Jesus was called Beelzebub and told people you are for Me or against Me

Welcome to episode 217.

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 217. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I'm going to continue on the topic of picking a side, and we have talked probably longer than you want to listen about hot or cold. I believe that this is an important lesson that Jesus is trying to teach the church today. Look, we need to be on God's side or we need to be on the world's side, but this middle-of-the-road stuff is going to get you squashed. And I just want to use some examples that Jesus himself used, and then we're going to go to the word of God, which of course is Jesus. And I don't claim to know all of that, but when you look at the Old Testament, that is the word of God. It is written down so that you and I can go into that and we can meditate on that and we can kind of try to apply that to our and that's all I'm here to do. Soapbox moment number, whatever number we're on, 753. You need to be in the Word of God. You need to let the Word of God get into you, and you need to be diligent on how you get after this thing, because there is one true God. And we're gonna talk about some of the problems with the body of Christ, and I'm putting up air quotes, and the church, and it's all about unity, and it's all about choosing sides, I believe. And I just think that we've kind of lost our way our way because we have not fallen in love with the Word of God. If we fall in love with God's Word, which is Jesus and the Bible, we will spend more and more time in it. And I can attest to you, what I used to just fight to try to figure out how I'm gonna read the Bible, now if I don't read the Bible, it is a problem with me. It is a habit that I've formed, and it's a wonderful habit. It is daily bread. I mean, you don't really honestly with your physical body, you very rarely miss a meal. I mean, I would say you call that fasting. When you miss a meal, like if you fast, you do intermittent fasting, I believe is the term, that you miss, say, breakfast, and then you go and eat on a lunch, that you begin your meal, you break the fast around 12 o'clock. Well, you've gone from 8 or 9 in the evening, or 7 or 6, whenever you ate dinner, to then lunch, and then that's a long, prolonged, quote, fast. And so that's called intermittent fasting. And you do that to kind of give your organs, I guess, I haven't really researched it. If you're an intermittent faster and you know all the ins and outs on the deal, don't hit me upside the head with a frying pan because I'm just trying to make an example. You do not miss too many meals. In your body. You, you go daily. I got in a habit— I make a joke all the time when people want to go to lunch, I tell them, hey, I get, I get hungry every day. It just seems like I've gotten into a habit of having to eat every day. So yes, you are going to eat physical food and you are going to fuel for your body. Well, in the same regard, the Bible is the Word of God. It is our daily bread. Jesus, in the Lord's Prayer, give us this day our daily bread. And we've talked about this multiple times. But the daily bread, I believe, is the Bible. That is the manna that has come down from heaven. Jesus himself has come down from heaven and he showed us the way, and he's now back at the right hand of the Father. And we're not going to go into all of that because I want to get into our lesson, but it is important. And again, I'm going to jump off my soapbox, but if you have just stumbled onto this podcast We talk about getting into the word of God. We talk about letting the word of God get into us. It's an incorruptible seed that we plant. We've got to learn how to plant it. We got to have the proper soil. That's the Kingdom of God lesson. It's just a bunch of stuff. And when people wonder, why is Christianity so difficult? Well, there's a lot of moving parts, and it's really not— it's simple, it's just not easy, and it's not without a battle because we have an enemy. We actually have 3 enemies: your flesh, the punk, and the world system. And we're gonna— on this episode, we're probably not gonna get all in the middle of all 3 of those, but we're gonna talk about the punk. And we're gonna go to Matthew 12, and we're gonna start in 22. Again, if this is your first time, you are going to get to hear my superior reading skills. And if you're a frequent flyer, Get ready, cuz here they come. We're starting at 12:22. Then one was brought to him who was demon-possessed, blind and mute, and he healed him, so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw. And all the multitudes were amazed and said, "Could this be the Son of David?" Now when the Pharisees heard it, they said, "This fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons." But Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or how can No one can enter a strongman's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strongman, and then he will plunder his house. He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters abroad. Now I know that's a lot of scripture, but it's not gonna hurt us. And I want to make our point here: the punk is coming against us. It's coming against reading the Word of God. He does not want you to read the Bible. He does not want you to meditate on his word. He wants to keep you distracted. He's doing a wonderful job with me. I've got an issue sometimes with little shiny objects. I feel like a fish sometimes, and I just go after stupid stuff, and I'm like, what am I doing? And so that's one of the reasons I have a hard time being on social media. I know a lot of you probably are on it. I'm just not good enough to just turn it off in like 10 minutes. Because I find myself, I'll look up, and I started— I talked to you before about when I got on Twitter, and it was way back in the day. I created a Twitter username and all that good stuff, and then I started going into this, whatever it was, 120 characters or whatever that is. I, it's been so long since I've even done it. In a short period of time, I had like 7,200 followers. I was trying to create a following. I was trying to do some things, and And I just found it was a colossal waste of time for me, that I just got so distracted. And I looked up one day and I had been in Twitter for an hour or two. I can't remember, it was such a long time ago. But it was like, oh my gosh. And the reality came that, you know, you've only got 24 hours in a day. And if you spend one or two of those hours looking at a Twitter feed, I mean, you can't get that time back. I don't know if I can go back into like a Facebook. I would just have to set a timer timer. I mean, I'm just telling you, I'm just not that good to where I can just know, hey, I can answer 2 or 3 things. I get down a rabbit hole and I poke my head out and it's like 25 minutes later and I still— I'm just getting out. I got all dirt from being in this rabbit hole. I'm like, golly. And so I just have a hard time with social media, and I guess I'm just trying to figure this thing out because I know That's where the majority of people are. