Climbing Gods Mountain Stop Three Growing Part 2

Welcome to episode 149.

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 149. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to continue to talk about growing in the body of Christ, and we got to go to one of our favorite scriptures, Matthew 6:33: But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. If you listen to episode 148, you know that we talked about finding your spiritual animal. We talked about finding your place in the body of Christ. But now we got to start talking about growing in the body of Christ. And to do that, we have to understand what God's ways are. We introduced the kingdom of God in the foundation, and that is a foundational truth. And I think that's why it's so important to understand Matthew 6:33, the kingdom of God and his righteousness, that we, that we seek those, that first. So that's one of the first things that we need to learn about. And so now this is the time to start learning about it. This is where we start growing. This is where we start planting the word of God into our heart. We're going to go to Mark 4:26, and he said, the kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow. He himself does not know how, for the earth yields crops by itself— first the blade, then the head, after that the full grain in the head. But when the grain ripens, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. I taught for weeks, I think 2 or 3 weeks, on the kingdom of God, and we're going to link to that in this, in the show notes. But I want you to remember, or if you did not listen to that, I want you to hear the things that we are to do. We are to plant and we are to harvest. I don't understand electricity, but I refuse to sit in the dark till I figure it out. We do not have to figure out exactly all the inner workings of the kingdom of God. We can kind of, if we want to get a picture of it, we can kind of get a picture of it, but our job as believers is to plant the seed and then to harvest it when it comes to fruition. The Bible is pretty clear. What we do is we just sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow He himself does not know how. So that right there in black and white— actually, it's in red in my Bible— but in red, in the words of God himself, we do not have to understand everything to enter into the kingdom of God. In fact, the only thing we have to do to enter into the kingdom of God is plant God's seed. Think we need to water it, we need to nurture, and that's part of the kingdom. Parable of the sower of the seed, which is different to the than the parable of growing— the growing seed. The parable of the sower— remember, Jesus said to his disciples, do you not understand this parable? How will you understand all of the parables? We have to understand the parable of the sower of the seed because we need to start getting all the rocks out of our soil. The soil is our heart. We need to get our heart prepared. We need to get it ready. Again, we've talked about this on a previous episode on the Kingdom of God episodes and lessons. But we need to get our heart prepared. Once we have it prepared and once we have it ready, then we plant the seed of God. And that is where we take a seed, we take the incorruptible seed of the Word of God, and we plant it into our heart. We just put it in there, and if we got our soil right, for the earth yields crop by itself. Now I want you to substitute, and I'm taking a little liberty here, but I want you to substitute the earth and I want to put in your heart, because we're talking about spiritual seed and it's not planted in the earth. Your spiritual seed is planted in your heart. And if we've done the work, we've done the heavy lifting in the foundational stage where we're pulling all those rocks out of our heart, and we've got all the weeds and everything, we've got our, we've got our heart soil as good as we can get, we've humbled ourselves, we've done all those things. Again, this is the Bible. There is so much to this Christian walk, and there's so much to this word of God. We are to get our hearts right. Once we put that word into our hearts, once we take— seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you— once we plant that seed in our heart, then we just cover it up, and then we go about our business. We keep watering that seed, we keep thinking about it, we keep meditating on it, and and we keep doing that for, I think, about 30 days. They say 21 days is a habit. I think it's more like 23 to 25. I'm gonna teach that we're gonna do it for 30 days, and that's gonna be the first seed that we plant. I think that's gonna be my first, quote, official product, is gonna be 30 Days to the Kingdom of God. And that we are gonna take that one scripture, Matthew 6:33, we're gonna plant it, and then we're gonna water it every day. We're gonna think about it, we're gonna meditate it, we're gonna talk about it for, for about 5 or 10 minutes. I think it's going to be kind of a devotional on steroids. It's going to be a walk with you, kind of a guide you through this, how I do it. When I plant that incorruptible seed, when I put that into my heart, then what do I— then I start reading the Bible, then I start finding other scriptures that'll help water that seed. Now I'm not going to dig that seed up, and I'm not going to sit there and look at it. We're going to plant it in our heart. We're not going to know how it's growing. It's going in our heart, and then we're just gonna meditate on it. We're gonna say that scripture in the morning and at night, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things," and we're gonna do that, and that's gonna be how we