Eschatology Part 6 Revelation 12

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in chapter 12 as we continue our study in eschatology. Guys, I hope that you are taking advantage of all of this.
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I encourage you to be here on Wednesday nights. Last Wednesday, we talked about the prophecies of Daniel and how it related to the
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Mede -Persian Empire and how it related to Greece, and specifically Alexander the Great.
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It is uncanny how accurate Scripture is. As if you will actually read past John 3 .16.
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And again, we're going to endeavor to try to do that today. It's not enough just to simply know the plan of salvation.
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Some people say, well, I'm a pan -millennialist. It will all pan out in the end.
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And all that is cute and cheeky in its word usage. It unfortunately is lazy and apathetic and may find you one day caught unawares and off guard at the impending return of Jesus Christ our
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Lord. I'm going to just do 11 verses this morning. 11 verses.
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And we're going to start in verse 1. And the first 10 verses are going to be looking at a time in history that is shortly coming to pass,
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I believe with all of my heart. In this time, you have to understand in eschatology, like with any doctrine of the
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Word of God, it is not enough to simply read one little passage of Scripture and then to somehow come to a conclusion on that prophecy.
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The allegorical understanding of eschatology is rooted in not just Revelation, but in Genesis and Daniel and Ezekiel and Isaiah.
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In fact, we can go back and learn more about what Revelation is saying, not by Revelation itself, but by the
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Old Testament. And this is one of the key fundamental principles when you come up with doctrine in systematic theology is that you get the entire picture before you come up with a conclusion.
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Here we're going to read in chapter 12, verse 1, once again, an allegorical vision that John has received from God, but it is one that is steeped in rich Old Testament history.
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Read with me if you will. And a great sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and with her head a crown of 12 stars.
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She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains under the agony of giving birth.
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Continue to read with me, please. And another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and on his head seven diadems.
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His tail swept down a third of the stars in heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth so that when she bore her child, he might devour it.
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She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.
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But her child was caught up to God and to His throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God in which she is to be nourished for 1 ,260 days."
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Let's take this verse by verse. Let's first look at this woman. If you go back to Genesis 37, you will see the parallels in what
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John is seeing. This woman is the nation of Israel. And the 12 stars are the 12 tribes of Israel.
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And once again, I'm not just pulling this out of a hat. If you go back through all the way through the
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Old Testament, this is used again and again and again. So any individual who has studied the
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Word of God, this is a no -brainer on who this woman is.
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And of course, the male child we know is Jesus. Yes, Mary gave birth to Christ, but throughout all
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Old Testament prophecy, we are told that Jesus would come from the line of Judah.
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He would come from that tribe and that He would be born in Bethlehem. In Micah 5, verse 2, hundreds of years before Jesus was born, it was prophesied that He would be born in Bethlehem.
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And of course, He was. It says here that this dragon sought to devour the child as soon as He was born.
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Once again, you can read the account of Jesus' earthly ministry.
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And from His birth, even before His birth, He was hunted by Herod and by those evildoers of the work of Satan.
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Yet God protected Him, and Jesus grew into a man and redeemed God's people.
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You see also in this dragon, you see this seven. You see seven and then ten horns.
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Once again, if you've been on Wednesday night, this is a continuation of 4 ,000 years of history.
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When the Bible speaks of horns, it always represents an individual nation or individual person.
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If you go back to Daniel chapter 8, and I encourage you, please read Daniel chapter 8.
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If you know anything of history and you are interested in biblical prophecy, Daniel chapter 8 will just make you go like, awesome, this is unbelievable.
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Because Daniel's vision is given, and God interprets that vision right there.
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It says specifically in Daniel chapter 8 that a horn came out, a conspicuous horn is what it says, and it was quickly devoured the whole earth.
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Yet it died very quickly, and its kingdom was divided into four.
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And of course, it sits there and says, this is Greece. And of course, you know from history, in 30 years,
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Alexander the Great marched out of Macedon, took over Greece, then Persia, then went all the way to the continent of Israel, defeating everyone in his wake, and was never truly defeated, yet he was killed.
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He died, we think, from poison, and he had no male child. He had no heir to his throne, and so his kingdom was divided into fours.
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Now, why am I his four generals? Now, why am I going over all this? Christian today, listen to me.
