Answer to the question are you a sinner saved by grace or a saint Part 2

Welcome to episode 167.

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.

Welcome to episode 167. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I want to follow up on my last episode, and we talked about the difference between are you a sinner saved by grace or are you a saint of God. And the reason I think this is an important topic and one that I'm just going to dive in one more episode on is because the things that we say to ourselves and the things that we truly believe, it shapes who we are. I've talked to a lot of believers that see themselves as a sinner saved by grace, you know, and I'm thinking of a specific friend of mine that he sees himself as a sinner saved by grace. It's more than semantics, because if you see yourself as a sinner, a sinner sins, and that means that you could just constantly miss the mark, and you're constantly— every step you're taking, you're screwing up, or you're getting ready to screw up, or you're waiting to screw up. And I just don't think that's the way it is. I believe that you and I, if we have been saved, our spirit man is 100% just like Jesus. I believe that, and I think that I can back it up with scripture. But what I want you to see yourself as is a saint of God, and it's your spirit man that has been changed. And that's what gives us the ability to say Hey, we're a saint, or we have been translated into the kingdom. You know, it is not of this world. Jesus prayed for his disciples and said, you know, they— we're leaving them in this world, but they're not of this world. Which means to me, and we— when we go to heaven, and that's our goal ultimately, is to go and hear, well done, my good and faithful servant. But the whole point of going through this life is to gather in other people. And to show people you do not have to be perfect to enter in, but you also don't have to be a worm, and you don't have to dig around in the dirt of life all day every day. You know, Jesus said when his disciples came in and he washed their feet, and Peter said, well, if you're going to wash my feet— and let's go to that real quick. And if you've been here before, you know that I love the Apostle Peter because he just speaks his mind, and he would just— again, I've said he takes one foot out just so he could put his other foot in. But he, he says what's on his mind, and I think the other disciples were thinking it, but Jesus was going to wash their feet. And let's go to 13:8, because Peter started talking, and at first he wasn't going to have no part of it. And Peter said to him, you shall never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, if I do not wash you, you have no part with me. Simon Peter said to him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus said to him, he who is bathed needs only to wash his feet but is completely clean, and you are clean. But not all of you, for he knew who would betray him. Thereafter he said, not all of you are clean. And I don't know if I told you what verse and chapter— that's John chapter 13, 8 through 11. But I wanted to just talk on this for a minute. Peter said, you know, I wash my whole body. If I got to be all that, I'm all in. And Jesus told him, you know, you're clean, but not all of you is clean. Not all of you. He was talking about Judas Iscariot when he's talking about not every one of you are clean. But he was telling Peter, you know, you've had a bath, but you are walking in this dirty, nasty world out there and your feet are getting dirty. So you're going to have to clean your feet. And that's, I think, an analogy or maybe even a parable, but it's what's going on. I think as our spirit man is perfectly clean, but our body is never going to line up with our spirit. But your mind, will, and emotion, your soul, because it's dragging around in this world we're living in, and there's some nasty, gnarly stuff going on in this world, you've got to clean your feet. And I believe Jesus was teaching because they had sandals and their feet were always dirty, and they had bowls there at the doors when someone walked into the house because their feet were nasty. I want to pull this analogy to where if you are clean on the inside and you are a saint of God, the only thing you really have to do is just occasionally repent from messing up, you know, because we all have sinned and we're always going to mess up. But not— we don't go out looking for trouble, we don't go out looking to sin. It just kind of finds us sometimes and we go, God, I wish I wouldn't have done that. So in the saints' tool chest is repentance. And you just say, God, I am sorry, you know, I've screwed up. At least this is what I do. And I said, man, I am so sorry, Lord, you know, I don't know why I said that, I don't know why I went off on a tangent, or I don't know why I got angry, but forgive me, Lord. And then we just kind of— that's kind of like washing our feet. But I'm still a saint of God. I'm still trying and going after God as my standard. Now, this is an imperfect man following after a perfect example. And I think that's where we get kind of jacked up, is we go, oh no, we know— I know I'm— and I know, I'm telling you, I can tell you flat out that I don't do everything correctly. I don't always do everything straight by the Bible, and I don't always react perfectly when someone slaps me upside the head. I don't always turn the other cheek. So when I know I mess up, I just ask for forgiveness. And I've gotten into a habit of that. And I don't ask for forgiveness so that I, you know, I know I'm going to make heaven. I believe that I am saved. I believe that I have been redeemed. I believe that I'm making heaven. And this right here is just me washing my feet. Again, I know I repeat myself a lot, but we have 3 enemies. It's your body, your flesh. It is Satan, the punk, and it's the world system. And this world system, if you watch the news, heck, if you watch the Olympics, or if you watch anything that's going on right now, anything on TV, you're going to see a commercial probably that makes you go, uh, you know. And so you're, you're constantly seeing crap in this world. And I know I'm probably not supposed to say crap, but I just say it. You constantly going through things and you are trying to do the right thing, and you're not always doing the right thing because we can't— you and I can't stay in the Bible all day and all night, and we wouldn't do