grow this kingdom. We're gonna talk to the Holy Spirit, and we're gonna grow in the grace and the truth, and we're just gonna leave it there, and we're just gonna by faith expect that seed to grow because our heart is right, our heart is clear. And so that seed, it's got to— by the word of God, we don't know, need to know how, we just know it's going to grow. And it's— we're going to learn about— and then the next step in this growing is we're going to have to find out about our spirit, soul, and body. Those were three parts. We've talked about this a lot. Of this maybe is some refresher course stuff, but spirit, soul, and body, it's important to know what we're growing. Our spirit man is 100% just like God, but we're growing the seed in our heart, which I believe is our soul, our mind, will, and emotion. So we're growing this so that we have something to go on. We're fighting our flesh. Our flesh is never gonna be in line with the word of God. We're always gonna, that's one of our three enemies is our flesh. Now we don't have to cut ourselves and we don't have to hate our flesh. That's not what it's talking about. Our five senses, our human carnal nature, is in enmity with God. It is never going to be one with God, so we're not going to pretend that it's ever going to be one with God. But our spirit man is with God and it's one with God, and our flesh is not. So the thing that we're fighting for, the battle is for our mind, will, and emotion. And that's where we plant in our heart that Word of God. And then when we grow it, then we don't have to fight so hard against our flesh because we have the Word of God that's grown up in us. Mind, will, and emotion goes, oh yeah, Well, I know this is true, and oh yeah, I know this. I can walk in this truth because I've already planted it, and I've got something. I've got fruit that's growing. Since I'm just introducing the mountain of God to you right now and our journey up the mountain and what each stop represents, I want to— I don't want to spend too much time here, but we're going to spend a lot of time at the kingdom of God, and we're going to spend— probably going to spend a lot of time at each stop at the mountain because there's— it's so rich and there's so much. But I want to move where We're still growing in the body, but I want to remind us that the Bible says, and Jesus said in John 15, that we are to be in the vine. And I really strongly want to chase the 7 I-Ms in John, the rabbit that just run right across in front of me, but there are 7 I-Ms in the Gospel of John, and I'm going to talk about this one. I'm not going to chase those other 6. I'm going to talk about I am the vine, and that's found in John 15:1. I am the vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that bears fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which was spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, 'Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit, for without me you can do nothing.' Now it's gonna be hard to add to that. In fact, I'm not gonna try to add to that. I just want to just magnify that Jesus is the vine. He is what we are to grow into. We have been grafted into his vine when we accepted him as Lord and Savior. We became part of the body. This is another analogy that Jesus says, look, you got to be in me. And we talked about being in the body of Christ. That's the third stop. That's where we're in the body of Christ. But Jesus gives us a picture also to help us that we— that he is the vine and we are to grow in him as a branch. And without him, we are just a branch. And if the branch is chopped off or the branch comes out of the vine, we can do nothing. So the vine is where all the nourishment is. The vine is where all the nutrients, all the power, all the food, all the water, everything that we need for life, the spiritual life, is in the vine. It is in Jesus. Again, soapbox moment, he is the word. If we're in the vine, we must be in the word. And I would just want to encourage you to read John 15:1 on your own. Read that whole chapter. Where he talks about being in the vine and that the Father is the vinedresser. This is a gardening analogy, and we are to be like Christ. And God is watching us, and he sees the things that are doing well, and he prunes that. Sometimes you're wondering, God, what— that was going so well, why did you take that away? Well, he took it away to make you stronger and to grow more fruit. This is where faith comes in, and this is where you have someone else watching outside of you. Pruning and changing and steering you in a direction that best helps your kingdom or God's kingdom. We're building God's kingdom. And so God may tweak something that looks like, man, this is going really good for you, but it may not be helping his kingdom. And so he prunes that off so that we can go start growing in the direction of his Son. And so what we need to do is we just need to stay in the vine, we need to stay in his word, and we need to continue to grow. Well, I don't wanna keep going. I could go on and on and on, but I'm just gonna stop right here. God, I thank you so much for your word. God, I thank you for, thank you for your Holy Spirit. Jesus, I thank you for coming and walking a perfect life and giving us example to look at and to live by. And Lord, we thank you for all that you're doing. Holy Spirit, you know right where this person is that's listening, and I pray in Jesus' name that you would just lead, guide, and direct them how you want them to walk, and what you want them to know from this particular lesson. 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.

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