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Today, I want you to not be entertained by God's Word.
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It's sometimes, we get this speculation. It's kind of like a mystery murder novel, or like CSI or something on TV.
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We have all these little charts, and we sit and think, well, this is this, this is this. If you read God's Word, there is no doubt on who, what is, and where it is, and how it comes, and why does
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God want us to know this? Well, I'm gonna tell you why. Because I believe with all of my heart, there are people alive in this church today, maybe in the children's department, maybe in here, they're gonna see the coming of God.
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They're gonna see the coming of Jesus Christ, and I'm telling you, there is a world coming that I promise you, you do not wanna be a part of apart from Jesus Christ.
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So, here we see this, and it goes through, and it talks about Satan's imminent demise.
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Now, if you read on, if you read on here, starting in verse seven, it says, now a war arose in heaven, and Michael and his angels were fighting against the dragon.
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Notice it wasn't God or Jesus. I love these romantic kind of Crusader type art of the medieval area, where Jesus and Satan are, there ain't no struggle, man.
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It'd be like me fighting, you know, Everly. It ain't gonna be no fight, okay? God's in control.
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He is a spectator by his will. There is no fight. The fight happens from God's creation, fighting
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God's creation. God's not involved. It wouldn't be fair, okay? Here we see
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Michael fighting against Satan, and he prevailed, the angels prevailed.
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Now, you have to understand that at this moment, right now, in heaven, Satan has never been to hell.
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He doesn't rule hell. He doesn't want to go to hell, okay? He doesn't have a red cape with a little tail and horn.
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All of that is superstitious bull. That appears nowhere in scripture. Satan has never been to hell, and he isn't gonna rule hell.
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He's gonna burn in hell and all those that follow him, but Satan has been in heaven.
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We know from the book of Job, which is chronologically the oldest book in the Bible, that Satan goes before God accusing the
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Christians, accusing God's people day and night. Now, I doubt very seriously the name
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Jeff Shipley has ever issued from the lips of Satan, because I'm nothing.
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But I guarantee you, there have been many saints that have gone before that Satan goes and says to Jesus, oh, you think these people love you?
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Look at what he's doing. Look at what she's doing. And so Satan has been doing that since the beginning of time, but there's coming a time when no longer will
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Satan be allowed in heaven. He will be thrown out, and a third of his angels, i .e.
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the demons, will be cast down with him. Now, I want you just to picture the world for a second. We live in a day and time, we live in a day and time where little girls can become little boys and little boys can become little girls.
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By the way, that's not possible for some you Z millennial generation people. It ain't gonna happen, okay?
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It ain't gonna happen. I always laugh when people tell me, oh no, that can really happen. They just dug up 12 revolutionary soldiers in New England that were killed during the
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Saratoga campaign. And you know what's funny? They could tell 11 of them were men and one of them were female, even though they had no flesh on their bodies and no clothes.
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Every part of your DNA absolutely screams the truth and reality of God's word and your feelings have no relevance to it, okay?
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But as they're sitting there and as Satan is thrown down with his demons, he's thrown down,
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I want you to picture just for a second, as bad as this world is right now, the church of Jesus Christ is gonna be taken out of earth and Satan is gonna be thrown down to earth.
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And there are gonna be a lot of people, including some sitting in this room, that have gone to church their whole lives and are good, moral, ethical people that are still gonna be here to deal with that garbage.
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Because you have given your mind to a belief in God that you have never submitted to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
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And you are gonna come face to face with a reality that is outside of anything your little brain can conceive.
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Satan is thrown to the ground. Now, pastor, that's all great eschatology. What do we do about that?
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Well, guys, I believe right now that we are fighting the opening salvos of the end times.
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And I wanna just give you, just in these few quick minutes, I wanna give you God's plan for us standing and having to fight, okay?
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Let's read verse 11 and I'll just spend a few minutes on this. Chapter 12, verse 11 says this.
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And they have, now this is, Satan has accused God's people. And in verse 11, this is what it says, how
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God's people won. It says, and they have conquered him, i .e.
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Satan. They have conquered Satan by the blood of the lamb, by the word of their testimony, and they love not their lives, even unto death.
