After Commitment the next step you need to take with Jesus

Welcome to episode 284.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I want to continue on my talk about commitment, and I told you, I had a little tease in the previous episode, that I was going to talk about one thing that we need to do that's going to change or correct the thing that we've got going on. And I want to be specific here as I can on a podcast. And this one thing, once we have commitment locked down, we have got to get commitment down then it goes to clarity. Then we got to have some form of clarity. How we then going to get these spiritual truths cleared up? And the one thing that we have got to do, and this is a soapbox moment, and I know most of you probably already know this if you're a frequent flyer to this podcast, but we have to be in the Word of God. And I want to encourage you to be daily into the Word of God. And when you get into the Word of God, we've got to talk to the Holy Spirit and ask the Holy Spirit, What is it that you want me to understand about this lesson or this specific verse? And most of the people that I talk to, they just randomly pick up the Bible, if they pick up their Bible, they randomly pick up or they start in a chapter or they start in a book and they just start reading without any clear reason to read. And I believe that we need to start looking at this spiritual weapon that we have, which is the Word of God, It is the sword of the Spirit. It is the most powerful thing that you hold in your hand and the most powerful seed that you can plant into your heart. And we've gotta start planting this seed into our heart and pulling up all of the weeds that the world is throwing into us. And we've got to make a commitment. I've told you multiple times that there's power in a made-up mind. And that's why I'm on episode 284. And that's not to pat myself on the back, because I'm nothing special. Everybody who knows me knows that I'm just a regular guy. I don't do anything different, probably, than most of you do in a day. I go to work, I do what I'm supposed to do in my career and my job. But I think what separates me from other people is I put an importance on the Word of God. And I want to encourage you as best I can to start getting into the Word of God. And I don't know how else to say this on the podcast, but since we've been talking about this commitment thing, I just want you to mentally commit, hey, I'm gonna do this thing. Why not? Why not put the Word of God at the forefront of your life? Why not be number one? People say all the time, hey, God is number one, God is first, or I put God first in my life. And God's probably sitting up in heaven looking at Jesus at his right hand saying, really? Does Greg Ryan put me first? Have you noticed that, Jesus, that Greg puts me first? I just want you— God doesn't miss anything. Nothing catches God off guard. But I also want to remind you that God is love. God's not trying to condemn you. God's not mad at you. God just wants you in a personal, long-lasting, forever relationship with himself. He loves you so much that he sent his only son to go die for you and I and to bring us back into his family. I'm jumping up and down this episode. I know you probably, if you're a frequent flyer, I know if you're a fanatic, you're kind of cueing the eye roll because you've heard this multiple times. If you're new to this episode or you're just new to this podcast, I want to encourage you that we get in the Bible. We use the Bible as food. It's the bread of life. We use the Bible as seed. It's the incorruptible seed. We use the Bible as a weapon. We can destroy the works of the enemy. And I just want you to think about all of the things that we can do with the Bible. But the one thing that I really want to stress on this episode is that we build a relationship with God. We build a relationship by showing God, hey, I'm going to put some time in this. And I'm not talking about 30 minutes or an hour. I mean, just if you're not picking the Bible up Pick it up for 5 minutes. Just say, "God, hey, I'm sorry. Change your mind on this." Or the fancy-pants Christian word repentance is simply just change your mind. I want to give the Bible some time, some effort, and I'm going to start with 5 minutes. I'm going to start every day, 5 minutes. If you don't have 5 minutes to give to God, God's going to cue the eye roll. He knows what you do with your day. He knows that you've got a Netflix account or an Amazon account, or you watch TV, or you listen to this podcast. He knows that you've got 5 minutes where you can dedicate every day to spending time with him. That's all he wants. Because if you've ever been around somebody, you spend a lot of time— my wife and I spend a lot of time together. My wife and I can finish each other's sentences and thoughts. It's nothing special. It's just because we have spent all this time together and we're creatures of habit. We keep saying the same thing. And so most of the times she'll cue the eye roll and all this stuff you're hearing from me for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, pray for my wife because she's got to listen to me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week when she's here. Thank God she's got a job, she's probably saying. When Mona and I are together, we're just together. We're just regular people. And that's the one thing that I just want to encourage you that I'm nobody special. I'm telling you, I