When you pick a side you must choose to be a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness

Welcome to episode 219, 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 219. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I am continuing on the pick a side mentality, and I don't exactly know which part of the mountain of God or the Christian discipleship, whatever I'm calling it now, it's all just a map that shows the journey from the beginning, point A to point B. And I'll remind you that that map is accessible. I will put a link to it in the show notes. It is really just so that I can kind of picture the journey that we're on, and I want you to be able to see that this is— life is not a specific event more than it's just a journey. It is just a walk, and I was going to say a walk in the park. It is no walk in the park. Life is a journey. Life is a battle. I'm excited to be a part of it. I have just recently gotten back from a vacation. I haven't had one in over a year. It was something I needed, and we went to Colorado, and I just want to shout out to a couple people there, uh, friends of mine that we got to visit with, and my stepbrother that I hadn't seen in years. So I really did enjoy the time up there. I needed it. It was a good rest. And it's beautiful country. It doesn't look anything like Louisiana. Louisiana is so flat, and you go up there and everything is a hill and a mountain, and it's gorgeous. Well, enough of that. I— God has made an incredible world, and I am just blessed to be a part of it. And I enjoy going and seeing different places, and I just wanted to give a shout out to my friends George and Donna and Jay and Christina. I— it was a good time, and we had a great wedding. Some friends of ours, their son got married. Jesus said that there would be marrying and people giving in marriage. So, you know, we are going about our life, and I kind of had a thought, and I don't know if this was the pizza or indigestion or it was just a thought. I think we ought to have— and this is kind of how I pictured— I think we ought to have our eyes to the sky and our hands on the plow. And if that makes sense, you know, we are not to look behind us. Paul said, forgetting those things which are behind, I press forward. To the upward call of Christ Jesus in my life. I think we need to get on with helping build God's kingdom. This is not yours and my kingdom. This is the kingdom of God that we are building, and I think that if you and I would just get after it and build God's kingdom, that he would bless us in our world. And I think that it has the kingdom of God all over it, that Matthew 6:33, which we quote often, seek first the the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. If you want things, I believe that you need to enter in to the way God's doing it. And I want to go back to picking a side. I've kind of gone off on a little tangent of what I was doing, and this, this podcast isn't about me, but I do want it to be personal. I do want you to know that I'm just a regular guy. I do the same kind of things y'all do. I go on vacations when I can. I have a family. I have children. I mean, I have friends. We— everybody should be engaged in their community. They should have friends and family, and that's just the way God made us. God made us to be in relationships, and God, perfect Father God, created us to have relationship, and he wants to have a relationship with you. He created us to have a relationship with him. That is his whole reason for creating us. It is so that he— you and I can have a relationship with Father God. And when that relationship was busted or broken in the fall at Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve bit from the forbidden fruit, then that severed the relationship. He actually kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. The rest of the Bible is pretty much Talking about how God was trying to bring the relationship back. If I was God, I'm not sure that I would write all of the stuff that was written in the Bible, but I'm not God, thank God. I am just a man, and God chose to put every one of those stories, all of the different ups and downs in the Bible, to show you and I that people are people and they're gonna mess up. We're all kind of jacked up a little bit. Well, enough of all that. Let's talk about the picking a side, and I want to go to what Paul has talked about in Romans. And there's many places where you can kind of see that there is a good and evil side, and there's not a middle of the road. And that, and that's the whole point of the last 4 or 5 episodes that I wanted to teach on, is that there's just not a neutral. There's just no gray. It's either black or it's white. It's either good or it's evil. And God pretty much said through Paul that we're not warring against flesh and blood. So flesh and blood are God's kids, they are his children. Now, a lot of them are deceived. A lot of them that have not accepted Jesus their Lord and Savior, I would argue, are deceived. They're in deception. Some may come out of that deception, some may not. I pray for everybody that I know, anybody that's listening to this episode I pray that if you do not have a personal relationship with Jesus, I pray that you would just dig in to the Word of God, and I would start in the Gospel of John. I would just start in there and ask the Holy Spirit, if you are really alive, if you are really a true God, help me understand this Bible. And don't start at Genesis. It's okay to read Genesis, but I would start— if you've never really read the Bible I would start in the Gospel of John, and I would ask Father God, I would ask Jesus, I'd ask the Holy Spirit, "Help me to understand what you want me to know about your word." And I would just go dig into that, and then just see what God would tell you. And I would take my time, I would read it, I would dig in. I just know that God will open up his word to you. He is not a respecter of persons. He opened it up to me, and I can promise you, if you knew me, if you saw me on the street, I am just a nobody. I'm not all that special, but I do love Jesus. And if you would just dig into his word, this is your soapbox moment, if you would just dig into the word of God, I believe that God, and I'm pretty confident that God would allow you to see what he wanted you to see. And I've just, with this one caveat, if you are proud, if you are arrogant, and if you think you know everything, you're probably not gonna understand the word because God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. But if you go into God's word and say, look, I don't understand everything and I'm struggling right now, and God, if you're out there, help me understand your word. I think he's going to open that word wide open to you. You're going to love being inside the Bible. Now, you are going to have opposition, and things aren't going to go all that smoothly. I mean, this isn't a perfect world. I'm not living the perfect life, but I do walk around with the peace of God, and it is a real thing. And I find myself non-stressed most of the time. I, I mean, I still get a little stressed out on things, but for the most part I walk around and I feel pretty peaceful. I'm not worried or nervous about just about anything, but I don't do a lot of news. If you're just tuning in, you'll, you'll probably figure out that I'm a little bit odd because I don't watch a lot of news. I don't get tied up into everything that's going on in this world. I think this world system is one of the enemies, and we need to take on a biblical worldview. And the only way to get that is to stay in the Bible. So I'm having to stay in the Bible more than I stay into the news and into all of the social media, which probably makes me a little bit unique. But I want to go to Romans real quick, and I want to start in Romans 6:13. And again, I'm going to show off my superior reading skills, and we're going to read a lot of the word, and then I'll come back and we'll talk about it a little bit. