In episode 282 of the "No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe" podcast, host Greg Ryan delivers a sermon‑style exposition on the paradoxical nature of God as both loving and "dangerous." He begins by citing Isaiah 55:8 to illustrate that God’s thoughts and ways far exceed human understanding. Using a vivid "box" metaphor, Greg argues that attempts to confine Jesus or the Trinity into human‑made categories cause God to "bust out" of those limits. He describes grace as a heavenly treasure trove that believers must appropriate, emphasizing that grace was poured out through Christ’s death and resurrection. The episode then shifts to a warning against lukewarm Christianity, referencing Revelation 3:15, and categorizes believers as "hot" (passionate), "cold" (inactive but not abandoned), or "lukewarm" (indifferent), urging a move toward wholehearted commitment. Greg reinforces this call with the parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great value (Matthew 13:44‑46), presenting total commitment to the kingdom as selling all to obtain it. He further discusses free will, noting that angels, Satan, and humans each received it and will be held accountable, and he declares Satan irredeemable due to his conscious rebellion. The sermon concludes with a prayer asking God to break the metaphorical box, to work in believers’ lives in His own way, and to inspire repentance and renewed devotion.
Welcome to episode 282, 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.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I'm going to continue talking about God is love, but in the last episode I told you that I was going to show you that God is dangerous. And by that I mean that God's ways are not our ways. And we're going to go to Isaiah 55:8 to get that scripture specifically, and then we're going to go to Matthew 14 and talk about the hidden treasures and the pearl of great value. We've talked about these scriptures before. If you're a fanatic and you followed my podcast for quite some time, you'll know that I love doing examples. I've gotta see this. And when I taught a Bible study a few years ago, I'm trying to figure out how we can get God out of a box because I just believe that God is not any person, anything that you can hold down. And when you start trying to figure God out, God's gonna bust out of your little box or your little mentality, your mindset. I had gotten my mind on a dashboard Jesus. I don't know if you've ever seen those, but I have tried to find the little Jesus that sat on the dashboard and I thought maybe it'd come in a box. Well, I wanna show you, if you're watching on YouTube, I wanna show you my little dashboard Jesus. And this is what I found. This right here changed my thoughts on God. And when I saw this, I thought, oh wow, that is perfect, because this thing had to come in a box. And that is God. Jesus is God, Holy Spirit is God, and Father God is God. So there's three parts, one God. I'm not here to talk about the Trinity, but when we look at Jesus and we see Jesus, we put him in a box, that's going to be a struggle if you don't bust him out and allow him to go. The whole lesson that I talked about is putting Jesus in a box, and I believe that's where the church is right now. And grace of God, and the— I call it the dangerousness of God, and God's ability to do things that you and I don't understand, or you and I may not have thought of, but God does things his own way. Let's go to Isaiah 55:8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Now I just want you to think about that, and when you start thinking about grace— and again, I've got to picture everything, so I've got grace of God as this treasure trove. It is just an unbelievable treasure in heaven. There's a place called grace, or the throne of grace, there is the grace of God is sitting there for you and I to take advantage of. And by advantage, I mean to go in there and appropriate it to our lives. And I'm not talking about making God do anything. When I hear people say, well, I'm just going to pray, I'm going to have God move in this situation, all right, we need to get God to move here or move there. God's not stuck. God is constantly moving. His Holy Spirit is everywhere all the time. So we need to understand that God is not in a box. God is not bound by what you and I are bound by, and he is not bound by anything other than his word. Now, he is bound by the word of God. The only binding of the Lord, and he's done this to himself, is that he is the word, and the word is going to come to pass. Everything in this Bible— and that's this soapbox moment— everything in this Bible is God-ordained. God spoke it, or God had men write it down inspired by the Holy Spirit. I wasn't there. I didn't write a word. I've told you multiple times, I make a horrible Holy Spirit. So I'm not here to tell you that this is exactly how you should define this, or this is how you do— this is how I do it, and this is what I put into myself. When I see grace, I think about Everything, all the promises that God gave you and I, whether we appropriate it to our lives or not, the grace of God has been poured out for all humanity. And the grace of God was poured out when Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected 3 days later. When Jesus said, "It is finished," those are the 3 most powerful words that he spoke. Because he said right there, it's over, it's done. Everything I've accomplished, all of it, it's all done. And he went and gave up the ghost. He then was resurrected 3 days later, and the power of God is forever released. And he took back everything that the enemy had stolen. There is not one thing that Satan can do about it. There is not one thing. And the only thing he does is to steal and to kill and to destroy God's kids. He is just here to raise as much hell as he possibly can before he gets banished and thrown into the lake of fire. And that is his modus operandi. I haven't said that in multiple episodes, so I got to throw that out there. Putting God in a box. I just want you to think about