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I wanna just give you in these three things some things to think about. And I encourage you to write some of the things down because I promise you, if you are a believer and you are living for Jesus Christ, you are under persecution.
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Now, if you are a Christian, but you're not living out your Christian faith, life's probably pretty comfortable for you.
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You can blend in real easy. You can sit and talk about the big boob chick at work and ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
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You can sit there and have that social drink and get drunk, but it's okay because it's acceptable because of the people you're around.
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In other words, you as a Christian go with the flow of the world rather than let the world bash against a soldier of the living
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God. How do I fight that? How do I fight my insecurities and my weaknesses?
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Well, it tells us right here. The first thing you need to understand is this. You overcome the world by the blood of Jesus Christ.
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Listen to what Ephesians 1 .7 says. It says this, "'For we have redemption in Him through His blood, "'the forgiveness of our trespasses "'according to the richness of His grace.'"
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I could preach on this one verse for an hour, but let me just touch just a couple of things for you.
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First of all, you have been redeemed in Him through His blood and your membership in Witten Baptist Church.
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Yes, it is Witten Baptist Church and that all -inspiring sermon by Pastor Jeff that saves you.
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Oh no, wait, I misquoted. It is the waters of baptism. That water that washes away.
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It's not mentioned there. The word baptist, baptism, and church are not mentioned there.
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But the thing is, the only thing that will bring you redemption and a peace of life you are so desperately searching for is the blood of Jesus Christ.
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It is only the blood that can forgive you of your sin, not your moral standing, not your political persuasion, not your declaration that I believe in God, for even the demons believe in God, yet they fear and tremble.
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That's why you have no confidence and you have no peace, for you have a demon -like faith that does not redeem you by the blood of the
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Lamb. Understand this this morning. It is by the blood of Jesus Christ that we are saved.
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Now listen to this next thing. I'm doing a topical study. Please write these verses down.
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I wrote them for you, but if you need to write a couple things down about them, please do. 1 John 1, verse 7.
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Watch this. The blood of the Lamb, it saves us, but it also cleanses us.
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Hey, you people that run around saying, won't save, always saved, stop saying that.
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Start quoting Scripture. It'll last longer in your insecure soul. Listen to 1
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John 1, verse 7. But if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanses us from all but the really, really bad sin.
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All. All of it. All of it.
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Ephesians 1 tells me that I have been created holy and blameless. Now that doesn't mean
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I don't sin. What it means is it don't stick. The causality of that is my own flesh, but the effect on my eternal life is nil because it was imputed to Jesus Christ and His sacrifice on that cross.
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Guys, you're looking at a free man. You're looking at someone who is totally free, and I promise you this, when you wrap your head around that and you stop looking at your failures and start looking at Christ's finished work, your whole life begins to change.
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You start walking around like this a little bit. You don't start walking, you don't, oh, should
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I pray at lunch table? Oh, everybody might see me. Oh my gosh.
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Some of you spineless wimps that take your family, you'll pray in your home, but you won't pray in the restaurant because of what it might look like.
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When you got the blood of Christ and you start feeling that confidence, dude, you'll sit there and say, hey, let's pray, and you'll pray loud so that everybody can hear because you are no longer ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ for you know it is the power of God and the salvation.
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You start walking like you've been to the dance and you've won. You start walking like you actually got a date with the prom queen, you know?
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You actually start walking with a little bit of confidence and that confidence plays into that next part.
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Look at this, the blood of the lamb, it cleanses me, but it finishes me off with a confidence not just here in this world, listen, but a confidence to stand before God.
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You say, oh, how can that be? Hebrews chapter 10, verse 19, therefore, brothers, since we have boldness to enter the sanctuary through the blood of Jesus.
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You see, it starts with the blood of Christ, it ends with the blood of Christ, and faith in that blood is what saves you.
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Guys, I always love, have you ever watched Nightfall? Is it the red one or the blue one?
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Anybody watch Nightfall besides me? Anybody else a history nerd? Oh my God, y 'all are losers.
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Seriously, you've watched it? It's basically, think of the
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Templars and their fight with Louis and the Pope, 1307.
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Yeah, it's really cool, I really enjoy it. And it doesn't have a whole lot of, it's pastor approved in a lot of areas.
