Bible Study Lessons- God is Not Mad at You and a look at Psalm 119

Welcome to episode 21. Let's get started in the Gospel of John 1:1.

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.

I'm going to jump right in and talk about again the pillars. Every show that I do, or episode, or whatever you want to call this, is going to be based on at least one of these three pillars. It's going to be on the foundation, it's going to be on the filter that you filter your, you know, your world through, and it's going to be on the follow-through. And I want to encourage you to just kind of dig in, but the, the number one filter and the number one, the number one pillar, and you could even say it's the foundation, so it's really not a pillar more, it's more of what we lay the whole thing on, is the Word of God. And so that is the, the entire reason that I'm here is to encourage, inspire, and empower you to use the Word. And the Word is so complex And I know I have no real business to even be talking about. I'm no theologian, but I have dug into this, and over the last 28 years, God has changed me. And that's what I want. I just want to encourage you that if you'll let the Word of God do its work and you let the Holy Spirit— you talk to the Holy Spirit every day and you ask him, Holy Spirit, you made, you wrote this book, and ask him, what do you want me to find out about this word today? What is it that you want? And so what I wanted to do is just, I want to encourage you. I, I I just want to get on here and actually want to take action because the Bible also in James 1:22, it says to be a doer of the word and not a hearer only. So I want to, I want to encourage you with my testimony. Again, I got to remind you that Revelation 12:11 is my absolute favorite scripture, and they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. I absolutely love Revelation 12:11, and it happens to be in the Word. So as you dig in, and you'll find a scripture that, that's your favorite. But I want to talk about right now, I want to talk about Psalm 119, because that Psalm is incredible. It is a— it's the longest Psalm in the Book of Psalms, but it is all about the Word. It's all about statutes. It all, it all just points back to the Word of God and how important the Word of God is. But it is also a poem. I'm trying to speak to you in the best English that I can, but this, this, uh, isn't— this psalm is an alphabetic, and I think it's a caustic. We're just going to call it a specific kind of poem, but it's, it's separated into, into 22 stanzas. Each one of these couplets in each stanza begins with the same letter. So in stanza 1, they take the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and every couplet begins with the first letter. And then in stanza 2, they take the second letter, and each couplet has the— it begins with the second letter, and so on and so on. So there's 22 couplets, has 8 couplets. And I know I was told never to do math in public, but you've got 22 stanzas, and you got in each stanza, you've got 8 couplets. And each stanza has a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So each couplet begins with a different letter. No, that's not right. There's 22 stanzas, and none of that's really important. I just wanted to kind of give you an idea how cool this psalm was while you're reading it, and it seems to repeat itself. And I was thinking, before I knew all of this, it was like, wow, they could have said this in a lot shorter Psalm. But the Psalm itself is poetry, and it just— what I wanted to do is, is get you to think about that someone took the time— I think this was King David— but took the time to write this poem and make all of these letters and all of these stanzas and couplets and all of that stuff flow together. And it is a wonderful, wonderful Psalm. If you're digging into the Word of God. And I want to real quickly give you a couple of verses out of Psalm 119. And the first one's in Psalm 119:11: "Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you." And then the second one is in Psalm 119:105: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." Again, this psalm gives you practical application, and it kind of gives the the psalmist kind of gives glory to God and his word. I wanna encourage you to go read that. It's worth the effort, it's worth the time, and it's one of my foundational pillar. It's about the word of God. So, you know, as I'm trying to get you to fall in love with the word, if you wanna spend time with Jesus, spend time in the word. That's the best way, in my opinion, to spend time with God. But another one of my sayings You know, I tell you all the time that, you know, God's not mad at you. You know, he's not even a little bit upset, and he loves you so much. If God had a refrigerator in heaven, your picture would be all over it. Well, you know, some of those things, you know, it's kind of, you may think, oh, that's kind of cute, or that's kind of nice. But, you know, if we're gonna base this on the word of God, I wanna give you some scripture that I wanna back this up with. And the first scripture is very familiar. To you, I'm certain, is John 3:16 and 17. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. Now that is incredible love. I mean, God is not mad. He wouldn't say— if he was mad at you He wouldn't have sent Jesus. And then we go to Romans 5:28, but God demonstrated his love toward us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Again, he demonstrated it. God doesn't just talk about loving you, he shows you how much he loves you. He sent his only son, the perfect son, the perfect representation of God and his family was Jesus, and he sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death so you and I could have the gift of salvation and eternal life. It's that simple. I mean, that is the good news. That is the gospel, that, that Jesus died a death for us. He lived a life we couldn't live, and he died a death so that we could live. God is so good. He loves you so much. And again, you are his favorite. He sent Jesus just for you. If you're listening to this, I want to encourage you that God loves you. He is not mad at you. He don't have his arms folded in heaven waiting for you to mess up. God has got his arms wide open and says, take my son. I'm, I'm begging you, please. It is a free gift. Just accept him as your Lord and Savior, and you can be here with me forever. That is the good news. That is a— I don't know that that's a pillar. It's all part of the word. But I am probably speaking mostly to Christians, and I just want to encourage again. I'm here to encourage, inspire, and empower you. You have, you have made the right choice if you've chose Jesus. I mean, I do a horrible job of representing Jesus on a day-to-day basis. I mean, I try to do good. But, you know, I'm just a guy. I can't help it. I'm not perfect. But my job is to reflect God's love, and I try to do that as best I can. But Jesus, if you'll dig into the Bible, Jesus and the Holy Spirit does a wonderful job. My job is to encourage you to open up the book if you have questions, listen to kind of how my take on it, but then go in and ask God for yourself because He's going to speak to you if you're one of his sheep. The, the shepherd says that my sheep hear my voice, and that is such a comforting thing to know that God will speak to you individually. But you have to kind of dig into his word. That's the best place to start. Part of my favorite scripture is my testimony. So that's why, I mean, I'm getting on here and turning this mic on and talking to this microphone like I'm talking to you. And I believe it was in episode 13 or 14, it was back, it was back a while back, maybe a week or so. I talked about the toothache that I had and how it was just driving me crazy and how I was using my faith to combat it and the stripes and all of that. But you know, and I haven't talked about it again, and it's really basically because I forgot about it because it doesn't hurt anymore. You know, you kind of put that, put that away if it goes away. But when I was telling you about it in a previous episode, I hadn't taken any aspirin or Advil or anything like that, but it had, it had gone away and it's, it's fine now. I don't know what the problem was, but I'm here to tell you that that is no longer an issue. My tooth is fine and I want to officially go on the record as saying it's healed. Now I don't know what was wrong with it because I didn't go to the dentist to find out, but all I know is is it was hurting and now it's not hurting. I wasn't able to chew on it, I wasn't able to blink, and now I'm able to do both. So I just want to praise God. I want to thank him for his word, and I want to give my testimony to encourage you. I mean, you don't have to know what you're doing, you just kind of got to go. My, my pastor used to tell me, you know, I don't understand electricity, but I just refuse to sit in the dark till I figure it out. I just flip the light switch. And that's kind of how I live my life. Look, I I don't have all this figured out, and I hope you don't think I do, but I, I refuse just to sit in the dark. I open up his word and I start digging into the word of God, and I start trying to figure it out with the help of the Holy Spirit. He said he'd never leave us nor forsake us, so he's right there all the time.