am just an ordinary guy who is following after a perfect and extraordinary God. And I just want to encourage you, I don't know what else to do, but we have to make sure that God has been separated from all this other garbage. We got to separate him from the world. And the world, what they're looking for If you ever look on Google or if you do Facebook or all these other things like search engine stuff, every one of these categories— health, wealth, and relationships— those are huge categories online. Everybody is concerned about their health or wealth or their relationship. One of those three categories is gonna pretty much catch everybody in one of those three buckets. And I just wanna encourage you, I think that that's okay. God's okay with all of that. God made you for a specific purpose and he knows that we have the issues and we have needs that we have to take care of and health and wealth and relationship are critical in our surviving here and thriving, but we have to, and I'm telling you, we have got to get the spirit realm down. Dialed in. And we can't put it on the same plane as these other things. We can't put our finances, we can't put our career, we can't put our family and our friends and our social and our recreation and our health and our weight loss and our— any of that, you name it. You can't put, or you shouldn't ought to put, all of those things on the same level. And I think it's a totally different sphere. And I've talked about this before. We have got a spirit realm and a physical realm. Satan wants to pull you into— we can't separate the spirit realm from the physical realm, then we're playing in Satan's backyard. He has got us. And that's why I believe most of the church is suffering through the same thing the world is suffering through. If you've ever wondered why there's the same amount or more divorce. One reason is there's probably more Christians trying to get married than non-Christians. Most non-Christians maybe don't even get married. They just live together or have kids out of wedlock, so they, they don't put a big price on marriage. But the divorce rate is similar, Christians and non-Christians, and bankruptcy rates and unemployment. All of these things are real similar. What's the difference? Before I was a Christian, I struggled with looking at other Christians and going, "Why would I want that? Why would I want to get up early Sunday morning when I can sleep in or I can go play golf or I can do something fun and I don't have to sit my butt in church?" So I just want you to think about we have got to be separate and apart And that doesn't mean that we just follow a bunch of stinking rules. And that was the other thing that I've always thought before I was saved, that I always thought, hey, it's just a bunch of can'ts. You can't do this, you can't do that, you should not do that, and don't hang out with those people, and don't do this and don't do that. And when Jesus was here, Jesus was considered a winebibber and he hung out with sinners. So they were calling him names. All these religious folks were saying, look, this guy is a drunk and all he does is hang out with sinners. So God couldn't even get it right in this world, and he wasn't trying to get it right. God was trying to show love one to another. It is love God, it's love people, and it's to hate evil. And I just don't think we hate enough evil. We're trying to love God and then we get mad at his people. And I'm guilty of this just like you probably are, that I'll get mad and I'm driving and I go, oh my gosh. But we've got to settle down. We've got to love God. We've got to love people. And we've got to hate evil. And we— this is why we're here. We're going to figure this thing out. But we need to separate the spirit realm from the physical realm. And I think, and I say this very rarely, But I believe through some of the teachings from my pastor and some of the studies that I've had in the Bible, I believe that I have found how to do that. And that's the wheel in the middle of the wheel, and we're going to talk about that again in the next episode. I just looked up and saw that it's going a little bit long, and you know I'm trying to get this thing down 8 to 10 minutes. You may not know that, but I'm trying to get it more concise and locked down so that we can get in and get out and get the thought that we can walk around during the day or till the next episode or to the week over the weekend. So we've got something to chew on, and I don't want to give you too much of a mouthful. Let's just stop it there. We're going to talk about the wheel in the middle of the wheel, and we're going to talk about the spiritual animal, what kind of spiritual animal you are. We're going to go back to that. We're going to go back to the kingdom of God. There's a lot of things we're going to revisit, but we're going to put a different spin on it, and we're going to try to turn this thing to where we can start kicking the crap out of Satan you and I, and we're going to just do this with the Word of God. Let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for your Word. Jesus, thank you for coming. Thank you for being the Word. And Holy Spirit, thank you for never leaving us nor forsaking us. God, I pray that whatever's going on with this listener or with this watcher, I pray that you would just embrace them, show them that you— that they are your favorite. And God, I thank you. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.