Imitating Jesus stop 4 on the Mountain of God continued

Welcome to episode 197, 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 197. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, we are still on stop 4 of the mountain of God in my little picture analogy. And if you have never looked at the mountain of God, you can go to our website and it'll put it in the show notes, but you can see what I'm talking about. And this stop is stop number 4. And it's on imitating Jesus. And what we're doing is as we go through, and this is not gonna be an exhaustive list of everything that Jesus did and how we're to imitate. In fact, this whole study, this stop on the mountain, you could spend your whole life right here on this stop of the mountain, and you could look at everything that Jesus did and you could try to mimic or copy or reflect everything that Jesus did, and you would spend the rest of your life trying to get this all done. It is that deep. We are just stopping here to take a look at and to inspire you to just to dig in the four gospels. Like I told you before, I've already read Mark, Matthew, and John. I am in the middle of Luke right now reading it, and I just want to encourage you, if you can't get in the Word of God, if you can't get in the Bible, then I don't— I can't help you because I make a horrible Holy Spirit All I do, I'm just here to encourage, empower, and inspire you to get into God's Word, to do the exact same thing I'm doing. I'm telling you, God is not a respecter of persons, that he is drove me into his Word, and as his Word gets into me, it changes me. I'm telling you, I'm just a guy. I've got the same guy desires. My wife could probably vouch for this, but I'm no different than you are. If you're a man and a woman, you've got goals and desires for your life, and they're all probably good if they're God-inspired. Some of them are a little messed up, probably, if you're anything like me. Still, you got too much of this world system in you. It's not all going to be out until Jesus returns and changes us in the blink of an eye. And we're told to renew our mind, to daily get into the Word, And that's in Romans 12:2, where Paul says, "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." The only way to know what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God is to get into the word and renew your mind. Do not be conformed to this world, You know, I've talked about multiple times that one of our enemies is this world system, and if you do not have a biblical worldview, I'm here to help. This is me trying to help you get into the Word, to believe the Word, and to live the Word. And it takes effort. It's a constant battle. And on my mountain of God, I've got follower, believer and disciple. I think there's 3 steps to this mountain. As you go up the mountain, each step is a little bit harder. I believe it's salvation. God gives you the faith of Jesus. He implants that in you when you accept Jesus, and then you start following after Jesus, and you start looking at how he lived, and, and the Holy Spirit is leading you as a child. And you're going, and when you start looking at and you turn that corner and you start going up another level higher, you look at how Jesus did things, you need to start believing instead of just following Jesus like the disciples. If you look at the disciples early on, Jesus got on to them and said— and that's another thing that we're going to talk about in, in this week— but Jesus consistently, when he was teaching His disciples, he constantly got on to them and said, how long am I going to be with you? How long am I going to suffer you? And we're going to look at a couple of those instances, but not today. I want to tell you about the things that I saw Jesus as being submitted to the Father's will. Even though Jesus was God here on earth, he, Jesus, submitted to the Father. The Father was the ultimate authority. He's the one that came up with this plan and sent his Son to die for sin. Father God sent Jesus, his Son, to fulfill the prophecy that started way back in Genesis 3, and I want to go read that. And this is in 3:14. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. And I believe that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. Bruise his head is not just a hit upside the head with a baseball bat or a golf ball or a baseball or softball. This is destroy. It is a death blow. And Jesus gave Satan a death blow and at the grave. And I just believe that Satan's just not that smart. You know, we give him too much credit, because if he truly knew what God was up to, he would not have killed Jesus. If he truly was all-knowing, he would have seen that this is the death blow. But no, he was prideful, he was arrogant, and he said, I've got him, I'm gonna kill him dead. And we're going to hold him hostage here in hell with me in the grave. And that just didn't work well with him. But Jesus was submitted to Father God. He was submitted to authority. And I believe you and I need to be submitted to authority. We, we submit ourselves to our government. We submit ourselves to one another, to our wives or our spouse, our husbands. One of our callings is to be submitted. We need to be submitted to God. It's something that I do every single day. Romans 12:1, where Paul says, I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, present yourself a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your reasonable service. You submit yourself every day to God, but you also need to submit yourself to your spouse. You need to submit yourself to the authorities. If you're here in