Faith and Hope Finding a pearl or a treasure of great value

Episode 125: 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 125. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to continue to try to tie this grace and faith and hope and love and law and doubt and unbelief. I, I think I bit off more than I could chew, but I want to continue to talk. God opened up a scripture yesterday about ask and keep asking, seek and keep seeking, knock and keep knocking, and And I believe it was in when I was talking about the childlike faith. I believe that God is trying to teach us a valuable lesson. And when I say us, normally I say me. What I have found is sometimes I'll ask, I'll pray one time, and then I'll say, "Oh, that's done." And then when it doesn't happen, I'll go, "Well, I guess God didn't want to answer that." I think the key word or a key concept to Christianity that most of us don't— and I say most, and I'm putting air quotes up— but maybe I don't exercise like I should is persistence. To just be persistent and just to continue on it like a dog on a bone. It's kind of like the relentless— the word that I had at the beginning of the year. I think that has a lot to do with Christianity. And then you talk— you look at where— how Paul talks about when you put on the whole armor of God, then what you're supposed to do is stand. Okay, but now what? No, you just keep standing. Okay, but now what? Stand therefore. I think you need to be strong and courageous. Joshua, he told Joshua, hey, you're about to go into battle. And he didn't even say you're about to go into battle. He said, my servant Moses is dead. Now you be strong and courageous. Did I not tell you to be strong and courageous? Be very strong and courageous. I believe this thing takes persistence and consistency and total disregard for what's going on in your physical life. You need to tie into the spirit realm. And I don't mean to just sacrifice everything on the altar. We're so spiritually minded, we're no earthly good. But we need to submit ourselves to God, resist the devil. If this is a battle, if our life's a battle and we're getting after this thing, we need to get after this thing. We don't— we can't just battle for 10 minutes in the morning and we're fighting and kicking and clawing, and then, uh, then we go to our lives and we're not, we're battling it. We still got the armor on. And I want to remind you of a truth: God is not trapped in time. So time has no real effect on God. He sees the end from the beginning. He knows how this all is going to end. In fact, he's given us a little picture of it in Revelation and in some of Matthew and Luke where he talks about the end time, where Jesus actually give us a little picture. But I'm not going to chase that rabbit. But we need to continue to be all in on this thing called faith. And grace and hope and love. The Bible, the word of God. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things— if you want things in your life, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, all these things will be added to you. And I want to go to Matthew 13:44-46. It's going to talk about a couple of different parables about the kingdom of heaven. And in 44 it says, again, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid, and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. These are two parables that Jesus used to talk about the kingdom of God, and I believe what he's saying is Look, we need to go all in on this thing. We can't be half here and half there and kinda sorta committed but not so committed. And I want to take you back to Revelation 12:11: 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. That is a scripture that demands your total commitment to God. He's saying, look, we're going to lay this all on the line, God. Has given his son. The blood of Jesus has been spilled. Your testimony— God, you've had your life to live. You can tell anybody that comes into your world what God has done for you. So you can use the blood of Jesus, your testimony, and you do not love your lives to the death. So that is a total commitment to Jesus. Now I want to try to probably in the next episode, because I looked up at the clock and I don't have enough time to make this point. So I'm probably going to use Daniel, the Old Testament example in Daniel, in the next episode. But I want to kind of try to tie all this together on what it looks like to have childlike faith. Because in the previous episode, we talked about having the faith of the child. If you don't come into the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven, as a child— I want to remind you of the battle that I had teaching my sons to be warriors on the field and gentlemen off the field, it's kind of the same tightrope that we're walking here in this world. We're just supposed to be mature, we're supposed to be grown up, we're supposed to make adult decisions. But when it comes to the Bible, we have to have childlike faith. And what is— I mean, how do you play that together? How do you walk through life and, you know, pay your bills and do this and show up for work and be dependable and all of that stuff? You're an adult. And you're making adult decisions, but then you've got to flip the coin over and you have to take everything that the Bible says like a child. You just believe it because Father God said it. And that is exactly what I believe you're supposed to do. And that's why Jesus said in Matthew 7:14, because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it. And I believe this kind of shows us a picture of difficult. And I don't think difficult is digging a ditch, getting out there, having to struggle, you know, just with your whole body, and, you know, just having just be totally spent every day following Christ. I think the difficult part is, is you've got to turn off your pea brain and just believe the Word of God. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. And that's why I've got my intro guy the whole time and me jumping up and down. Soapbox moment number 153. We have got to get in the word, because if we're in the word and the word gets in us, then we can start getting— it starts becoming easier. There's an effortless change that comes when you're in the vine. And that's why Jesus declares himself the vine in John 15:1. I am the true 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. To get a picture of that, let's look at Psalm 1. And I've spoken in a previous lesson that one of the symbols for men are trees. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither, and whatever he does shall prosper. And I know my superior reading skills are wonderful to listen to on the podcast, but I have got to read the Word of God mainly because I don't have it memorized. That's a character flaw on my part, but I just do not. And again, this is imperfect action following a perfect Savior. I do not have Psalm 1 memorized, and I don't have John 15 memorized, but I do know where to find it. Now I want to try to tie this lesson up together so that we can kind of move on to the next thing. I want to talk about Daniel in the next episode, but I want to— I kind of want to get an idea, make sure we got an idea of this childlike faith. We've got to sell out on the word of God. The faith that Abraham had was unwavering. We just have to— if the word of God says it We have to believe it. And when we use Abraham, Father Abraham, as an example, I want you to notice that God didn't twist Abraham up with about 100 different blessings and 100 different things. He said, "You're gonna have a child, and everyone that blesses you, I will bless, and everyone that curses you, I will curse." There's just a few things. It was all wrapped around this child, and he had faith in this child, and he had faith in the Word of God. And everything else, once he put his faith in that one word, everything else bled. When he got out of that land, he just started following God and God started blessing him. I believe that you need to find a place in the word that, something that you're struggling for or something that you're believing in or something that God has spoken to you that you're gonna have this one thing and just get into it. We gotta sell all out to the concept that ask and keep asking, seek and keep seeking, knock and keep knocking. Like this hidden treasure that he— it's buried in this field and he sells— this guy sells everything he has to get to purchase that field. Or that pearl— this merchant had gone out looking for pearls and finds one pearl that has got such value that he sells everything. He commits his whole life on this one pearl because he's found the pearl of great value. And I think that's what we need to do with the Word of God. We need to sell out on this thing. We need to be all in on the word of God. And I want to finish this episode up in James 1:6. But let him ask in faith with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. And this was talking of— James was talking about, you know, asking for wisdom, and he was talking about perseverance and that kind of thing. What we've talked about probably on this whole podcast, all these episodes, the underlying message is just perseverance, being relentless. But we have to ask and keep asking. We have— when we ask, we have to believe that we've received it. And we're going to talk about that tomorrow in tomorrow's episode. And I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little concerned about being able to land this here plane by the end of the week on this faith and hope and love. I'm going to do it with God's help. But let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for the person listening to this episode. I pray that you would start opening up his mind, her mind, to the truths found in your word. Lord, we are to come to you as children. Lord, we don't know— compared to you, Father God, we are little bitty kids. We lean on your wisdom, we lean on your Holy Spirit, we lean on Jesus. Help us, lead us, guide us. Let us be like you, Lord, and 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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