Just ask.

Well, that's enough. In the next episode, I want to talk about sin and what sin is and what sin looks like, because I don't know if you knew it or not, but I wrote the book on it. After 29 years of living in sin and not knowing God from a billy goat, I think I bring a different perspective and the kind of the way I look at things. I, I wrote a book on kind of how I see sin, and, and I hope— I think it helps kind of to get a picture of it. And so in that, in the next episode, I'll talk about kind of briefly what I've figured out or what I think it is, and maybe it'll help, maybe it'll just confuse you. But I just want to thank you again for being a part of this episode and being a part of my life, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode. One more thing before you go: if you've ever struggled with the Great Commission and witnessing for Jesus, 1211 Apparel is here to help. 12/11 Apparel, the most powerful clothing line in the world because it's based on the Bible and gives glory to God. Jesus gave his followers a great commission before he left, and that great commission includes you and me. But if you have ever struggled with sharing Jesus, 12/11 Apparel created Prayer Wear and Share to help. It's a free training on how to fulfill Jesus' promise of light and easy, found in Matthew 11:28-30. Since 1211 Apparel is Bible-based, they start out with giving first. Give and it will come back to you. This is not a theory, it's the truth. 1211 Apparel wants to give you access to unlimited Christian tracts and free training to help you get off the pew and into the battle for the souls of your friends and family. Use our special link NoDoubtOnlyBelieve.com/battle to get started today.

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