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There are a couple areas it gets a little hanky, but anyways, guys, I love that show, I love it.
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And it's amazing, even when princes from other nations came into the courtroom of the king, it was interesting, when they would come to the king, they would come and they would bow, and when they finished talking to the king, even princes could not turn their back.
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They had to walk out because it was disrespectful. When you talk to the king, you had to be on your knees.
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I want you to think about something. As a child of God, like the king's son, it was different.
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When he walked in the room, he could say, hey, dad, what's up? How you doing? Because he belonged there.
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That was his throne being held by his father. I want you to understand something. When I walk before God in my flesh,
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I am always afraid. I'm gonna be honest with you. When I think about God and His holiness and His righteousness and I see my failures,
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I'm always like, oh man, I'm fitting to get it now. But when I look outside of this temporal world, when
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I look past the blue pill and see eternity, the Word of God tells us in Romans that I am a joint heir with Christ.
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Let that sink in for a second. I am a joint heir with Christ. The blessings that God gave
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Christ in His obedient sacrificial death are what I'm inheriting.
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I remember when I was Catholic, I used to hate the idea of heaven. I'll be honest with you, I did.
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Because I thought it was gonna be this. Amazing grace, how sweet the, for 10 ,000 years!
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My ADD won't last that long, man. I can barely get through three songs up here if I'm not focused on God.
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For 10 ,000 years, I'm gonna be in some cosmic choir? Man, that's boring.
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I'm just, I'm being real. Sorry, it is. Oh, I'm so glad it ain't gonna be like that. I'm so glad in the area of heaven that I'm gonna be, there's gonna be dirt bike trails and a shooting range, and there's gonna be a buffet table, and that's what it's gonna be like.
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People always say, how do you know that? Well, Jesus ate when He was resurrected from the dead, the firstborn among many brethren.
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Man, He ate fish by the sea. I'm gonna eat pork chops by the glass sea.
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But my point is, is this. I have a boldness, not because of who I am and because I'm a pastor, because I'm as big a dork as any of y 'all in this room.
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Everyone in this room is on the same level. We are, the difference is you're going to hell, I'm not. Okay, well,
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I shouldn't say all of y 'all are going to hell. All Tennessee fans, you're good to go. The rest of ya, that was a little heretical, wasn't it?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who said, oh my God. I hate you,
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Mike. I love the fans. Guys, listen to me real quick.
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I have a boldness, not based upon my works, but the finished work of Jesus Christ. Now look at this next thing.
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We are saved by the blood of the Lamb. And look, we're saved by the word of our testimony.
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You know why some of y 'all are so weak and you doubt all the time? Because you fold up like a Kmart lawn chair every first temptation that comes against you.
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And you're beaten. And then you never get back up on the horse. And you spend 10, 15, 20, 25 years and pass that same weakness on to your children who grew up and say,
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I ain't gonna go to church, it's full of hypocrites. Well, yeah, idiot, it is. One more ain't gonna matter. Shut up and get in there and go to work.
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Okay? That's why you don't know how to fight. You've never learned how to fight.
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You've never learned. Listen, one of the greatest things I taught my sons was not how to win, but how to lose.
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I set them up to lose. Set them up. They were gonna lose.
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I used to hide wrenches in my back pocket and yell at them, go find me the 916th wrench.
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And they would actually find one and I was like, oh God, that's six point, I need 12 point. Off he goes again.
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I set them up to fail. And the reason why I did that was this. You grow more from failures than you ever will grow from successes.
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You look at your failures though as the end point of your relationship with God. It's not.
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It's in those valleys when you actually grow. When you stop being a Sunday morning Baptist Christian and start becoming a blood -bought warrior of God.
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We got enough people who go to church on Sundays. We don't need anymore of that crap. What we need are men and women of God who will stand up, not for political correctness or not because their party is in fact, you need to stand up for God because it's
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God and then everybody else. Republicans are just as stupid as Democrats and liberals are just as idiots as conservatives.
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I'm sorry if you think your conservative Republican morals are gonna get you to heaven, you're gonna split the gates of hell wide open.
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Listen to me this morning. It ain't that crap that saves you. Your testimony.
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When you start sitting there going, yeah man, this is tough. But you know, remember when?
