Faith and Hope You are Blessed

Welcome to episode 94, 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 94. If you are just joining us for the first time, welcome aboard. And if you've been here multiple times, welcome back, you fanatic. Well, I am going to start a new series. It's going to be similar. I'm going to try to tie it into the doubt and fear that I did in the previous episodes, but I'm going to call this Faith and Hope. We're going to eliminate love for a minute, and that don't mean we're, we're not going to talk about it or we're not going to do love. We're supposed to love one another every day, but I want to concentrate on faith. 1 Corinthians 13:13, "Now abide faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love." We understand that love is the most important, and it's the virtue that's going to continue on with us in heaven. But right now, I think we need to figure out what faith and hope look like, and what faith and hope are, and how to use faith and hope. And to do that, I want to tie into the having the eyes to see and the ears to hear. I believe that that kind of turns back into the hope and love. And I think maybe with some scripture we can dig into this thing and see what that's all about. And I believe sometimes the best way to see what a certain thing is, is to see exactly what it is not. And I'm going to talk about faith real quick, and to show you an example of what I believe faith is not, we're going to go to John, the Gospel of John, chapter 20:24. Now Thomas, called the Twin, one of the 12, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, we have seen the Lord. So he said to them, unless I see his hands, the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after 8 days his disciples were again inside, and Thomas went with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, "Peace to you." Then he said to Thomas, "Reach your finger here and look at my hands, and reach your hand here and put it into my side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing." And Thomas answered and said to him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, And yet have believed. Well, I think that is a perfect example of what not to— how not to use faith. Thomas was like, no, I don't think so. I think I'm gonna wait till I can put my finger in his holes of his hand and then put— stuff my hand in his side. Because the— in the previous verses up in 20, at the beginning, the disciples— there was 10 disciples that were in a room and Thomas wasn't in there. And they saw the Lord. And I'm sure that they were all fired up telling Thomas. And Thomas is— I mean, there's a reason that he's called Doubting Thomas, and this is the reason right here, is that he's like, 'Nah, I doubt it. I don't think so. I think this guy— I think you're telling me, you know, y'all saw a ghost.' I don't know what he was thinking, but he wasn't thinking, and he wasn't using faith to think. So Jesus appeared to him in the room and said, 'Thomas, Reach in here, look with your eyes, feel with your hands. This is me. Then Thomas said, my Lord and my God. And then I want you to listen to what Jesus said. Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen yet have believed. I want you to know right now, after reading that scripture, you are blessed if you have never seen Jesus but believe. If you've accepted him as your Lord and Savior, this scripture right here, Jesus himself is calling you blessed. So if you ever think, man, why is this so hard, or why is it— you just got to change the, the thought that's going on in your head and say, man, I am blessed and highly favored because I have not seen Jesus, but I believe. That's what faith looks like. Faith is seeing with your spiritual eye. If you can look in this Bible and take the word of God and believe it even though you don't see it. And we're going to talk about hope is being able to see it with your spiritual eyes. That is the hope. And that's what you've got to mix, faith and hope together. And that's the one-two punch that just gets things done down here. Now, if you do all that, if you learn how to use faith and hope and then you don't have love, then you're in trouble. It's, it's even worse, I think, than not using faith or hope at all. So we gotta, we gotta do everything in love. But if we can learn how to use faith and hope, we can get things done down here. And I think part of the reason is most of us think hope is, oh, I sure hope that happens, or I'm hoping and praying. You can't— that's not hope. That's not scriptural Bible hope.