anybody any good if we did. We've got to get out there and be amongst the people, and we've got to love on people, and we've got to mess up. And they can maybe say— I mean, you know, the goal is not to mess up, but if you do mess up, you're like, well, I screwed up. And I think that's how we learn. I think I learn more, a lot more from my mistakes than I ever learned from my successes. And I want to go on record to say in this business, in this podcast, in all this other stuff that I'm doing, I'm learning an awful lot because I make a lot of mistakes, but I'm learning. And I just adjust the course. And that's what I think as you and I as believers, that's our goal is that when we make a mistake or when we ask God, he's gonna be a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. He's gonna light the correct thing, but when we take a misstep, he just, hey, hey, come over here. And you just, if you're in constant contact with the Holy Spirit, and he will, I think he'll just nudge you back. You know, you don't have to throw your hands up and quit following God 'cause something didn't happen, because remember, it's difficult and it's narrow is the gate. We're not, no one promised us this was gonna be easy, so we're not looking for easy. But we're not going after the hard either. We just know that things are going to happen in our life and we're just going to have to get after it. And then the next episode, I'm going to talk about something that Jesus said, and I may have talked about this before, but it is mouth-opening when you see what he talks about to his disciples. And many of them walked away. You have got to trust in the word of God. You have got to get in to know the truth. And you've got to know that you are a saint, and it's not just semantics. You are a saint of God. And when you walk through this life, you don't have to walk through the life apologizing. A sinner doesn't come boldly into the throne room of grace. A sinner stands outside and waits to be invited in. God told us that we could come boldly into his throne, into his presence, and that is the Truth, that is a promise from God the Father. We, before Jesus died, we had no entry. If we walked into the Holy of Holies, we would drop dead immediately. In fact, there was a— when David was moving the Ark of the Covenant back, he put it on a cart and it bobbled, and one of the men that was David assigned to watch the Ark of the Covenant he saw the, the cart bobble and he put his hand up on it and it— and God dropped him dead. And it was because David was out of order. David was so excited he messed up. And David— I love David, King David— but David was kind of ready, fire, aim too. And he didn't research, hey, how is the proper way of carrying the ark? And if he'd have done that he'd have seen that you got to put the ark on wood poles and have the Levites carry them up, carry the ark on the, on his shoulder with wood poles. David was so fired up he found the Ark of the Covenant and wanted to take it back to Jerusalem that he threw it on a cart and it hit a pothole on the road and it kind of fell over. And this guy thought that he was, you know, the ark was going to fall over, so he put his hand on the ark and God dropped him like a bad habit., and it is an amazing story. Let me give you that scripture. That story is found in 2 Samuel 6, and I want to pick it up in verse 6. And when they came to Nacon's threshing floor, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the ox stumbled. Then the anger of the Lord was aroused against Uzzah, and God struck him there for his error. And he died there by the ark of God. And David became angry because of the Lord's outbreak against Uzzah, and called the name of the place Perez-uzzah to this day. David was afraid of the Lord that day, and he said, how can the ark of the Lord come to me? Now I want to remind you, David was a man after God's own heart, and David made this mistake because he didn't research proper Ark etiquette. And so when Uzzah put his hand up, Uzzah thought, oh my gosh, you can't have the Ark falling. Well, it should have never been on a new cart. If you go back a few verses, that's David put it on a new cart and had oxen pulling it. It should not have been done that way. And God had a specific standard and a specific way. And this is Old Testament, by the way, and there's a difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. I just want to show you that, that God means business. And if you were a sinner and you try walking into the Holy of Holies, or you try to get in the presence of God as a sinner and bust in boldly before God, God's going to drop you like a bad habit. But if you are humble, if you humble yourself and you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, the rules have been changed for the New Testament. We have been reconciled because of what Jesus did and what we've accepted. We have been reconciled to God, and that's God's whole purpose. His whole modus operandi of this Bible, it's a love story. It's about God loving his creation, it's separating from him, and then his plan of redemption to bring us back into right standing. And that is what I'm talking about. We are in right standing with God if we've accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We are a saint of God. We are a child of the King. Jesus is the King of Kings. You are a king, and Jesus kingdom, and it's not of this world, it is of another world. And that's where we're going at the rapture, or at the end of this age. But that's another rabbit that I'm not going to chase. Let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for the person listening to this episode. I pray if they've accepted you as their Lord and Savior, I pray that they would see themselves forevermore as a saint. And Lord, what the things that that means in their soul and in their mind, will, and emotion, and in their spirit man, that they have the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead living on the inside of them, and they will learn how to use it. That's what— that's our job as disciples. That's our job as saints, is to figure this thing out. And the only way we can do that, Lord, is by your word and with your spirit. Lord, we thank you for never leaving us nor forsaking us, and we thank you, Holy Spirit, for leading us into all truth. God, we 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 on the next episode.

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