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I'm gonna share this story with you. I'd been a
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Christian two, three years. I was 22. How old were we when we moved to Wyoming?
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God, I ain't got that much time. All right, I was like 22, 23, somewhere along there.
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We were going to Graham Heights Baptist Church over there in the bush. And when we were over there, my ministry included this.
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This is all I did. I taught martial arts in their little gym to all the little hood kids out there.
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That's what I did. And I was happy, because I'd go to work, I would go over there and teach martial arts, and I would go home.
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That was my entire, I was so comfy, man. I was a new Christian, I was working for the
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Lord, so I could kind of, you know, like, I feel better than all you other losers, so I'm feeling kind of good.
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And I let black people in there, you know? I let the black people in there. And some of the older white folks had a problem with it.
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I stood up and I was like, y 'all are a bunch of racist pigs. If y 'all kicked in, I'm going to, oh no.
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Because we were the only people under the age of 60 that were there, right? So they wanted to keep us.
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So then I stood up morally. So then I felt really good about myself. I was super Christian, man.
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Didn't know nothing. I didn't know who Moses and Noah were, but I was doing something, right?
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Better than the rest of you losers. Got that arrogance going for me a little bit. Guy in Wyoming, bar none
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Wyoming, called and said, dude, I've heard about you from, you need to come up here and be our youth pastor.
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And I was like, yeah, well, I ain't moving to frigging Wyoming. Yeah, no, man, heck no.
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I am not, God, I am not moving to Wyoming. Now my wife this whole time was like,
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I really feel like the Lord is telling, I was like, baby, you may feel what you want, but we are not moving to bar none
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Wyoming. Ain't gonna happen. Not gonna happen. Three months later,
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I was packing the U -Haul to move to bar none
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Wyoming. Drove up there, 24 hours, everything I owned.
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And the deal was this. One of the deacons had a two bedroom little part of his house that his kids used to live in, and that's where we were gonna live.
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And my wife and I, we were like, okay, we're gonna move up there. I ain't got a job. The church was gonna pay me 25 bucks a week.
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Making that big money. So we went up there, I pulled up,
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I went outside, got to the pastor's house, went out, 30 degrees, 30 below zero, three foot of snow on the ground, and I'm hooking my drive train back up, hooking my drive shaft back up in the snow and going, what in God's name am
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I doing here? Right? Gwen comes out and says, honey,
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I always know when something's wrong, because she always goes, I need to talk to you. What's wrong?
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Well, the deacon's daughter's separated from her husband. They all moved back in. We don't have any place to live.
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I asked the pastor, man, what we gonna do here? He goes, I don't know. By the way, men, leaders, never say
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I don't know. Man up. But anyways, I don't know what we're gonna do. So here's what
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I did. I, in the middle of that snow, with the street light shining behind me like some angelic cue,
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I knelt down in that snow and I said, oh Lord of heaven, no, that's not what I did. I walked in there and started using words that I haven't used in 20 years, calling that guy everything but a white man.
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I was sitting there going, I drove for 24 hours, all the way up this
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God forsaken armpit of the United States of America. You people even got trees up here.
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What am I supposed to do? He's like, I don't know. You can sleep in our camper. I got a pregnant wife and two children.
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What am I supposed to do? Now, I want to tell you what my wife said. 21 years old, maybe.
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21 years old, she said, Jeff, calm down. Let's pray about this, the Lord will work it out. Once again,
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I wish I could have said, but here's what I said. All right, babe, here's what you and your little prayer need.
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I ain't got no money. I gotta have this stupid U -Haul in Cheyenne, Wyoming tomorrow.
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So here's what I need. I need a four bedroom house with no money down and I need it by tomorrow at noon.
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You and God work that out and let me know how it goes. The next day, I'll never forget this. I can still feel it on my feet.
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I remember having the two wheeled dolly with the washing machine on it as it rolled over the threshold of my four bedroom house that I paid no money to get into at 11 .30
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and I swear to you, I knelt down in that living room and asked
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God for forgiveness. Let me tell you something. Learning how to lose fights is learning how to grow in maturity.
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Sometimes the greatest battles that we lose are really the greatest ones that we win, bud.
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I'm sitting here now 30 years later sharing with you a word of testimony, not of who
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I am, but what Christ has done in my life. Do you have a word of testimony?
