How Can I Know God Wants Me in His Kingdom? - Purity 1331

To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of a dark cloud hovering over an unknown body of water as the last light of day paints the sky orange on the horizon comes to us from an unknown Facebook friend who shared this scene on social media on or around April 23rd, 2021. With the contrasting clear blue sky above this murky scene below, I have to wonder if this was smoke on the water, or perhaps some mammoth dark spirit moving to and fro on the earth, à la Satan in the book of Job, just looking for someone to devour. Anyway, it is Saturday, and no dark cloud or demonic entity is going to steal my joy today, because even though my shift at tour has me working today, I am choosing to look beyond that to anticipate my joyful reunion with my beloved wife, Tammy Lynn, at our countryside home in Easton at workday's end. While I know we can never really know what we will encounter on a daily basis, I am praying that the Lord will bring me to my intended destination unscathed. And while I can't guarantee that positive outcome, I am placing my faith in God to bring me to a good place. One way or the other. These themes of the demonic spiritual forces of darkness present in our world and our hopes for God to protect and guide us in a way we should go, um, are at the forefront of my mind this morning because I received some feedback on the YouTube version of my Bondage Breaker class from 2021 that asked the question of how we could be sure and confident of our salvation when our behaviors and attitudes in life clearly show that we are not sinless, get angry continually, and are not always kind and gentle. I provided the following response to try to assure, or to answer that concern, that utilized wisdom from Dr. Neil Anderson's work. I shared from the Steps to Freedom in Christ, and this was from Anderson's Steps to Freedom in Christ, Assurance of Salvation. Paul wrote, if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Do you believe God the Father raised Jesus from the dead? Did you invite Jesus to be your Lord and Savior? Then you are a child of God, and nothing can separate you from the love of Christ. And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life And this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son does not have the life. Your heavenly Father has sent his Holy Spirit to bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God. You are sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise. The Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth. I then commented, the fact that you are concerned is a good sign that you may indeed you indeed may be a Christian. Uh, Ephesians 2:8-9 says, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. We are not saved by our works. We are saved by grace through faith. If you put your faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior, you are saved. However, it doesn't mean you are living the life God God calls you to live as a Christian. That's what we do after we are saved, our sanctification. And we are all a work in progress, so don't beat yourself up for not being perfect. However, keep seeking the Lord and turning from the world's ways and follow Jesus instead. And then I advised him to keep doing the study, the Bondage Breaker, on, on YouTube, sharing the link to the playlist for that, or to check out the Freedom in Court, uh, the Freedom in Christ course on YouTube, also sharing the link for that on the MT for Christ 247 channel, uh, to learn about who you are in Christ and to believe it and then live it. And then I finished with walk in the Spirit, you will know peace beyond understanding. God bless you, M.t. Clark. I thought my comments addressed the issue of assurance of salvation, but now I, I have reviewed their question. I realized that they also asked about how they can be confident that God wants them in his kingdom despite their faults. Uh, to which I would say that God wants you in his kingdom because he loves you. Jesus tells us in John 3:16 that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. And in John 6:44, that no one can come to me, Jesus, unless the Father who sent me, Jesus, draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. In these two verses, we can see God loves us and sent Jesus to save us, and that nobody comes to put their faith in Jesus unless God specifically draws us and reveals to us the truth of the gospel. The fact that we put our faith in Jesus proves that God wants us in his kingdom, and he does this and loves us fully knowing our less-than-perfect state. For Romans 5:8-11 tells us, but God demonstrates his own love toward us in the— in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if we were enemies, we were reconciled— for if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we now have received the reconciliation. So be assured that God wants us in his kingdom. God loves us, and he has reconciled us to him through Jesus. And as for any feelings we have to the contrary, I would stand by my original advice to repent and to follow God with the way you live your life. When we don't know who we are in Christ or are denying our new identity in Christ by living contrary to who we are in Christ, it's no wonder