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Paul's Letter to You · The Rhett Palmer Show

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I catch myself taking it.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: I just like I have wired picking up your guitar.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_05: Well you're hearing, you're hearing, you're been hearing my accolades coming over the he didn't Michael didn't realize that the mic is on the side.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Red, Rhett, this is a good song.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Rhett uh wrote that song.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's called The Great I Am.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it has a very catchy tune.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've been listening to it as it just comes on.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've never heard the whole thing, but I found myself walking around my house singing this song yesterday and the day before.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very nice meditation.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_05: It is.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_05: And that's I wanted to put a whole record out like that where it's more contemplative.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_05: I think Schobiz has entered the churches, and I think we need to.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_05: Do you remember John Michael Talbot?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_05: Well, do you know that he's come out to your Bible study?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_05: This guy, he's the one, this guy.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_05: There's there's all these famous people from uh what's her name, Para, Twilight Paris, who I got the pleasure of interviewing.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_05: But I mean, she's one of the greatest artists of all time with the Lamb of God and but but John Michael Talbot, of course, was was uh sort of like living like this monkish life and he was very subdued.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_05: Well, all these people were being recorded 30 years ago, 40 years ago when I first became a Christian.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_05: So, out of all the people in the world, the former guy who was the engineer for all those artists in in LA is now in town here.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_05: Really?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_05: His name is Billy, and he went through a horrible dessert dessert, uh des uh divorce.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, you know, he's uh uh not doing the grace.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_05: As a matter of fact, he lives in his car, and we got to get him out of that car sooner or later, but whatever he wants.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_05: But I mean, ironically, he said he would help me record my new records.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_05: But here's the very guy who recorded all the people that I have this high admiration for back 30 years ago.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's funny.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_05: But John Michael Talbot was uh sort of wore that brown hooded thing.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, I I I met his brother Terry Talbot.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, isn't he a great musician?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_05: He's a great musician.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_05: Oh man, I used to buy the records.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, so uh so yeah, the Lord gave this to me recently.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_05: I am the great I Am.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_05: Uh uh the first uh my first friend was Abraham.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_05: Uh he is the great I am.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_05: But let's get back to what we're saying.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Since you mentioned that, Brett, um we've been reading, you know, in our men's study on Tuesday morning, we've been reading the book of Colossians, right?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the great I am, okay.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: This uh just cues into what I was thinking about this morning, and I think it goes along with what we finished up last week.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: We were uh we were talking about uh how words matter and how when you look at the Bible, you read it in English, you just often don't get the significance that whoever's writing this in the Greek uh is meaning to give to us.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're reading it in a different language, and where uh English has one word for love, uh Greek language has four words for love, right?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh there's much more expression, much more meaning, and so words do matter, and this is kind of what we talked about last week, but just you mentioning this song and what I've been thinking about, uh Paul is writing to his friends in Kalasi.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Kalasi is in a uh valley in the southwestern part of Turkey.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was there in 19 or uh 2021, and Kalasi right now is uh is a barren hill that is in the middle of an apple orchard.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's at the base of Mount Cadmus, which is a 52 uh-foot mountain with snow on it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and from the base of that mountain comes the uh uh Lycras River that is ice cold and uh very refreshing.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, my friend Randy Smith that I work with in our study tours uh was in Colossae yesterday.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Randy is funding an excavation of the uh tell.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a barren hill that uh when I walked up on top of it uh four years ago, I see these square blocks that are chipped and cut out, and they're obviously building blocks.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh I didn't see any writing on any of them, but these are obviously structural blocks that are just partially uncovered.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's a bunch of them at the top and on the sides of the hill.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_05: So these like 2,000-year-old blocks?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, these are this the the Randy hired an uh an archaeologist, a Turkish archaeologist last year to begin the excavation of Khalasi.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so this is uh uh I I'm I'm very uh personally involved in this because I want to go back and be part of the dig uh to uncover this city.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: But but um Paul writes a letter to his friends in this valley.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is the same area where Laodicea is, and just uh north of Laodicea is uh the hot springs at Heropolis.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so these are four three Christian communities that are probably separated by a total of about seven miles, okay, in this very rich cotton and vineyards uh producing area.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: But they also do hot air ballooning, which we did while we were there.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: But Paul's writing a letter to his friends in Colossae, and the first thing that he he uh mentions to them is is he's heard of their faith and he knows what they're doing, and he said, says, For this reason, since we've they we've heard of it, we've not ceased to pray for you, and ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his wisdom and all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all power according to his glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience, joyously giving thanks to the Father who's qualified to share in the inheritance of the saints.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's Paul's prayer for his friends in Colossae.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I want you just to think about that for a moment and put yourself in this prayer.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: And since we have been studying this at our Tuesday morning men's study and we've been digging in deep, as you know, we've we've we we've been about five or six weeks and we're just now somebody stuck on the finishing chapter one, right?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there's so much here, and especially in this prayer, writ, where that I would be filled with his knowledge.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, see that word in English comes across as like maybe something that we read in a book or something uh somebody told us.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the word is epinosis.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: It actually Epinnosis.