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Does your testimony go all the way back to when you smoked drugs and drank beer and now you're a deacon in the church and gosh, gee, you love
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Jesus? Is that really your testimony, you loser? That's the entirety of your testimony?
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You've been a Christian 32 years, the only thing you could reach back to is when you were converted? What did Jesus do in your life last week?
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Well, nothing. Then something ain't right in your life. You need to overcome this world by the blood of the
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Lamb and the word of your testimony. And the last thing is this, that you love not your life, even unto death.
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I remember I taught my children, all five of them, if you do something good, you should always use we.
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If you do something bad, you always say me. In other words, it's this.
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If you succeed, it's because we all succeeded. If there's a failure, you alone own your part.
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You don't squeal on anybody else. You take responsibility for you. I remember teaching my boys, you don't eat.
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You don't put a bite of food in your mouth until your mother and your sister have eaten first. Don't do it.
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I trained my kids to be last. To think of other people first.
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To think of their family first. And I think it served them well. Unfortunately, some of you 20 -year -olds here today are some of the most self -promoting, self -interested, self, the word self, you make me vomit.
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I'm serious, man. And I don't want to be too mean here. But you turn your traumas into commercials for you.
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Even in your failures, you turn them into self -promotions because you are that self -centric.
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You cannot be a child of God and be that selfish. Look right here.
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And here's what some of you idiots are going to say. Well, you're judging me. Yes, I am. You're an idiot. Stop being an idiot.
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Okay? I am judging you. Go read Matthew 7 and actually read it because it says
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I'm supposed to judge you, dork. It just says I'm not supposed to be doing the same thing you're doing when I do it.
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Guys, I know some of you are not used to this kind of preaching. You're visitors here, and you're probably feeling a little offended right now.
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Let me assuage your soul. You are the idiot I'm talking to. If you're convicted right now or offended, you're the dummy who this sermon is for because your arrogance is going to send you and everyone that follows you straight to hell in a handbasket.
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And your arrogance will not work before a righteous and holy God. You need to repent.
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Not ask Jesus Christ into your heart as your warden savior or whatever crap you did when you were a kid in First Baptist Church.
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You have never repented of your sins, and you feel like you're justifying self -focused ideals of what are going to get you into heaven when we have heard over and over from Genesis to Revelation, it is faith in the blood of Christ that saves you.
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Well, I'm a Christian, but nothing in my life has changed. No, you're a churchgoer. You're not a child of God.
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And I know that's offensive. And I'm not doing this for your entertainment. I am the flag guy on the side of the road waving a flag telling you the bridge is out.
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And all of your skills, your money, your values will not stop you and the momentum and inertia of your life dragging you over the threshold to hell.
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You are not in control. Your control is an illusion of your life. I had a kid actually tell me last week, well,
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I'm going to party now. When I get older, I'll give my life to God. You know how selfish that is?
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Here's what you're saying. Your codependent boyfriend or girlfriend that you are with, you're going to emotionally scar them.
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You're going to scar them and the children that you bring into this world. But then you are going to get your life right with Christ.
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May I say this to you? Why don't you repent now and save the scar tissue? Why don't you repent now?
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You men in here, you visualize the Russians coming through the window and you're going to get your
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AK -47 that you told your wife you just absolutely had to have to defend your family.
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And you got a tie ribbon around your head, go, and you're going to start, you want to go to war for your family.
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You want your wife over in the corner going, I am a man who will fight for my honor.
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You have all these little prepubescent childish visions, but you won't fight for your family now and the stuff that actually matters?
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Love you leading your family sacrificially to the cross of Jesus Christ every day? Repent. And it won't happen by you attending church.
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It'll happen by you repenting of your sins. How do I do that? Stop loving yourself more than you love
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God. In fact, maybe say this, I love
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God so much that I don't love my life anymore. I am willing to die for Christ.
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You know how you win in this world? You die. That's how you win. How do you become a
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Christian? It's not ABC. There's no prayer in the Bible for you becoming a
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Christian, people. I'm sorry so many churches lied to you for decades, but I take no responsibility of their idiocies, okay?
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What I am hearing and telling you now is you have now heard the truth. And some of you in this room are going straight to hell.
