Imitating Jesus revisiting the 4th stop on Gods Mountain Part 2

Welcome to episode 192, 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 192. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I am on the fourth stop of my Mountain of God map, and it is called Imitating, or what did Jesus do, and more specifically, how we are to imitate Christ. And remember back when I talked about at the end of the Endued with Power in episode, I think maybe 189, 190 something, but it was where I reminded you that Jesus Christ is not Jesus' first and last name. Jesus is the Anointed One and that he is the Messiah. So we have got to come to the realization that when we study the Bible, when we look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that this man that we're studying is the Son of God. He is the Anointed One, the Messiah. He came to set everything right. We have got to go into this read and into this study knowing that Jesus is the Anointed One of God. He is God's only begotten Son. He is the only one like Jesus. Now, the wonderful great news is that when we by faith point to what Jesus did for us, then we can become sons of God. We can become part of the family of God, but it's by absolutely nothing that we do other than just believing. That is why Christianity— I kind of get my feathers ruffled up when people call Christianity a religion. And I guess if you gotta cornhole it into some category, then it would be more of a religion than a business. Most religions have to do with performance. You've gotta do, every religion, as a matter of fact, you've gotta do this, this, this, and this for this to happen. You've gotta do all of these things in order to be deemed worthy by the religion. You've gotta pray so many times a day. You gotta point in a direction while you pray. You gotta do all of these things. The Christian experience is so unlike any other religion because Christianity has to do with relationship. It has absolutely nothing to do with your performance. And I think part of the church, and I think that's a huge big deal, and that's a mouthful when I say that, but we are not here to perform for God. We are to believe and receive. We are to only put our faith in what Jesus did, not what you and I did. We're never going to measure up to Jesus. We're never going to measure up to anything other than we're a sinner, that we are— all have sinned. The Bible said all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So we all We're all in the sinner bucket, but while we were still in this sinner bucket, or on sin island, or hell island as I like to say, while we were all on hell island, Christ died for us. He became the bridge to back to Father God. The relationship that was broken at Eden when Adam and Eve bit the forbidden fruit, Jesus restored all of that. He gave us a way back to the Father, and that is key to Christianity. This is Christianity 101, but if you don't get this part, you're not— it doesn't matter about anything else if your salvation is not set and you do not understand that it is nothing that you do that grants you access to Heaven Island, or to God's kingdom, or to God's family. It is not one thing that you do in your life other than use your faith to believe. You repent. This is your gospel message. You repent of all the mess-ups, all of the sin, all of the falling short, all of the missing the mark. Every one of us— the Bible is clear in Romans 3:23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We all sin, and what we can do as sinners, what we then do is we believe on Jesus. We say that with our mouth that Jesus is the Son of God, that he is the only way. Jesus declared himself the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the Father except through me. These were things that happened When Jesus walked on this earth, these are the things when you start studying the gospels, the four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you start studying the life of Jesus, you will see that multiple times Jesus declared himself God. And that's what just ripped the Jewish leaders. They picked up stones multiple times. They tried to throw him off mountains. They tried to kill Jesus. And Jesus just walked away because Jesus was God. He was not going to die being thrown off a mountain. That was not how it was written. He was going to die on a cross. Jesus came to die for you and I, and it's just such an awesome story. It is such an awesome God that we serve that he would come knowing full well that we need a Savior And the only way to get this thing back right is by coming and dying. Father God set that up. Again, I make a horrible Holy Spirit. I did not write one word in the book that Jesus came to die. And when he died, and when Jesus said, it is finished, it started the kingdom of God. And when I talk about the kingdom of God, that's God's way of doing things, but it's taking The people that were lost and on Hell Island, you know, I got a picture. This is your first time, I've just got to picture things. But everybody, when they sin, they are placed on Hell Island. And the only way off this island is to take the Jesus Bridge. And the only way to get on the Jesus Bridge is to repent and say, I am a sinner. I need Jesus. I need what you did on the cross. You walk across this Jesus Bridge and you are on Heaven Island. You walk across this bridge, you are translated into a new kingdom, and it's God's kingdom. And what God wants to do is he wants to restore the relationship, and the only way he could do it, the only way he could do it was to send his own son. And I just want you to understand that we're dealing with— when we start talking about Satan the punk and we start talking about all the evil in this world and all of that stuff, we're talking about intelligent spiritual beings. And, and it may