
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He is the object of your faith, not some kind of psychology Jesus, not some kind of Roman Catholic Jesus, not some kind of liberal
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Episcopalian Jesus, but the Jesus from the Bible. For that matter, not a Bible Church's Jesus, or a
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Baptist Jesus, or a Muslim Jesus, the Jesus found in the Scripture. So why don't you take your
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Bibles and open to Mark, and read them. Read those 16 chapters about that Jesus, and you'll look at that Jesus and say,
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I'm impressed. There's no one like Jesus. He's unbelievable. The way he knows things, how he speaks, what he does, there's nobody that I've ever seen, heard of, or met that's like this
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Jesus who claims that he is God. He's equal with God. He comes from the
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Father. He's ascended to heaven because he's come down from heaven. And he knows the way of salvation, and he says there's nobody else.
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Don't give your glory to anyone else, is the motto of the Godhead.
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We won't give our glory to anyone else. So you glorify God today by bowing your knee and believing in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. I wish someone would have told me that. If you're a Christian, why don't you go tell someone that?
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Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.