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourself 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 to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey? You are that one's slaves whom you obey. Whether of sin leading to death or of 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 became sins of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And I know that's a lot of reading, but I just wanted you to see, instead of the middle-of-the-road stuff where there's neutral or I'm not a slave to sin, there's good and there's evil. There is God, there is the thief. I call him the punk. But the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. But God comes that they may have life and have it more abundantly. That is John 10:10. That is Jesus giving the two different sides. There are only two sides in this equation, and it is not your neighbor. You are not on different teams. There are good and there are evil, and evil are Satan and demons and all of those spiritual hosts of wickedness. Those are our enemies. Those sons of God, if you will, the demons, the, the spiritual beings that God created. Like, he— I think that God created, and this is for a different episode, but these demons, these started off as sons of God. Satan was not created to be evil. Satan was created— Lucifer, he was brilliant, he was perfect. He was created to be a son of God in the spirit realm. And he fell. Satan had free will just like you and I have free will, and he chose to use his free will to turn against God. I'm not going to go into it on this episode, but we are now either slaves of sin or we're slaves to righteousness. One or the other. That again, we're going to say, pick a side. And if you commit a sin, I believe that Satan hooks you. That don't mean you're going to go to hell, That just means that you're going to be hooked. You're going to be pulled in the wrong direction, and you're not going to want to continue on that path. Now, I want to remind you that I make a horrible Holy Spirit. I did not write one word of this Bible. This is the Apostle Paul that was writing to the Roman church, or the Roman Christians, and he was telling them, hey, there is one or the other side. You're either going to be a slave to sin or you're going to be a slave to righteousness. And Romans 6:16 pretty much spells it out: 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 of obedience leading to righteousness? That is the side. If you want to pick a side, either be a slave to sin or of obedience to God, which leads to righteousness. It's either sin or righteousness. There is no middle of the road. There's no middle ground. We're probably going to talk about this a little in the next episode, and then we're going to kind of turn it into some kind of unity message. I know, some kumbaya. I can kind of feel it bubbling up in my spirit. But we need, as the church, we need to unify. We need to find something that we can rally around. We need to become one in the church. We don't need to be a bunch of different pieces of this body, this just disjointed body of Christ. We need to be the body of Christ all working together in a normal functioning body. And we're going to talk about that in the next episode. But I wanted to just kind of highlight what the Apostle Paul— he's using the, the slave terminology back in the day. He's wanting you to see that you are not your own person. In the spirit realm, you are going to be either a slave to sin or you're going to be obedient to God unto righteousness. It's, it's all about who you're going to obey. You're going to be obedient to God or you're going to obey Satan in the sin. You're caught either way. You're on one team or the other. If you are caught in a sin, God's not approved. And we've talked about this before. God wants you to have fun, but he knows that there are things that can cause harm that you and I can't see. I believe when we get to heaven, we will see how big a deal the spirit realm really is. Because we are caught here in the flesh with our 5 senses, we go by what we see, taste, hear, smell, touch. We're using our 5 senses instead of faith. And the just, the justified, shall live by faith. I'm not going to get on that topic. There's a lot of moving parts in this Christian walk. And I just wanted to highlight this one thing, that we're either gonna be a slave to sin or we're gonna be obedient unto righteousness. We're on a side, we're on one side or the other. And if you're caught in sin, I just wanna encourage you that repentance is real and that if you would just repent and ask God to help you, he will close that door, he will unhook you if you're hooked into a sin. And it's just changing your mind and it's just changing directions. That's all repentance is. It's a fancy-pants Christian word for just changing your mind. Look, this is not working out. You just got to make a decision and say, God, help me with this. And then just like that, if you have been saved, if you're a child of the King and you have declared Jesus your Lord and Savior, you are released from the sin. You have been unhooked. Just start getting into the Word and you become obedient unto righteousness, and you just get after God again. It's not— it's as simple as that. The Bible is clear, all have sinned. We're all gonna make mistakes. We're all gonna mess up, but you just don't roll around and wallow in it. You just pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, you ask Father God, "Hey, I screwed up again." I do it all the time. Trust me, it's not a big deal. I wish I could tell you that I never mess up, but I occasionally mess up. And when I do, I say, "God, I'm sorry, it's me again. I'm sorry, I got— I messed up on this deal. Forgive me. Help me to correct this." and let's go. Let's pray. God, I thank you so much for your Holy Spirit. I thank you for your word. I thank you for this listener, this person that has made it to the end of this episode. God, I pray that if they have something in their life that's holding them back and they just know it, Holy Spirit, help them to repent. Help them to change their mind on this thing and know that you are loving and kind and gentle and that you will shut the door on the enemy and allow them to get healed back up and to just get back into your word. God, I pray that you would just continue to lead and guide and direct me and this listener into your word, into what you need us to do for your kingdom. 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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