freak you out if you don't believe in evil, or if you don't believe in demons, or if you don't believe in Satan. I mean, you're just going to have to get over because that's the Bible clearly states. That there is evil, that there's demons, there's principalities. So we're going to talk about it on this podcast. We are dealing with a very intelligent evil. It is evil and it is trying to destroy people. In fact, he puts thoughts in your head or thoughts in people's heads, and so that the demon doesn't have to be there all the time, 365. If you put that thought in somebody's head then that thought just stays with them. I don't know if you've ever had a negative thought, or, and I've talked about this multiple times, that 78% of the thoughts most Christians have are negative. All a demon has to do is put a negative thought in your head, and then he can go to the next person, because then you're just gonna mill that around, and you're gonna kick it around unless you know the truth, and then the truth shall make you free. That is John 8:32. Jesus said his disciples will abide in his word. That's John 8:31. I probably chopped it up. The only way that you can have true freedom from the enemy is to know the truth. That's why I jump up and down, my soapbox moment. We've got to be in the Bible. The word of God is given to us to teach us right from wrong, but to teach us how to navigate in this fallen world. God is the perfect parent. God is not angry. God is not mad. But if you're a parent and if you've ever lived on a busy street, or if you've ever visited somewhere in a business and there's a busy street and your little toddler runs out of the door and it's unsupervised, you do everything you can to get to that toddler before they get to that busy street. Per— you teach this toddler, do not go, and you punish them and you show them, look, Dad knows best. And they don't understand. They run like they run in the backyard or in, you know, in a field. They just ran out the door just like they normally would, but you know, being the parent, you know that that's dangerous. You know that there's danger there, and you can't allow your toddler to run in front of cars on busy roads. You know how that's going to end. Father God is perfect. He knows how the story ends if he allows you to run freely into this evil world. There's got to be boundaries. It's not because God is a prude. It's because sin is there and evil is present. Opening the door to evil is through sin. That God's not mad. God sent his Son. Jesus died for all sin. He died once for all. You can look at Hebrews 10, that chapter. It talks about it multiple different ways. But Jesus died one time for all sin, past, present, and future sin. I say a lot of time, next Thursday's sin is just as paid for as 10 years ago's sin, as the sin, all of the sin when I got saved in January 10th, 1993. When I was saved, for the first 29 and a half years, I was pretty good at sin. All of that sin was dealt with right there on the cross, all of my sin. That's the past sin. And then the present sin, when— if I messed up right then on how I prayed the prayer, it was paid for on the cross. I just need you to see what Jesus did on the cross before we get started. This is a huge deal, and salvation and the gospel is a big deal. And that's why I love it. That's why I love the Bible. But we have got to read John 14:12. Most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do he will do also, and greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father. Jesus at the right hand of the Father. Jesus has done everything he's going to do. Jesus died once for all. But now he's saying, if— and if you'll take John 14:12 and hold it up to the gospels now, the first thing you've got to do if you read this, he who believes in me, you have got— it does absolutely no good to use the Bible if you do not believe in God. If you have not declared Jesus as your Lord and Savior, what I'm talking about does you absolutely no good for eternity. You may get a goosebump, or you may do some things to help your situation or your world, but But in the end, if you don't believe, then it kicks in Matthew 7:22 and 23. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons in your name, and done many wonders in your name? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. We have got to know. That's our first step. When we come to this step, imitating Jesus. We have first— we've got to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. We have to declare him Lord of our lives. Then the next thing we do is we start studying and we start going all in, because this is the kingdom of God. And I've touched on this briefly, but we're going to talk in the next episode about what that means. God, I thank you so much for the person listening to this podcast, this episode, And I pray in Jesus' name, if they do not know you as their Lord and Savior, that Holy Spirit, I pray that you would draw them. Father God, I pray that you would draw them into your kingdom. I pray in Jesus' name that this listener would have a personal relationship with you, that it's not about religion, it's not about dos and don'ts, it's about knowing you as their personal Savior. And I thank you, Lord, that you, you did that for me. You did it for anyone who asked. The grace of God was poured out to the whole world. There's no such thing as a price needing to be paid for any sin. You paid that price over 2,000 years ago. It is paid in full. Any sin by anyone has been paid. That is the gospel. And we thank you, Jesus, for doing that for us. Holy Spirit, we thank you for being here. Father God, we thank you for your plan and for how you love us and how you guide us. 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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