Justification Stop one on the Mountain of God justified by faith part 4

Welcome to episode 173.

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 173. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I want to use episode 173 to talk about what I thought I was going to talk about in the last episode, and that is the battle that we have with our flesh. And we have— there's one of the enemies that we've talked about. We're still on just— justified by faith, but the justification step is we have to understand that our soul and our spirit has been justified, just as if we had never sinned. Our soul and spirit— when our body dies, our soul and our spirit man will be present with the Lord. And we have to understand that when we get into Romans 6, 7, 8, and 9, it starts talking about how we are— we are to crucify the flesh because we are constantly having to battle our flesh. And that is one of the enemies that we constantly have to fight, and we have to fight against our five senses. And it's just a battle that it's never gonna end. We're never gonna put our five senses— and you're never gonna not need your five senses. When you're driving down the road, you need at least three of them. You need the sense of touch, sight, and you need to be able to hear. You may not need smell and taste while you're driving. I want you to be carnally minded. And I know we talk about me and my driving problem, and I know that you're probably playing— praying for me, and I appreciate it. There's things in this world, because we are in a three-dimensional world, there are things that we have to do with our five senses. But what I want to talk about, and what I thought I was going to talk about last episode, was how the kingdom of God suffers violence and the violent take it by force. And we're going to back to that scripture, and that's in Matthew 11:11. Assuredly I say to you, among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist, but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force. And I have got a shirt, and I know you probably get tired of hearing about it, but my clothing line, but it says, "It's time to get violent in the spirit." And I believe— and it's got a little guy on there praying— but I believe we have to be aggressive in our spirit, and we've got to understand that the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead is living on the inside of us, and that we have to take this power and we need to push it into this physical realm. There is that fourth dimension that I was talking about, and it's the spirit realm And it's when Jesus was translated, or when he was taken up, I don't think he went 13, 14 billion trillion light years away. I think he just went to that next realm and it kind of went up in the clouds, and then maybe God just pulled him into the spirit realm. And I think, and I don't understand how it works, and don't ask me the question, but somehow it is right here with us. It is, it is functioning, and it's kind of overlapping. If you can imagine how the spirit realm is overlapping slapping. And as you walk through this life, you have the kingdom of God on the inside of you, but you have to use faith to go over into that spirit realm, which is right around here. We're walking with it, and we go in there and we appropriate those things that the Bible says— that the grace, the redemption— we go over in there and we go get it. And in order to fight that— and I, and I— we're going to go to Romans right now. And it's in Romans 6:13. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law but under grace. What then, shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Certainly not! Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey You are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or obedience leading to righteousness. But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered, and having been set free from sin, you become slaves of righteousness. I want to stop there, and I want to remind you that we are three parts: spirit, soul, and body. We are built in God's image. Remember, God is a Trinity— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So our flesh is the thing that we're fighting. But this is what Paul is saying, is when we died to ourselves, when we accepted Jesus, we became slaves to righteousness. And he says in the next verse that I'm using human terms. He's trying to get you to picture you're on one side or the other. If you start accepting the temptation, if you, if you hear the knock at the door and it's Satan and he's tempting you to— if you're driving down the road to get angry, you throw Satan's yoke on you and you react to that temptation, and then it becomes sin. So now you're hooked into sin, and the only way in my mind to get out of that is to repent, and that's to turn away. Repentance just means to turn away from, and then you ask for forgiveness. And then I think in the spirit realm, God breaks that yoke and you're no longer yoked, you're no longer bound to sin. And that's why— and it's a struggle, and that's why it's difficult, because a lot of times you don't even know you're hooked. It's like I, I've seen like a little fish hook that's so sharp it goes into your flesh and you don't even feel it hooking you. So you just got to understand that your flesh is always going to battle and it's always going to try to side with evil. And I'm telling you, that is where Satan is running around, and that is why it's so screwed up in this world. And it looks like we're walking on the ceiling where good is called evil and evil is called good. If you've ever wondered why in the world is— are these people doing that, because they are not following after righteousness. They are not looking at the word of God. In fact, they scoff at it. They think that we're crazy. They think that we're stupid. And a lot of times you start looking at the body of Christ, and it just fires me up when I start talking about it, and I'm gonna go off on a tangent and chase this rabbit. We have the sword of the Spirit, you and I. It is the Word of God. There are still a lot of people in the body of Christ that the only time they pull their sword out is to cut other believers up. They take their sword and they take this Bible and they just start beating the fire out of other believers. I'm telling you, none of us have this thing all figured out. Jesus did, and he walked through this world perfect. But you and I aren't Jesus, and we have got the Holy Spirit, and most of us, we go, part of what