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, gnosis is knowledge, but epinosis is experiential knowledge.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_05: Empirical knowledge.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Experiential, something you personally have experienced.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_05: Epinosis.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_05: Epinosis.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Epineans, uh experiential.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And gnosis is knowledge.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Rhett, you know there's times when you're praying or you're you're talking to the Lord, and all of a sudden you know He gives you an answer.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Or there's circumstances that you find yourself in and you're looking for a solution, and all of a sudden, you have a solution and you know God gave you that answer.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Or you meet somebody uh that you knew years earlier that suddenly is going to be part of whatever you're doing, and is everything as well for and you know God is doing something, right?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this experience with God, and and this is the difference between just reading a book about him.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: As a young child, my parents took me to Sunday school and church.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew about Jesus, but it wasn't until I was 30 that I actually knew him.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: See?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the difference between religion and a relationship.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_05: You know, last night I went to a memorial service for police who have given up their lives over the past year's line of duty.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_05: And this one guy got up and spoke.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_05: And he he was very intelligent.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_05: Uh he had some compassion because his 26-year-old daughter had died a couple years ago, so his heart was circumcised, a tender man, but he missed the mark in this way.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_05: He talked about it, but he didn't tell any stories to back it up.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_05: If you notice, Jesus used the power of story.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_05: And so when you use the power of story, you you uh you bring in the the the personal aspect.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the practical experience or the practical application.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_05: Because you know, Jesus does say that what do you say?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_05: They're forever learning but never coming to the knowledge of truth.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_05: Paul spoke about the milk of word.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_05: Now, this is Rhett Palmer's take.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_05: When you got the milk of the word, it means you can quote, you can quote the Bible.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_05: The meat of the word is, yeah, but are you going out on the street and are you feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, are you visiting people in prison?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you really get it?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_05: And I have to, and then look, I'm not looking at you folks.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_05: Once in a while I go, okay, Rhett, you're a big talker.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_05: When's the last time?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_05: Like I did, I but I last time I was at the soup kitchen was maybe 15 years ago.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_05: Because well, I frankly I for personally got fed up because I kept seeing the same people, and I thought, well, I don't know, you know, I might just, you know, give a man a fish and uh he eats well tonight, teach him how to fish, eats all the rest of his own.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right that uh you know you gotta have uh your own personal experience.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is why there's many people that because they come and attend church, they think they're followers of Jesus, but if they have not had that personal experience with him, if they've not experienced the grace of God in their life, okay?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the the great need that we have in our life for Jesus, if we've never experienced that and seen the grace of God active in our life, then we're missing an entire critical aspect of what our Christian faith is.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm having a challenge right now with that.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_05: You know, Paul wrote about I don't come with exceptional words or high, high ver you know lofty arguments.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_05: Lofty arguments.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_05: Here's what I'd like to say is I'm heading off to a seminary, as you know, for a for a uh concentrated week of John of uh uh John, the Bible, the disciple, not John the Baptist, but the disciple.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_05: Because I I have my own reasons for wanting to go.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, so they sent me this information that I'm supposed to read before I go.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know whether to go or not because it was they weren't 75 cent words, they were a dollar 75 cent words.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_05: It was filled with all this in pseudo-intellectual uh verbosity, uh, big big vocabulary words.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_05: It's like Do some people think that you're pleasing God by sounding more intellectual?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's pseudo-intellectualism.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_05: Wasn't Hemingway great because he could write simply as opposed to Escott Fitzgerald, these other guys who disdained his simplicity?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_05: I think even my mother taught me growing up that simplicity is the essence of good taste.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_05: If you notice women, if you see have you ever seen a woman in like a three or five thousand dollar dress, you go, it's utterly simple.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_05: You can hardly see any weaving, there's no extras, it's very maybe a string of pearls, that's it.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_05: The more elegant a woman looks, the less, you know, and I don't mean showing flesh, by the way, ladies, right, but the less the simplicity.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: So experiential knowledge with the Lord is what our prayer should be, that we would experience Him.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: And Paul goes on to say that with all spiritual wisdom and understanding, okay, so that our experience with Jesus would be such in a way that we would get greater understanding, and perhaps why he's telling us to do the things uh that we're doing, supposed to be doing, uh, we would understand his care and his love for us even more.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: But it goes on to say, so that we would walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the Bible, uh, especially the book of Proverbs, continually talks about how the life of a follower Jesus is a walk.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's a step, one step, two steps, three steps.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's walking, it is a step-by-step process that our days are steps of faith, and sometimes we walk off the path, right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, sir.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're quickly uh reminded we're off the path because usually we uh stumble over things or we uh get cut up in the in the bushes, but things happen.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we get back on the path, go, oh, I need to stay on the Lord's path, you know.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: But Psalm says, Your word is a light unto my path, okay?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that this is this is my prayer is that I would walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And here's here's a part that I'd never quite understood until recently.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the next line says, To please him in all respects.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: To please him.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: That Rhett, that um there are things that my wife likes me to do.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are things that she places she likes to go, there are certain kinds of food she likes to eat, and I know when it gives her pleasure and brings a smile on her face, I realize it's worth my efforts to do those things, even if it costs me something or I don't want to do it.