It—

I've heard a definition as a blessed assurance that you know that whatever the Word of God says is true, and then you hang your life on the promise of God. And we're going to go into that in more depth, but I just want to— because I don't think I did a great job of tying it all together, you know, in the last series. But this is where Jesus was saying, look, y'all, Thomas, you're trying to use your eyes to see me. And remember that every time the disciples saw Jesus after the resurrection, they didn't recognize him. They did not recognize him. And I want to go to 2 Corinthians. We're going to go to chapter 5, and we're going to start in verse 15. 2 Corinthians 5:15. And he died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again. Therefore, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh, even though we have known Christ according to the flesh. Yet now we know him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things become new— have become new. Well, I wanted to read that whole thing. The last part, I wanted to get to 2 Corinthians 5:16. Therefore, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh, even though we have known Christ according to the flesh. Yet now we know him thus no longer. And I think that Paul was aware of this fact before. Paul did not walk with the disciples. Paul was not one of the 12 disciples. So Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus. He met Jesus outside of those 3 and a half years of Jesus' ministry. It was after all of that, after the resurrection. So Paul met Jesus after the resurrection. So Paul had a different take or a different way of looking at Jesus. He knew Jesus by the Spirit. The disciples, I think they were at a disadvantage because they had seen, they had walked with Jesus, they had talked with Jesus, they had touched Jesus, they had, you know, slapped him on the back when he said something funny, you know, just all of that stuff that just being around somebody. So they had all of that input from their eyes and their ears. They had heard him, they had seen him, They had touched him. They had talked to him. All of those things, it kind of messed with their mind when they saw Jesus resurrected and he did not look like he looked before he died. And Paul is saying, look, we know we've seen him in the flesh. You know, Jesus was a popular figure. I'm not saying that Paul didn't know what Jesus looked like. Paul, I'm certain, knew what Jesus looked like because Jesus was a thing. For 3.5 years in all of Jerusalem and Judea and all of those places. Jesus, everybody knew who Jesus was because Jesus was the healer. He was the one turning the cities upside down. I mean, everybody came out to see Jesus. Everybody knew what Jesus looked like. But what Paul is saying here in 2 Corinthians 5:16, I believe, is look, everything's changed now. We're not looking at things according to the flesh. In fact, if we would do— if we would not look at people according to the flesh, I think the world would be a whole lot better. And that's why Christians— I mean, we're not better than people, but I think if you truly are a follower of God, you don't care what someone looks like. Now, you know, we kind of— we have a tendency sometimes to judge people based on— or maybe at least I do— based on how they looked and my past experience with people that look like that. Or whatever, but I don't judge people based on the color of their skin or male or female. The Bible tells me not to do it, you know, and I struggle sometimes, not all the time, most time I don't, but sometimes like, oh, if he looks like that, then he's probably this or that. You know, we make judgments and we need to stop doing that based on the flesh. We need to make judgments based on the word of God. In fact, it says not to judge because if we start judging people, then that makes us a judge and there's only one judge. And that's God. What we need to do is be fruit inspect. You tell me you're a Christian but you're not growing any of the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control— if you're not growing that fruit, you need to dig into the vine a little bit. You're kind of outside the vine. And that's part of— and that's a whole nother rabbit that I'm not, I'm not about to start chasing. But we need to stop looking at everybody based on what we see, based on our five senses. We need to start seeing with the eyes of our heart. We need to start hearing with the ears of our heart inside, and we need to put— use the Bible as the filter. And I don't know, way back, the three pillars that I said, or that we were going to stand on, one of them is holding the Bible up as a filter. And if we can use the Bible as we look through the Bible and then see people the way God sees people, you know, we're not going to have a problem. You know, there's not— there's no such thing as racism in the kingdom of God because we're all one. There's not male nor female, there's not Jew nor Gentile, there's not slave nor free. We're all the same in Christ. This has gone a little longer than I wanted. I just wanted to introduce the concept that we're not going to use our eyes and that faith and hope has nothing to do with what we see with our eyes and what we hear with our ears. We got to start using different muscles with spiritual muscles and we got to start exercising them and And I'm going to start stretching them out in the next episode, but I want to pray for you. God, I thank you so much for the person listening to this episode, and I thank you. You know right where they are, Holy Spirit. Where two or more are gathered and agree as touching anything, you are in the midst. And Lord, we are here to worship you, and we're here to praise you, and we're here to thank you for what you did for us. And God, we thank you so much. We thank you for your word., and we thank you that we have the ability to look in it and put it in us. And Lord, I pray that you would help us understand your word. Holy Spirit, you said you would lead us into all truth. Lead us into truth on this one topic, Lord, faith and hope. We pray in Jesus' name. We love you, and 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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