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I promise you, you're going straight to hell in a handbasket. And you'll sit there and you'll repress these words back and you'll think about all your little keyboard theology that you look up to prove this is right and this is wrong.
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It's not going to help because there is a reality. This is a dream. This is a dream, guys.
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Reality is being in hell forever with no parole, no time off, no recess, no weekend.
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But it's also being in heaven with no sin, no failure, no breakage,
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God, no cancer. I'm going there. How about you?
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I'm going to ask the little music dudes and dudettes to come up. Listen, for those of you that have never come to, listen, shut your pie hole and listen.
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For those of you that have never known the reality of Jesus Christ, I'm not asking about your church membership.
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Membership is nothing in the Word of God, okay? I'm asking, do you know without a shadow of a doubt that if you died right now, you would go to heaven?
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If you don't have that confidence, you need to make that right today. Number two, if you don't have a church home, now let me explain to you what church is for real quick.
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Listen, I promise I'm almost done. Listen, take an Adderall and listen. If you're in this room and you have been to church, but nobody was all up in your business telling you you're being an idiot, you need to stop, or good job, keep going, you've never been to a church, okay?
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You've never been to a church. You see, church is built for accountability, for help, and for blessings.
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If I didn't have my church, I have six different people and or groups that I'm accountable to.
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They'll ask me, Pastor, have you looked at porn this week? No. Are you lying to me? No. Give me your computer.
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It's heinous, man. I'm the pastor of the church. How dare you question me? If I didn't have that, guess where I'd be?
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www .hotmississippilonghairedredneckhicks .com. Sorry, I got. I'm sorry,
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Mike. Millennialcooldudeswithhatswithstickersonthem .com.
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Hvac .com, baby. You need people in your business, guys.
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You do. Seriously, some of y 'all are bored. You're looking away. You're who
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I'm talking to. You need an accountability group. You need, and chicks need chicks, dudes need dudes, okay?
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If not, you're never gonna grow. You're never gonna grow. You're like, well, I'm embarrassed for people to know.
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Dude, we have gay people in here. We got people who, you name it, we got at least one of them, okay?
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We got at least, I got more white trash in here so there ain't nothing that you can come up with that I guarantee you some of them hadn't done in here, okay?
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I got a chick with blue hair. What else do I need, right? She ran, her face ran into a tackle box.
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I promise you, I promise you there ain't nothing you've done that someone else, but when we share with each other, when we share with each other, what we've come to realize is this.
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The stench of our sin is not as great as the grace of God. That's when you start learning.
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You start realizing that you're not crazy and you're not alone. When you break down that church little bull thing of, oh,
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I'm glad, glad to meet you, God bless you, God bless you, I'll pray for you. When you get rid of all that garbage, you start living authentically in reality with a group of people that's something bigger than yourself that selfishness dies, that fear dies and you start running in a herd and you start feeling a little bit of confidence.
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That's what church is, man. It ain't a stupid building. If you're not a member of a church, come join this one.
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Be ready to go to work, but come join this one. Third thing, last thing, listen, if you're going to hell, come up here.
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If you ain't a member of a church, you need one, come up here. But number three is this. Man, if you just need someone to pray with you, because you're not really sure where you're at and you're trying to figure it out, do me a favor.
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Just come up here and let someone pray with you. I don't care if you're a queer. I don't care whether you're, what's another bad, a drunk.
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God, I got drunks all over the place. I don't care if you struggle with drugs. Mikey, how long has it been?
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Thanks, Mike, for that authentic and genuine. Well, what do you expect?
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It hadn't been so long, I can't remember. Hey, guys, listen, I don't care where you're at. I don't care where you're at.
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You just need someone to love on you and pray with you. Come up here and let's pray, right? If you're afraid to confess
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Christ before men, Christ will not confess you before his father. Hey, listen to me, man. Let's do some work here today.
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If you are a born -again Christian, don't sit in your padded seat or look at the stupid screen and sing some stupid song that you're not even thinking of, but you're worrying about what you're gonna cook for dinner because you didn't get the ground beef out of the fridge.
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Okay, let all that crap go. Let all that crap go and go and start ministering to someone in this room.
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Guys, let's stand up and go to work. Let's be the church. If God has spoken to you today, you come as God leads.