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like my wife is a dancer, she loves to go listen to music and dance.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I find myself at uh 9 30, 10 o'clock at night wanting to go home and read and go to bed.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: But um there's a local uh uh um um place restaurant and bar that has uh on Wednesday night has a lot of amateur musicians that are playing.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh it is some incredible music.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, it's right here in Vero Beach.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just uh uh I don't want to mention the name of the place.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_05: Uh but uh we get castigated by the Christians or something.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, it's it's a totally a clean thing.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, we just go we walk in and we start dancing, and the music is incredible.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: She loves to do that.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: It brings a smile to her face, right?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we usually uh uh we'll go have uh a meal somewhere and we'll stop off and we'll probably catch the last 20 minutes of the uh set of the before they close down.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it just brings a smile to her face.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I know it's pleasing her, you know.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Even we can be at home and suddenly she'll turn on uh music and she uh we have a couple playlists that is uh Laura Bailando, Laura dancing, you know, and uh we'll just dance right there on the rug uh in our uh living room, you know.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: It just brings pleasure to her.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: I see a smile.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so what Paul is is is asking that I would do things that would bring pleasure to my king.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now think about that for a moment.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: That we would actually have a personal relationship with Jesus, and the love would be the aloha would be so great that we would actually does aloha mean love?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that we'd actually go out of our way to do things that bring him pleasure.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_05: That's I don't know about you, but that's my my constant prayer is that in these latter years of my life, I don't care.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I don't want anything that doesn't come through the filter of Jesus at this point.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_05: I don't care if it's a billion dollars, I don't care, fame of man, uh-uh-uh.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_05: I don't want anything without his permission.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_05: And what can I do to be pleasing to you?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_05: I want him to have truth.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_05: Says I love you, from palm trees to little hummingbirds, everything is just made by the hand of love, unless you're blinded to that.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_05: And so what do we want to do?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_05: Give back, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, right.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so to please him in all respects.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the next thing that Paul is uh is praying is bearing fruit in every good work.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: James says, You have faith, I'll show you my faith by what I do.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, because a lot of people have you've said that.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um a lot of people have uh say they have faith.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but he but you don't do anything with it.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously God has called us, as we talked about uh last week in the Great Commission of those four verbs, go uh and uh into all the world, make disciples, baptizing and teaching them to obey all that I uh told you, commanded you.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Of those four verbs, only one is in the uh uh uh imperative form is make disciples.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_05: What does imperative form?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh command form.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: The others are in continuous imperative.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that we must do this, okay?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: So so we are called to be involved with Jesus in making disciples and bringing people into his family.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that I would experience him personally, that I would do things to please him, and that I would bear good fruit in every good work, that I would really be in his agenda and not my agenda.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_05: You said your your Laura likes to dance, which is which is really beautiful.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_05: When you see people dancing, I don't know about you, but I've gone to some churches, particularly in uh the black section of town and the town south of us, and it's predominantly black people, which I happen to like to go because I think that uh people that have gone through uh you know oppression have a greater heart, you know, and they've they've taken a lot of crap.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_05: So anyway, I go to this church and these little these little uh African American girls get up and I just start bawling.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_05: I start these hot tears come.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_05: I sit in the back so no one can see me.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_05: And I cry because it's it's sincere.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_05: They're dancing, they swirl the purple, the purple scarfs around.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_05: And you want to know something?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_05: So you know that about Laura, right?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna tell this about you.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_05: You light up when you're teaching.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_05: You absolutely you I know you studied in Europe, but I want you to know just this morning I said, This guy lights up when you're teaching.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_05: No wonder that your wife, who loves you exceedingly, came to me with tears in her eyes and said she's really for what we're doing because she loves you so much, she wants your gift to be used, you know.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um I would agree with you that it does light me up.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Especially and so this this passage here, bearing your element God gave you a gift.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Bearing fruit in every good work, and the next line is increasing in the same word epinosis of God, the experiential knowledge that we would continue to have these experiential uh moments with him, strengthened with all power.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is the word dutymus, this is where we get the word dynamite, okay?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: That we would be strengthened with his power, Rhett.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Not, you know, there's certain things that you and I uh uh uh can do to in our own efforts.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um we can decide, for example, that we're gonna fast for a day or two, okay?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the fasting for more than a day or two requires us something a little extra.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we can decide we're gonna be nice to a nasty neighbor for maybe a day or two, but they still keep uh doing nasty things to us.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: But to actually do that over a long period, that requires something more.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's it's gotta be something that comes from.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_05: I have another point to make that's just recently happened with me, it's okay.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_05: So I I asked AI, I was I was befuddled one night and I said, So tell me, do you want me to worship you and sing praises to you first, or do you want me to love you first?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_05: Because maybe you really this is what you want.