Faith and Hope How do faith and grace work together

Welcome to episode 115, 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 115. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul starts every, just about every one of his epistles in the New Testament that way, and I want to start my podcast with that. Each episode I want to say grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So I said it twice. It is so Good to have you here. I am so thankful that you're a part of this, and I want to continue to talk about grace and faith and hope and how all these things— I'm going to try to tie all this together. And we're going to get— we know now we're not going to talk about the grace of God. We've got a picture of that. And if you are stopping by for the first time, it's a few episodes back I talked about the grace of God in the last probably 2 or 3. But I want to move on with faith because we got to have grace and faith. It's a Maybe not a two-edged sword, but you got to have both. And again, I've used the example of sodium chloride for, I think it was Faith and Hope, but it works with Grace and Faith as well. You can't, you can't have one without the other, or they're poison. Like if you just have sodium, or if you just have chloride, or chlorine, or whatever it is, just one of those elements, it will poison your body. But you combine the two together, it becomes a nutrient that is needed to live here on earth, and that's salt. But before I started talking about faith, I wanted to make sure that we had the vision or the goal to what we were going to use our faith for. We're not just going to exercise our faith because God gave us faith and we just need to build these big old faith muscles. God gave us the faith so that we could walk over into the spirit realm and appropriate the grace, the that God has poured out for us when he sent his Son to live a perfect life and die that death that we couldn't die for us. And then he just put all of the grace of God into, and I'm gonna say this room or a treasure chest, it's actually into the spirit realm. And we are seated in heavenly places. And that's another thing that I'm still trying to get, wrap my mind around is how we are seated with Christ and our body is still here on earth. But that's what the Bible says, and the Bible is true regardless if I understand it or not. So we are in heavenly places, we have the mind of Christ, all of those things are going on in the spirit realm. But we need to bring our body and our soul, our mind, will, and emotion— we need to somehow get this body here to appropriate the things in the spirit realm. And we've talked about the physical realm, the spirit realm, and I don't— you know, it's way back on different episode, and I don't want to get into a woo-woo discussion, but we— there is a different realm. And, and I read a book a while back called The Fourth Dimension, and it was written by a pastor that said, you know, we're living in the three-dimensional world here on Earth. I may be talking out of school for all you scientists out there, but it may be— I think it's length, width, and height. So those are the three dimensions. Everything has a length and a width and a depth or height. We're in this three-dimensional world. Maybe just to make your mind kind of expand a little bit, maybe there's a fourth dimension right here, and that's the spirit realm that is here, that at the snap of a finger or at the walk across that faith bridge, you are right there. And in my mind, I have this fourth dimension. I have this, the grace of God that follows me around. It is always there. It is always within an arm's length. It's always there to, for me to appropriate to my life. But it takes, it requires faith. And the just shall live by faith. And so in order to figure out how to get to the spirit realm, we need to now take a look at faith. We've talked about grace, and the reason I started with grace is so that we know what we're talking about. We're talking about the prom— the grace of God is the, are the promises of God. So it is, when you're talking about healing, The grace of God would be by his stripes we were healed, or by your stripes you are healed. If you look at Isaiah chapter 53 of Isaiah, it says that by his stripes we are healed. Remember, Isaiah is looking to the future. I want to say it was like 800 years or 12— it was 800 years in the future when Christ would come and take the stripes, take that beating. Now Peter in 1 Peter 2:24 was looking behind because he had, he had seen the Lord take the whipping and he saw those stripes that Jesus took for you and I. So Peter is looking back at the event, Isaiah is looking forward, and that is just one or two verses on healing. And another verse is Psalm 107:20. Verse 20: He sent his word and healed them and delivered them from their destructions. So God— there are multiple truths in God's word for healing, and you just gotta— if you're needing a healing, or if that's what you're believing God for, then you dig into that by faith. And so we also have prosperity. And remember when I talked about sozo and soterion and soteria and what the words— that's saved and salvation. That is the grace of God. That is what is poured out, and those are all-inclusive of what God did at the cross. I believe that for eternity we're going to continue to see all of the things that God has done for his kids. We're going to just get there and we're going to look at Father God. We're finally going to have eyes to see him, and we'll be able to look onto Father God. Because right now, if Father God showed himself to me or to you, it would destroy us. We— the bodies that we have right now, our physical bodies, cannot look onto Father God. That is how powerful he is. That is incredible to see in your mind that you can't even look at Father God and survive. And I don't know about you, but I don't know what Satan was thinking when he decided that he wanted to exalt himself and, "I want to be like God." I, I don't think he was thinking. I think he got to looking at himself in the mirror and saw how wonderful he was and that is pride. That it just came into him, and so he decided in his pea brain that, I'm going to just exalt myself, and I'm going to take this— I'm going to take God on. That was a bad plan from the beginning, and so God threw him out. And that's a rabbit that I'm just chasing. But God is so wonderful. But God is not mad. God is huge. He can hold the whole universe in his hands, and he is your dad. He is Abba Father. He is Father God, and he is looking to have a relationship with you. The whole Bible is a love story from start to finish. It's where he made man in his own image. Man fell, and the rest of the Bible is him trying to restore the relationship that he had with man. And if you read it any other way, if you don't read it as a love story, I think you're reading the wrong book, or you're reading it with the wrong attitude, because God loves you. You are his favorite. Now, he has a lot of favorites, but you are one of them. And I don't care if you haven't accepted him as your Lord and Savior. I can't imagine you being on this podcast unless you just stumbled across this by the, the wonderful title that I wrote, or the subject matter you wanted to see what this yahoo was going to talk about. But the grace of God and faith. Romans 10:17, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So you have got to hear the word of God for faith to kick in. Again, soapbox moment number 27 is you've got to be in the word of God. My whole desire, my whole reason for being on this podcast or do these episodes is to encourage you to dig into the word of God. It is nothing more than just sending you to the same place to eat that, uh, the bread of life, the same place that I go every morning and dig in, get me a mouthful, and just get to chewing on the bread of life, and it just nourishes my body. My spirit man feels stronger, my soul starts getting ready to fight this battle, and my flesh is— I think it's just shut up to a degree. And again, we got 3 enemies, and one of them is the flesh, one of them is our body that we're going to put down one, one day. We're going to put down, and it'll be risen up if Jesus tarries, that we will be planted in the ground like our ancestors. And then on that day when that trumpet is blasted, that we will meet him in the air. And if we're still here, and if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, it is going to be an incredible time, in the blink of an eye, in a split second. You're not going to have time to repent. You're not going to have time to say, oh no, let me get this right. It's going to be over before it even gets started. So that's why on this side we need to get it right. And so that requires faith, and that requires that, you know, when Jesus went in and when Nicodemus was talking to Jesus in John 3, and he was talking about being born again And Nicodemus was questioning, what does that mean? And again, we got to do it by faith because it's a spiritual truth in a physical realm. And that's what makes the Bible— I'm not going to say complicated, but that's what makes it to where you have got to appreciate that this is the word of God. You got to go into reading this Bible knowing that it's God's word and that Jesus— and that's why I've got my little intro guy talking about And the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. You've got to anchor yourself on the fact that when you read this Bible, you are reading Jesus. You are spending time with Jesus. And if I can't do one thing, I will go to my grave telling you, if you don't spend time in the Word of God, you are going to get the snot kicked out of you by the punk.