America, we are submitted to our government and we do the best we can. Sometimes the government makes some crazy stupid decisions, and you know, if they go against the Word of God, I think we've got biblical standing to where we can resist. But if we are to be law-abiding citizens, we are to abide by the law. And I'm not even going to run after that rabbit because I know there's a lot of people that are passionate about how screwed up everything is and all of that. So I'm not even going to go there. This is a Bible study, not a civics lesson. The next thing I want you to see Jesus doing is being a servant. Jesus did not come to be served, but he came to serve. Jesus taught his disciples this lesson in Matthew after John and James asked— actually, their mom asked that John and James sit at Jesus' right and left hand, and all Jesus' disciples kind of got wrapped around the axle about that, got a little upset, as you might think, and I probably would have too, thinking, "Who's my, your mama's boy? Well, you got your mama talking to Jesus." This is what Jesus, his response, Matthew 20:25, "But Jesus called them to himself and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them, Yet it shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to be great among you, let him be your servant, and whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. Now that is Jesus' whole modus operandi, and you know I love that word. Jesus, he came to die. He came to give his life a ransom for many. And Jesus came and he served humanity by dying on the cross. He came and gave us an example. He showed us the Father. He did so much stuff, but Jesus did not come to be served. Jesus stepped out of heaven and put on flesh and blood to become just like us and to serve you and I. The only way that he could do it is to become a man and to live a perfect life here on earth and to be the spotless Lamb of God. And we talked about this when John declared Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. So Jesus came to give his life, a ransom for many. And it's really amazing how people just deny this free gift. Last thing I want to talk about in this episode is I'm looking at what Jesus did. He served and he put himself under the Father's authority. And I want to show you that Jesus did not get in a hurry. And this is the one that just makes my eyebrow go up every time I am reminded by the Holy Spirit of this fact, that Jesus walked through life. He did not ride in a Maserati or a Ford F-150. He chose to come when things were slow, when most of the farms, if they had a team of oxen, they were wealthy. Most people hand-dug probably their own gardens or their own livelihood. They did it by hand or they had a donkey. The livestock were an asset back in the day. This is when Jesus was walking the earth. This is when God chose to walk on the earth, and he walked almost everywhere he went. Now sometimes he got on in a boat, and now sometimes he walked across the water. Jesus didn't have to be in a boat, but he rode with his disciples because he wanted to spend time with the men that he chose. And this was God. This was God amongst men, and he did not get in a hurry. And I just, as I walk through life, as I drive through life, as— and you know one of my struggles is when I get in traffic and I get all tense and anxious and nervous. I am trying to get better, but I'm just barely getting a little better. Even, even recognizing that I have an issue or a problem with my driving, it's still difficult for me when someone cuts me off. It's difficult for me not to blast them. And I don't know what all that is, but it's something. I am amazed when I start thinking about that God walked everywhere he went. And what that does for me is when I'm reminded of that fact is it slows me down. It slows my pace down I know this world is spinning out of control, and I know it seems to like it's going faster and faster, and all this artificial intelligence is speeding up everybody's decision-making, and all of this mess is going on. But that's— this is a system that we're here to fight. We're to fight this world system, this world order. We are to come with a biblical worldview. I believe that's why I'm here, is just to hold this Bible up and say, look, this is what I'm doing.. And it's— I'm not doing it perfect, but I want to encourage you to just dig into this word. Look at what Jesus did. Jesus was a man's man. He walked with these men. He was a leader among all these people. Multiple hundreds of thousands of people looked up to Jesus. I know that multiple thousands yelled to crucify him, but that's what happens when the mob gets in control. When the mob starts taking over, then everybody loses their dadgum mind. And we can see that played out in multiple different arenas in this world. I don't want to start chasing that rabbit. I really just want to just encourage you to dig in. The reason we're here at this stop is just to kind of look at what Jesus did, how he walked about, how he lived his life, and just to take another look at what God did while he was here on earth. Well, God, I thank you for everything that you've done. Father God, I thank you for sending your Son Jesus. I thank you for coming. And Holy Spirit, I thank you for coming down after Jesus left. You have never left us nor forsaken us. I pray in Jesus' name that you would just start drawing people to yourself and that you would help us to learn what it is you want us to learn before Jesus' return. 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 in the next episode.

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