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_05: And so I looked up AI and AI says, No, praising and worship is an outgrowth or a fruition of love.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Of course it's love.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_05: If you're God and you're hanging around for a gazillion of years alone and you create man for fellowship, what's the first thing you want?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_05: I want you to dot the I's and cross the T's.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_05: No, not the letter of the law, the spirit of the law.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, strengthened with all of his power, according to his glorious might.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I really like the next line here.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: For the attaining of all steadfastness and patience.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, those two words sound the same.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Steadfastness and patience.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the word stead for steadfastness actually refers to your circumstances, that you would stand firm in the circumstances that you find yourself.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_05: Go through what you may not get over.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the word patience actually is a word to refer to the things that other people throw at you, that you can be patient with other people.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you have circumstances and people.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, these are the two things that derail us uh in our walk.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: This uh takes us off the path because we react to uh circumstances and to people.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: But Paul's prayer is that we would be steadfast in our faith according to the circumstances we find ourselves, medical issues, financial issues, relational issues, uh cultural things that you see that you just see things going on in the Culture that makes you just want to throw up and get angry, and now we become one of those uh angry people that all they hear is the uh is the the spiteful words coming out of our mouth, you know.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no, we don't want to be those people.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_05: The anger of man does not produce the what?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_05: The love of God.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: The righteousness of God.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: So steadfastness in our circumstances, patience with the people.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where me when looking in my dictionaries, and I've got a couple of dictionaries here on my phone, the Greek dictionaries, and I get the nuances of these words, and they just come across so much more alive and applicable to me, applicable to me.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: The next line is joyously giving thanks to the Father.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, who has, and why do we give thanks?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's qualified us to share in the adherence and inheritance of the saints.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: There is something huge that is awaiting us in this next dimension that we we enter when we pass from here.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's an incredible inheritance uh that we have.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: We are seated in the throne room with the king.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: We are his personal friends.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's something huge that's coming up, and we get to share in that.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: So whatever is going on with the people in our lives, whatever's going on in the circumstances uh that surround us, we can joyously give thanks to God for what he's doing in our lives.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_05: I hath not seen nor ear heard, neither has entered the heart of men the things which God has prepared for those who love him.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: So what I've done, uh, Rhett, is over the last couple months, as uh we've been reading and studying this, and and I've been uh just meditating on it, I make this personal.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I'm driving to work, when I'm driving to the Rio Coco Cafe in the morning, either for a meeting, for roasting coffee, for some chores that I have to do, I'll be driving down 43rd Avenue and I'll say, okay, Lord, fill me with an experiential knowledge of you today, that I would have an experience with you.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: And let please let me walk in a manner that's worthy of you, Lord.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And Lord, may all my words and my actions please you in all respect.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and I know you have things for me to do today, and you've got people for me to meet, and I know you're working in their lives.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: So let me bear fruit in every good work and every relationship.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And as I'm doing that, Lord, let me even know you even better.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And where I'm coming up with obstacles, Lord, strengthen me with your power.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Don't let me fall to temptation.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the Lord's prayer, right?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Don't don't let me fail those tests.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Don't let me fall to temptation to the trials that Satan throws at us.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that I would really not let my circumstances affect my faith and you, my trust in you, and that people around me would not be ones that would uh would hinder me and my walk with you, but in fact would strengthen me, and that I could continually be thankful for all that comes at me, because I know you've got my you've got my back.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, what a prayer if we started this day and the next day and every day with this prayer.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it really encapsulates all that I want to be today.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_05: Be thankful in all things, for this is the will of God for you.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_05: You know, when I first heard that when I was a kid, because I had a uh stepfather that was not particularly nice.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_05: So when I first heard that, I thought God, you know, 40 years ago, God was going, be thankful in all things, for this is the will of God.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_05: And now I realize, no, he's saying it lovingly.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_05: Be thankful in all things, for this is the will of God for you.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_05: When you have thankfulness, no matter your situation, if you're thankful for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you can't afford steak and lobster.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_05: You can you might be enjoying that peanut butter and jelly sandwich a whole lot more than someone who's eating steak and lobster and not really filled with thankfulness or appreciation.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: I have to tell you, one of the most joyful meals that I had, Brett, was a cold rainy day in 1987.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: We were traveling on the Cocoa River and we were uh had uh been fighting the rain uh coming up river.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: We uh were ready to cross over into a uh swampy area of Honduras, and then we were gonna be walking about seven miles through the swamp and get to another river where we'd get into another boat.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it was just a horrible day of travel, and it's all by foot and by boat.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: I got to the riverbank finally in uh Utlamata, and I was just muddy, I was wet, I was cold, and I there's a picture.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sitting uh on the riverbank leaning on my backpack, and my friend Trano's wife walked up and she handed me a bowl of hot white rice.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: It the steam was coming off the rice.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: There was no salt, no pepper, no condiments.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: She handed me this bowl and she handed me a fork.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was one of the most delicious meals I ever had in my life.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And somebody snapped a picture of it.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sitting there and I'm just totally engaged with this bowl of rice, and I look over like, why are you bothering me?