we have no peace. We are living in the flesh and denying what God says about us. So the antidote for our doubts and feelings of anger is to renew our minds through the word of God, to accept our new life in Christ, and to to change our ways to be consistent with it. A double-minded person is unstable in all their ways. So we can't claim the kingdom and live like a devil— like the devil. We can't keep denying that God has changed us and then wonder why we don't feel changed. So stop agreeing with Satan, who accuses the brethren day and night, and agree with God, who encourages you to have faith that he has made you new and start living like the child of God you are. But don't think it's something you must perform. Believe that you've already— you already are new and live according to it. Repent and believe the gospel about you specifically. I know this world deceives us into believing we must earn everything or that we must perform to be approved. God has given us a whole new existence as a free gift the moment we believed in Jesus as Lord and Savior. Our next step after receiving that precious gift is to enjoy it and to live it out with gratitude and joy. So keep walking and talking with God and let Him show you who you are and to guide you into the person He created you to be. Today's Bible verses come to us from the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling by John G. Cruis. This morning's meditation verses come from the section on death and eternal life, and today's verses are Romans 8:35-39. And the word of God says, who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, for your sake we have been— we are being killed all the day long. We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Today's verses fall under the 13th point of our Counseling Reference Guide's resource section on death and eternal life. That 13th point is: Nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. Today's verses assure us that even death cannot separate us from the love of God. God is love, and he chose us to live with him forever. And the only thing that can prevent us from experiencing the joy of that reality is our doubt, disbelief, and our choosing to live in the flesh—our sin. If you need more faith in this simple truth, obey the principles in Romans 10:17 that tells us, "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Need more faith? Listen to God's Word and agree with it, and take your new increased faith to the next logical step revealed in Romans 12:1-2 that tells us to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. This passage points to a transformed life that results from surrendering our bodies and minds to believing what God says about us and living according to it. Assurance of God's love is experienced when we live with Him, with and for Him. So Don't let your doubt, disbelief, or sin get in the way of experiencing the peace, love, and joy that results from knowing the love of, of God and living a righteous life in harmony with him. As always, I invite all to go to mtforchrist.org, where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist our brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we continue sharing from According to Your Word. Morning and Evening Through the New Testament by Stephen F. Alford. And, uh, in Alford's devotional, he, he prompts us to read a chapter of scripture from the New Testament every day. Today's reading would be Acts 2, and from Acts 2, he shares a portion of Acts 2:39, which says, for the promise is to you. And Stephen Alford writes, the promise of the filling of the Holy Spirit was not for the early apostles only. This very verse clearly indicates that the promise is for as many as the Lord our God shall call. If the promise to me is the same as the early disciples, it follows that the power for witness that they had should also be my power. The Apostle Paul teaches later in his epistles that it is every Christian's responsibility to be filled with the Spirit. Ephesians 5:18. The Lord Jesus taught before he left this earth, if you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. Luke 11:13. And Alfred ends his devotional entry by praying, Lord, Teach me how to claim this promise rightly, that I may be useful to you. Amen. Amen. And yes, we have the Holy Spirit the moment we put our faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior. His indwelling presence comes to live within us. It makes us spiritually alive, quickens our spirits, as the word is said, and You know, basically He leads us into all truth. And the truth that usually comes after we put our faith in Jesus is, yes, we have a lot of sin in our life. And that sin would make us, you know, doubt whether or not, wow, did I actually become a Christian or not? Because look at me, I'm still acting pretty sinful. I still feel pretty bad about myself. Well, you probably feel worse now that you're a Christian because the Holy Spirit's going to convict you of your sin. And that conviction is not to condemn, to make you feel guilty or bad or sad, but is intended to make you repent. Now we have to be careful because of the spiritual forces of darkness are also active in the world. They will, and they will pour condemnation on us. You know, Ephesians indicates that the