God being dangerous. And when I say danger, I want you to see that God, he gives each person that he creates whether it be a spiritual being or a physical being, God gives them free will. And God gave Satan and all of the fallen angels— he gave them free will. They chose to use that free will and turn against him. That was a bad mistake. And the reason that I believe that Satan is not redeemable is because he is a spiritual being and he knew full well the cost of disobeying God. He knew that God was superior, that God was the Creator. Now, with us humanity, we are born into the flesh, and we have got to use our faith. We have got to see something in the spirit realm that we can't see here on earth, and that's called faith. It's impossible to please God without faith. If you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and you are a Christian, I believe the next best step, the next step— your first step is salvation, the next step is commitment. And I know that's probably kind of deep, and I know that you probably are thinking, well, I'm just saying— Jesus does not like wishy-washy. We've talked about this in previous episodes about Revelation 3, and I'm going to go to that. I didn't have that in my notes. And this is Jesus speaking to the church of the Laodiceans, and this is the lukewarm church, and this is what God is saying. And it starts in Revelation 3:15. I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth. And I just want you to Hear that? The Word of God is so relevant, and lukewarm Christian, if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, we need to be hot or cold. I think Jesus is saying to the church right now, this lukewarmness ain't getting it. And he's not saying that he's mad at you. God is love. We've talked about that in the previous episodes. God is love. God is dangerous. God gave you free will. To be hot or to be cold or to be lukewarm. And God is saying, stop being lukewarm. You need to get fired up or you need to cool off. But we need hot or cold Christians. And by the definition of a hot Christian, I think that's a fanatic. That's someone that stays in the word or wants to get in the word, wants to learn more of God. I'm putting myself, of course, in the category of a hot Christian. The cold Christian, these are people that have not walked away from God, but that have walked away from the Bible. Maybe they've just said, look, this thing ain't working, I don't understand all this, but I need to go back to doing this thing. Peter did that. The disciples, when Jesus died on the cross, Peter and the disciples went fishing. That's what they knew to do. I would say that that was a cold moment in the Apostle Peter's walk with God is he said, look, I'm— I, I don't know what to do, I'm going to go fishing. And so God's not upset with us being cold. That's what Jesus said, I wish you were hot or cold. I just want to encourage you that God knows right where you are, but we need to take God out of the box. And I think that first initial step after salvation is total commitment. And I can hear some of you probably going, no, I don't think that's the next step. And I, you know, I, we could argue about which step or that, but if you're not committed, if you're not totally committed, when you're in love with God and you've accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, I just want to encourage you to go back to that first love that Jesus talks about to another church in the book of Revelation. But I want you to look at Matthew 14:44 again. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. Which a man found and hid, and for the 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 had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. I think Jesus is describing total commitment. We're going to talk about in the next episode where I think half of the church is missing the boat. And we're going to look at the scripture that represents the half of the church not getting it. And I just want to encourage you that if you are a Christian, if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you are the church. The church is you and I. If we've accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we are the church, and we need to be God's hands and feet. I'm not going to start chasing that rabbit, but I just want to encourage you that God is dangerous. God gave every one of his creations free will. God gave the demons, the angels, he gave you and I. Every human being has the free will, and every creature is going to stand before God, and they are going to give an account to what they did with his free will. And if you said, the heck with this, God, get out of my life, I don't want nothing to do with you ever That is a dangerous place, but God is a dangerous God. He loves you. He don't want you to say that. He sent his Son so that you wouldn't say that. But if you say that, I believe that God is going to honor that for eternity. God's not throwing anybody into hell. I believe you're going to raise your hand and say, "Look, I don't want nothing to do with God. I want to do my own thing." And for eternity, God is going to separate you from himself. And you're going to have eternity to be separated from God. And I just think that that's a horrible plan. I just think you ought to revisit, and that's called repentance. That's that fancy-pants Christian word that just means change your mind. I just think you need to change your mind on this thing. And I'm going to stop right there because I can feel myself going on another tangent. And I just want to pray. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for being dangerous, Lord. And doing it your way and not our way. God, you are so wonderful, and I pray in Jesus' name that we would pull you out of this box that we've created that makes you in these four walls, that you can only work a certain way. God, I pray that you would just work any way you want to work in my life. And Lord, 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 in the next episode.
Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.