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: This was you know, it wasn't steak and lobster.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_05: You're talking to the one human being, probably in this whole world, that can relate to that story.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_05: I don't normally tell this story.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_05: I was starving in Baltimore and I was 14 years of age.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_05: And this lady invited us into her house with her and her guy there, and uh they fed us each a little teeny tiny bowl of white rice with mushrooms on top.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_05: That's all it was.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_05: And I was so hungry and so thankful that to this day I go to a Chinese restaurant, I'll I'll have white rice with some mushrooms on top, and it tastes better than steak and lobster ever will taste, because you never forget.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_03: How do you like that?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_05: Do you want to you want to have this really parallel thing going on in some in some areas?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_05: It's like, yeah, yeah, I I totally I totally, absolutely get what you're saying.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_05: So the next but that's because you were filled with such thankfulness, though.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, totally.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: So the next line, and we're still in chapter one, it's like verse 13, is why does we should we be giving our obedience and honor and love to Jesus?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: What rights does he have over us?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, verse 13 says, He rescued us from the domain of darkness.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: He rescued.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now that word rescued in implies there's peril.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's danger.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you and I went through a phase of our life where we were doing what kind of what we wanted to do, things we thought best.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't realize the peril and the danger that was there, but he rescued us from that, and he transferred us, the next line, to the kingdom of his beloved son.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: There was nothing that we did, he transferred us.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, this is the grace of God.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh I think the difference between people who think they're Christians, but they don't really know Jesus because they've never experienced the grace of God.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: They don't understand that He transferred us through nothing that we did on our own.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_05: So in all other rel a lot of most of all the other religions, it says you have to do something to know if you have to die for God or this one or that one or all or whatever.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_05: Jesus is the only says, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_05: I died for you.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_05: I give you free will, so this is a relationship that the Father and I want to have.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_05: Right, right.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh him doing it and whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what does that word redemption mean to you, Rhett?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: To be redeemed.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: To be um Okay, it's to be redeemed.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_05: Someone pays the price uh if I'm I'm up before the judge and someone comes in and says, No, I redeemed this one, I paid the price for this one.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, it's mine.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: When I was in the first, second, and third grade, uh, we lived in Rayford, North Carolina.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was stationed at Pope Air Force Base, which was uh over by Fayetteville.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there was a busy state highway that was uh just uh our little street was a cul-de-sac, and uh it hit out on the main road.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a very busy highway, and this was in the 50s, so people weren't really conscious of littering.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: So people threw their uh coke bottles and uh trash just out the window as they're driving along.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my brother and I would walk over to that highway, and we would walk down with our uh paper bag and we would uh pick up these dirty Coke and RC and 7 Up bottles, and we would get probably about five a piece, and we would walk back toward our house and we'd walk across the field to the other road where Ludd's fill-in station was, and we could take those dirty bottles that were discarded along the side.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's two cents each.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and for three of them, we could get an uh a moon pie because they were only a nickel.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if we had uh if we had four or uh five more, we could get an RC cola.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh boy.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: Now we took a pie.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: We took those dirty, discarded trash that was along the side of the road, and we turned it in to redeemed it and turned it into a RC cola and a moon pie.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: And for a uh seven-year-old kid that that's sitting in heaven, that's experiencing.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: So why does God why does Jesus have rights over us?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because he transferred us.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_05: Because he died of death on a real cross.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the next line is uh now Paul is saying who this guy is.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is the question everybody's gonna have to answer.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is the final exam question.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Who do you say I am?