fiery darts of the evil one can be put out by the Shield of Faith, that indicates that they can put those fiery darts or thoughts in your head that, yeah, you're no good, you're nothing, you're, you're not really a Christian, you're fat, you're ugly, you're stupid, you're evil. You know, these condemning thoughts. And now you might think that's your own negative self-talk, and it could be, but it could also be arrows from the evil one. In my experience, I learned that a lot of the negative You know, what I thought was low self-esteem was partially me beating myself up, but it was also spiritual forces of darkness. As I went through the Steps to Freedom in Christ and suddenly there was silence in my mind. There was all that heaviness and that depression, the anger, and all the negative condemning thoughts about myself, the belief that I was criminal-minded, that I was an evil person, they stopped. There was silence. There's a moment of clarity, as you might say. But they didn't— those thoughts, you know, those thoughts were gone in a significant way, showing me that I had been set free. And it was after that that I could live a Christian life increasingly with more and more success. I had attained sobriety before the Steps to Freedom in Christ, but I was really white-knuckling it in terms of the temptation and a lot of negative thoughts and lustful thoughts at that. But after the Steps to Freedom in Christ, I, I could believe the gospel that I was saved and that I had been changed and I was a new creation in Christ and that I had already been set free. I just had to live according to it. That's what I'm talking about. Believe it. You know, it sounds trite, but if you believe it, you can receive it. But you also might have to resolve your personal spiritual conflicts by repenting of your sin, cutting off the influences of the occult, and forgiving others. You know, the Steps to Freedom in Christ leads you through 7 steps to resolve all those issues. Because if you haven't resolved those issues, they might, you know, that gives the enemy a foothold in your life to afflict you. So we recommend the Steps to Freedom in Christ very highly. That's why we put the Bondage Breaker, Victory Over the Darkness, and Steps to Freedom in Christ course on a podcast and on our YouTube channel. So if you don't know these teachings, you need them. And you not only need to know what they say, you need to perform, you need to go through perform. You have to go through, you have to pray through the Steps to Freedom in Christ and agree that the Lord will help you and set you free from all the past and the bitterness of unforgiveness, your rebellion, your pride, your sin, your sexual immorality, your ancestral curses. All of it gets, gets taken care of in a prayerful repentance process when you do to do it. So we recommend that highly. Freedom in Christ Ministries, ficm.org, is the place you can go to check out Neil Anderson's stuff beyond what I provide in my simple little blog and podcast. So I know the freedom, and it's increasingly set me free. So it didn't happen all at once. Some of these battles had to be fought and continue to be fought. My food addiction, for instance, is the current struggle. But this is after alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual immorality has been defeated. That's freedom, okay? And you can say, wow, he still eats sweets, but, you know, yeah, not recently though. So we're going to stand on the 5 days of freedom that we have with no sweets or carbs, really significant, you know, abusive. And we're going to continue to walk forward. And see what we can do about that. So we encourage you to seek out your freedom in Christ, seek out your identity in Christ, and live according to it, because that's the way, that's the way of peace. You know, the walk in the Spirit, you get peace, love, joy, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, patience, and self-control. If you live according to the world, you don't get those things. You get depression, anger, bitterness. Blessed, you know. So, uh, go with the Spirit and you'll find peace. Anyway, uh, I'm gonna pray and move along with my day. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. We thank you so much for the freedom you've given us, and we thank you for the assurance of our salvation that we can find in your word and through our spirit, your Holy Spirit in us, that you do want us in your kingdom and that you invite us to go further with you. And to abide with you forever. Lord, we pray for anyone listening or reading today's message, that they be convicted of the truth that they are children of God and live according to it. We pray for you to come alongside them and their prayer requests and their walk of faith. Help them, Lord. And we pray for you to help us too. We need your help every day. We need your encouragements every day. We need your protections every day. And we're asking again, Lord, for you to open our eyes to the things you want us to see and lead us in the way we should go. It's all we want to do is represent you in your kingdom here on the earth, Lord, and we desperately need your help to do that, Lord. So we thank you, we praise you, we love you, and we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.