You—

he is going to deceive you. That's what he— that's the only thing he's got is deception, for the most part, is he just questions the word of God. And we're going to get into that. He is questioning constantly. He's accusing you. He's accusing God. He's questioning the word. He's keeping you from it. He's deceiving you. He is a punk. He come— he comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. Jesus said that in John 10:10. But I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly. There's no better example of good and evil than John 10:10. The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Jesus came for abundant life. End of discussion. And which side do you want to be on? And I put that choice in front of you like Moses did back in Deuteronomy. And this was Deuteronomy 30:19. I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you. That I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live. That is so strong. Moses set out the law in Deuteronomy 28. It talks about the blessings of God and then the curses if you don't follow the law. We set before each person life and death, blessing and curses. Which one are you going to choose? I mean, you'd have to be an idiot to choose death and cursing. The wide road is choosing the curses. And it's hard to believe, but that's just how good the punk is. Satan is very good at what he does, and he questions the word of God, he questions God's motive, and he's accuser of the brethren. He is just a punk, and we're going to get into kicking his teeth out. But we got to figure out this faith thing, we got to figure out grace and hope and love, all of that stuff. Let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for the blessings. Lord, I also thank you that you show us what a curse looks like and what a cursed life looks like. And Lord, that you set before us blessings and cursing, and you say, please choose life. And I thank you, Lord, that the per— the person listening to this has the same choice that I had, and that you gave us each free will. And I pray in Jesus' name that this person would dig into your word. If they have not chosen life yet, that they would choose to follow you, that they would die to self, repent, humble theirself, and accept you as their Lord and Savior. God, I thank you so much for your word. I, I thank you for the person listening to this episode, and I pray in Jesus' name that you would pour out your grace and faith and mercy and truth into their life. Lord, 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.

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