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and uh we uh Jesus took his uh disciples to Caesarea Philippi, which uh we talked about this a couple weeks ago.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's called Banyas, it's a place where there was a lot of uh temples and idol worship and the altar of the dancing goats where they were sacrificing animals, the court of Pan and the Nymphs, where they were doing sexual sac uh acts to worship Pan, uh Nemesis, the goddess Nemesis.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: You were writing name your uh name of your enemies on a piece of pottery and throwing it down in the back of the cave and shattering it.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now your curse was alive.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: This is where Jesus took his disciples.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Who do people say that I am?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, Well, some say John the Baptist, others, others say Jeremiah, others say one of the prophets.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Who do you say that I am?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: And see, this is the final exam question.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_05: You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's confusion as to who Jesus is in our culture.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um if you ask just the man on the street, they'll probably say he was a great teacher.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Muslims say he's a great teacher, he's a prophet.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of my Jewish friends uh says he's just a very confused rabbi.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I have uh living on Maui, as I have over the last 45 years, there's a lot of new age uh religion that goes on there, a lot of people that are into uh these uh spiritual things.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And one of my friends said uh to me, Well, you know, Jesus was the first guy to recognize his Christ consciousness, which we all have.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: So if we eat the right foods and we chant and do good deeds, we too can become God.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_05: So that one before.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so um there's a lot of confusion.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh Mahatman Gandhi considered uh Jesus uh not necessarily as a historical figure.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't consider him to be God in the flesh, but he considered him to be a great philosopher.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, Gandhi wrote a book on the Sermon on the Mount.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, I don't really uh care if Jesus existed uh or not, the Sermon on the Mount will always exist in my heart.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_05: You know that Gandhi went to a church in India because he wasn't dressed properly as a young guy, they wouldn't let him in.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_05: Little lesson learned there about legal legalism.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Horrible.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: So Paul is going to clear up any confusion here by saying he, Jesus, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now we read that in English and we go, hmm.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: And some people read it.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: I have friends that read this in their New World Translation, and they say Jesus was a created uh being like the angels.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: He's not really God completely.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he was born because this says firstborn.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you read it in English, you're gonna get some confusion here.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: The word image is the word icon.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've we know what an icon is, right?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little image of uh uh an app or a program, and if we click on the icon, then the program or the app opens up, right?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_05: Icon is also someone we admire exceedingly or make as a god.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Plato defines this word as when you see a sun setting over the water, the image in the water that you see is the icon of the sun that's right above it.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's the exact image, it's the same thing.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Paul's telling us Jesus is exactly the same thing as Yahweh.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he's the prototokus of all creation.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually the Greek word.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Prototokus.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_05: What is a tokus?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_05: And what does to mean?
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's actually a term uh that was used in the Roman legal uh system.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: It referred to the rights and prerogatives of the eldest son of the family, who could who could sign documents, who had all the rights of his father because he had the signet ring.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: And basically everything his father owned, he owned, and he could make decisions.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a legal term referring to the rights of the eldest son.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he's not saying he's uh a created being like the angels.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: He's just saying he's like the eldest son in Roman society that has all the rights, owns all the property, and uh can do anything that the father can do.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now that makes sense to me now.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: So he's the icon and the prototocus of all creation.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_05: So this gift of being the firstborn is a great gift of God.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_05: And is that probably why he hated that guy who traded in his firstborn uh you know, qu uh credentials for a bowl of porridge.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_05: Who would sell their the right?
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_05: And you know why that would make you God?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_05: Let's say you had a son who you said, Hey, this is my son, and I give you these rights and privileges, and he gave it up for a bowl of porridge.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_05: You say, I this is the greatest gift I could have given you.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_05: You thought so little of it, no wonder God hated Esau, right?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: So the next line, okay, this is so rich, Rhett.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: For in him all things were created, both in heavens and on earth, invisible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rulers, authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: So who's when uh God said, Let there be light?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: How did that light come into uh existence?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was the logos, as John says, in the beginning was the Lagos, and the Lagos was with God, and the Lagos was God.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: He was there in the beginning.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: In John's world and the Greek philosophical world, the Lagos was defined as the wisdom and the creative force of whoever was behind this universe.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: And there was lots of talk about the this lagos.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Plato talked about these uh virtues, the uh ultimate virtues, and um the lagos, the wisdom of the creator, and the active force of the creator.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is the lagos.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh Paul says that Jesus is the creator, he is the Lagos, he's the one that the next line, he's before all things, and in him all things hold together.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you've ever watched the sunrise, which you have, and you've watched the sunset, that's the only time that we can actually sense planetary motion.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: We actually see the sun moving.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: We realize the sun's not moving, it's the earth is moving.