my struggle is a lot of times, I'm not always asking God, hey, should I talk about this? Or hey, should I do this? Or hey, should I walk this way? I just have that attitude, and it's an adult attitude of, hey, I got this. You know, I've been doing this for 20-some years. I got this, God. And so I just start walking, and I forget to ask God, hey, is that a step you want me to take? And I don't mean we gotta ask God every single step that we take, every thought we have. We have— we need to take our thoughts under subjection. What we need to do is we need to understand, we need to be in the word enough to know when we're going against the word of God. And that's my point. If we're doing this with a sincere heart and we go against the word of God, the Holy Spirit is going to come out and say, you know, he's going to nudge us back because he's a gentleman. Greg Ryan, that's— and I just know, I just know that I've screwed up. I can't tell you, oh, that was God talking to me. And I mean, my conscience Something inside of me knows, hmm, I shouldn't have said that, or something inside of me says, oh, that, that just, that wasn't right. And so then I start going back and thinking and settle down, slow down, and go, what did I just say? Why did I just say that? And do I need to apologize? Do I need to do this? And so that's called meditating, and that's knowing the word and understanding that, you know, there's something besides me and it's the Holy Spirit that's guiding me. And so when I feel that little tweak in my spirit that says, "Hey, you kind of screwed up," then I go back and I either apologize or I just change course. What I would like to have happen is us take our sword, and when we see something in the flesh, our flesh, that we need to cut out— remember, Jesus said, "Why are you trying to get the speck out of your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own eye?" remove the plank out of your eye so that you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye. And Jesus was just saying, look, it's very easy to pick apart somebody else's Christian walk. It's very easy to go, oh, that's wrong, or oh, that's that, or that. We're not supposed to judge one another. What we should be is fruit inspectors. And we've talked about this: does he have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness? And self-control? Does he have the fruit of the Spirit? Because if the fruit of the Spirit is coming out, there's going to be evidence of someone being loving and kind and gentle. Maybe not all of those, because I struggle with some of those, and I'm sure you do too, but we're working on it. And we don't need another brother or sister in Christ to tell you or I what we're doing wrong. We've got the Holy Spirit. Now, that don't mean that we don't need correction, and iron sharpens iron, and I understand that. But someone that takes their whole ministry of taking their sword out and cutting other brothers and sisters up in Christ. It's got to stop. We need to take our sword out and we need to look at how we can cut all this crap off of you and I. And I know I'm not supposed to say crap, but I say it. This is what we need to do. We need to use our sword to pull the stuff off of our flesh, to pull that board out of our own eye, and we need to use the sword to cut up the enemy. In our lives and in other people's lives. And we need the sword to cut up the world system. And anything that needs— we are to be salt. Anything that needs salt dumped on it, we need to dump it on ourselves, because salt kills. If you've ever just dumped a big old pile of salt on anything, any plant, anything, it kills. A little bit of salt will preserve, and a little bit less salt, if you just sprinkle it on your food, It gives flavor. And Jesus told us we were supposed to be the salt of the earth. If we ever have to pull our salt shaker out, it is only just to make it— season it a little bit around other people. If we need a little bit more salt, we dump— we put some salt on us to preserve our bodies and to preserve us. But if we need something dead, we do not need to pull our salt out and dump it on anybody else. If we need something dead, we need to pull that salt out and we need to dump it on the thing in us that needs killing. And it's just that simple. We need to figure out this word of God. We need to figure out that we're not battling against flesh and blood. And we really need to figure out that we do not need to fight against the church. We need to fight the enemies. And the enemies, as I've declared it, and I'm not going to back down on this, we have 3 enemies. It's our flesh, It's the world system, and it's Satan. That, if you pull your sword out, that's what you're going to be cutting up. You do not need to pull your sword out and stab another believer. What you do is you pray for that believer. You, you pull them out. If you see them stumbling, or if you think that they're making a mistake, you call them on it, but you do it in love and just ask them, hey, what scripture are you going on? Or, oh, okay. And you don't have to get in an argument, or, you know, the apologetics part of it where you just got to just get down in the weeds with theological definition and all of that stuff. God, you got to just allow God to be God, and you need to let somebody be that person. And I'm off of my soapbox, and I apologize, but it is firing me up to see people fighting the body of Christ. We are to be in unity. We are not to be in division. And that's the punk. He divides us, and he tries to get us to break this thing apart. House divided cannot stand. So we need to come together as a church. I don't care what you call yourself. If you're reading the Bible and if you're following Jesus, I call you a brother or a sister. Well, let's pray. God, I thank you so much for your word. Holy Spirit, I thank you for never leaving us nor forsaking us. And the sword of the Spirit, Lord, is your Bible, and it says that we shall know the truth and the truth shall make us free. Lord, it's our knowing and it's our personal understanding of the truth, not pointing out what other people are doing wrong. Holy Spirit, that's your You lead people into all truth. That is your job, is to guide, lead and guide people. Lord, help us to be more like you, but help us to work on ourselves first. God, I thank you. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thanks for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.

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