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. I mean, all of these places, I have a presence on all of them, but it's not very strong presence. There's people that do it so much better than me, but I'm learning, and I just got to set boundaries. But in this case, we have an evil, and this evil— and the Pharisees actually called Jesus out and says, hey, the only reason he can do that— because Jesus was drawing a crowd. And so they're kind of prideful and they're, you know, wanting to be the top dog. And they're saying, well, the only reason he can do this is because of Beelzebub, which is the head of the demons, or Satan, or whatever. It's a proper name. And they call him out. Well, then Jesus says, hey, you need to pick a side. And that is really what I want to talk about, is the last verse is in 12:30. And he He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters abroad. You and I both know, if you're here on this podcast, that we have declared Jesus Christ Lord. And I'm just assuming, I'm making the assumption that you have— you are a Christian, or if you're not, you're at least researching the idea of maybe becoming a Christian. Jesus pretty much said But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you. So he's pretty much announcing, hey, I'm doing this, I am God. And that's one of the things that just irritated them Pharisees and them Sadducees and all of those muckety-mucks of the Jewish tradition. You know, the people that walked around in the robes and wanted all the best seats. And all of those people just got irritated when anyone— well, actually, when Jesus declared himself God. In fact, that's blasphemy. And so that's what a lot of times you'd see them— there's 3 or 4 times that they picked up rocks and was gonna try to stone him because he had put himself on the same level as God. And we know that he was God, but he's walking around as a man. In their defense, they're like, like, this is just some dude. That's walking around and he's turning up this apple cart. We had this thing all in order. Everybody was following us. Everybody listened to us. And now all of a sudden they're not listening to us. They're looking at Jesus and he's got these miracles and he's ringing this bell. He's got everyone's attention. He's turning everything upside down and we need to do something. They pretty much called him out. And Jesus said, look, every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. And every city or every house divided against itself will not stand. This is what's going on. And I, I'm going to turn all of these teachings— probably the next 3 or 4 lessons is probably going to be a little more about unity, because I think that is a huge, huge deal. And if you can't tell that Satan or this world system or all of these demons or whatever, they're trying to come together and just divide us— if you cannot see that you're not looking or you're not tuned in at all, because I don't even listen to the news and I can just feel all the divisiveness. You know, you're either a vaxxer or you're a non-vaxxer or an unvaxxed. I don't even know. You're vaccinated or you're not unvaccinated, or you're either a minority or you're white. And if you're white, white privileged or something. I mean, again, I'm really not all that dialed into everything going on because it just makes me— because I can feel myself when I get involved in all that garbage, then I can feel myself falling in and getting anxious and nervous, and the peace of God that I have that rests on my life, it kind of flees. And it's not like God walks away, it's like I start absorbing some of this energy, this negative energy from the world, and I really honestly don't want nothing to do with it. Now that don't mean that I'm so super spiritual that I'm no earthly good. Really try real hard If I fast something, it's usually fasting news. And, you know, people at my office, when I go— I'm in real estate— and when people start talking about things that have gone around in our city or state or whatever, and I say, "Really?" and they're like, "Oh, you got to be kidding me, this has been going on for a week." And I'm like, "Look, I haven't watched the news in months." So I just honestly have no idea what's going on, and I'm I'm probably not all that informed, but I'm not misinformed either. I don't know where to put myself on that scale. I honestly try really hard not to worry about what's going on in the world. Jesus said that he would protect me. I'm not an idiot, and I don't go around, you know, whistling downtown where people may or may not have my best interest in mind. I don't go whistling and say, you know, I'm in the money. Or have $100 bills in my back pocket sticking out. I'm not an idiot. I mean, people would probably argue that. I try to be prudent and I try to do the right thing and I try to stay in my lane, I guess, is the best I know to do. And I'm kind of boring. So I mean, I don't do a whole lot. I do know I'm not nervous and anxious like a lot of people that listen to the news all the time. And I'll turn it on every now and then, But I'm telling you, when I do it, it takes me forever to get that out of my head. I've just found that it's easier for me if I just stay in the Word and then just do my thing and try to treat people like I want to be treated. And I know I've rambled a little bit, but I've kind of setting this thing up, this unity, because we got to pick a side. And Jesus, I want you to see this example that he was called out again I understand that I'm so far right that I'm probably wrong. I'm very conservative. When I see the liberals, and I'm putting air quotes up, but some of the Democrats in Washington where they're just yelling and screaming and accusing people like myself of doing things that we're not doing, we try to, quote, defend ourselves. We're not doing that. Come to find out 6 months or a year and a half later, well, the people that were screaming and hollering and saying we're doing that, they were actually doing it. And then projecting what they were doing onto us. And it's that again, reason number 57 why I don't get involved in politics or get involved in the news. It just fires me up and I get all irritated. But I need to stop right here. Let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for your word. God, I thank you for coming and showing us the way, the truth, and the life. God, you are the Word, and you are the Truth, and help us not to ever forget it. I'm thinking of right now John 10:10, Lord, when we're picking a side. You said the thief comes only to steal, to kill, and destroy, but you have come that we may have life and have it more abundantly. Lord, that it can't be any more clear. The bad guy, the thief, the punk steals, kills, and destroys, You give life and abundant life. God, I pick life. And we're going to talk about that in the next episode. But God, I 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.