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we notice in the wintertime it's setting further south if we're in the northern hemisphere, and in the summertime it's setting further north, the days are longer.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the tolerances for us to stay in orbit around the sun are extremely, extremely small.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: If we uh I've I've heard uh astronomers give the numbers, it's an incredibly small tolerance that to keep us from being an ice cube uh orbiting around the sun or a shish kebabab, a hot uh, you know, because if our orbit changed just a minute fraction of a percentage, then everything would suddenly get really cold and as well.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_05: They say it's incredibly placed.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: The moon does has incredible impact on our agriculture, because planting uh during full moon, uh cutting for the mosquito culture, cutting bamboo, uh you have to cut it in the full moon.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, if you're gonna use it for structural stuff, it gets real dusty.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: They they understand uh that there's uh effects that this moon has on even the sap in plants.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, on our tides it does.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, the the whole orbital thing.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you just look at uh the the universe and look at planetary motion.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_05: Well, a lot of people get loony, and the police will tell you that there's more crime committed uh full moon.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: So he's the creator, and uh he created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Think about this for a moment, Ritt.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh talk to a physicist.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have a friend uh that teaches physics at the University in Milano.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Marco.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: I met him uh this past year on Utilla.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's there for diving.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Marco told me, he said, we physicists, we know only about 10 percent of what's going on in this world.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: We only know 10 percent.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's 90 percent of stuff that's happening.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: We don't even we don't even uh recognize it.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: We observe it, but we we just we we don't recognize it sometimes, and we see bits and pieces of it.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: We've concluded we only know 10 percent.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, of that 10 percent, half of that is what we call dark physics, where we don't really understand it.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: We we we know that it exists.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's like quantum physics.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's like quantum tunneling where they know particles can go through barriers, either go through or hop around, or but they don't know how.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: They know that uh quantum um influencing, I think it's called, that particles that are separated by light years somehow influence one another.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: They don't know how that happens.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: The more that we get into subatomic uh physics, the more it's just a mind blower.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_05: They can take pictures now of molecules within molecules, and that's only with the limited equipment we have now.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: So here is Jesus, who is the creator of all of these things.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's the thing that holds everything together.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_05: I like what you said this morning.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_05: You've encouraged me that when you said something big is up ahead.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_05: You know how you said that?
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_05: I'm thinking, you know, you're right.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_05: Something really big is up ahead for those who follow the Lord.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the Father's good pleasure that all the fullness dwell in him.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the where it gets personal, and through him to reconcile all things that would be you and me to himself, having made peace through the blood of the cross.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Through him, I say, whether things on heaven and earth.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this word peace is uh it's an interesting word.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's it means establish a relationship that wasn't ever established.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a peace that was never there before.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very unique new peace.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is this word?
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh in the Greek, the word is uh, let's see, the word is the word ere no peilo.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_05: So that's different than the regular word peace.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a different word.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_05: And it means what again?
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's a new peace.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: So something happened on the cross that was absolutely new.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_05: The day I was born again, I don't know what happened to you, but I felt this supernatural peace which is unexplainable.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_05: Let me ask you this.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_05: He said, All sins shall be forgiven man except blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_05: Which leads me to believe all sins shall be forgiven man.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_05: Do you think is he going to separate the goats from the li from the from the sheep?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_05: Or do you think in the end you know, I mean, you know, there's people who believe Hitler could be re forgiven now in his dying breath there and Well, remember let's
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Let's use good uh Bible scholarship here.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_05: And that's you.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's us.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you're you're well trained in this, even though sometimes um it would not seem so Okay.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at the context.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at the context when Jesus actually said this.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: What was happening that would prompt him to make a statement like this?
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: There would be no all sins will be forgiven, but uh only blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be unforgiven.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_05: They were attributing the healings of Jesus to Belzebon.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, there you go.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Say you are a good Bible scholar.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the context is that the religious authorities, the temple guys and the Pharisees, they saw what Jesus was doing, healing people, and they said, You're doing this by the power of the devil.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus looked at him and go, whoa.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: So here I am among you, and the Holy Spirit is revealing who I am through the miracles that I'm doing, through the things that I'm saying, and you're attributing that to Satan, that is a total rejection of what the Holy Spirit is doing.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now remember, the word blaspheme means to give a bad report about something.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_05: So if I went out and blaspheme is a bad report.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_05: Through gossip, right.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_05: You're murdering them.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: So when we um do things, if we call ourselves Christians, followers of Jesus, and we do things that people see us and they go, How can they be Christians?
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: They just lied to me.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: I just they just cheated me.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: They just uh gave me a product I bought at their store and it just was worth nothing, and they wouldn't take uh it wouldn't take we're giving God a bad report through our behavior.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're we're we're blaspheming God by our ungodly behavior.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus says that'll be forgiven.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: But what won't be forgiven is when the Holy Spirit is doing something and especially revealing that Jesus is Yahweh in the flesh, and you say it's the devil, that is a total rejection of the person of Jesus and his divinity.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: And as we all know, that is the criteria whether you make it into heaven or not, is whether you receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: So the Pharisees were basically saying, We're never going to receive you as the Messiah because you're actually doing the work of the devil through the power of the devil.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_05: Well, let me ask you this.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_05: There was a uh I was told this that there was a Jewish man who was dying in the hospital and he was into a coma, and his uh born-again Christian friend wanted to come and see him.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_05: When he got to the doorway at the hospital, the family said, You can go in and see him, but no proselytizing, no preaching to him.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_05: You know, you can just Okay, so he goes in to see his friend.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_05: His friend's in a coma and he's holding his friend's hand, but he's praying in his heart, but he can't, he's not allowed to proselytize for the will of the family.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_05: He's praying for his soul, and suddenly his friend gets up from the sits straight up in the bed and goes, Um not Barabbas, but this man, and then falls back and dies.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_05: At the last moment, that Jewish man, unlike the crowd that said, Not this man, but Barabbas to set him free, he said, Not Barabbas, but this man.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: What a story.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a true event.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_05: That's what I was told.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know, but that's what I've been told, you know.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_05: Only God knows the if these people are I don't think someone could make that up.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I I just look at this message to the this uh church in Colossi.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: Which I now feel like I have this personal connection to because I was there a couple years ago, and now my friend Randy Smith, my friend and mentor, uh uh is actually involved in digging up this uh place.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I feel very personally connected.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the to this letter, I'm very personally connected to what Paul is praying for uh his friends in Colossi, that I would uh experience God, that I would walk in a manner uh worthy of him, that I would bear fruit, I would experience God's power, I would be uh steadfast in my circumstances and patient with people, and that I would always be thankful for what's going on.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: If that could be my prayer every day, Brett, my life would be so successful if I could actually walk that out and not get sidetracked by all these other things.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is what brings me back to that place is what did Jesus do for me?
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: He rescued me.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: You've seen this uh image on the back of my phone.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_04: This is uh You were a fighter pilot?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so I uh did not know the Lord.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: I took a picture and gave it to our graphic designer, and she made this label for our Cobrew.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: The picture was me hold uh sitting at uh the Bachelor Officer Quarters in Fallon, Nevada, after uh a hot day of bombing uh targets because that's it looks like a scene out of the movie.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_05: You look like Gunner in the movie um No no no no no with the Tom Cru Tim Cruise or whatever.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I was holding a bottle of tequila in my hand and I told her to take out the tequila and put a bottle of our cobrew.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: That uh you look like tequila.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_05: Remember in the movie?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have this on my phone, so I remember where I came from.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to ever forget where I came from.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because I was on a road that there was a bridge out ahead, and I was ignoring all the warning signs.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I got rescued.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: You got rescued.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to ever forget that God rescued me from the kingdom of darkness.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_05: Let's say there's somebody listening to this, they were rescued too.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_05: Now, I was rescued miraculously, gloriously born again in my living room in the Troy Troy, New York.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_05: I was a struggling songwriter, living in the ghetto,$150 a month apartment.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_05: Anyway, I had a hard time in my life.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_05: I was actually swearing, probably uncontrollably.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_05: I remember I was with a friend of mine, and I said, uh, you know, uh something bad, the bomb, you know.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_05: And he says, uh, Red, he says, My daughter, Gina's in the room with us, Tony told me.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_05: So, oh, sorry, sorry.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_05: Now I get born again.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_05: Two weeks later, I'm in my little tiny, tiny backyard of this little hundred and fifty dollar a month apartment, and I marveled.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_05: I said, I'm not swearing anymore.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_05: He had cleansed my palate.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_05: And I heard this.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing happened to me, Red.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_05: With the swearing business?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I just stopped using the F-word.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, but here's the deal He gave me the power, and for months and months his spirit was with me so strong.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_05: It was just it was amazing.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_05: But then a year later I thought about swearing and maybe didn't.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_05: And then maybe a year and a half later I thought about swearing and then I did do it.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_05: Instead of being by omission, it was by commission.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_05: And I feel bad that now I walked backwards.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_05: Now I'm not presently swearing that much, but once in a while I do.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_05: So did I mean I I sometimes I I worry, I think, and I think people can relate to this.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_05: I wish the day that I got born again he'd kind of killed me and took me to heaven, because then everything would be cool.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_05: Because I have fallen, and I wonder how far can I fall and he'll still receive me back.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's gonna receive you back totally because the uh when John is writing his first letter, he says, if if you call yourself a Christian and you think you don't sin, you're deluding yourself.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: We are gonna sin.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we have when we do, we recognize it, we have a faithful uh savior that we just ask forgiveness and he's free to give us.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_05: And hopefully the more we fall in love with him, the less we find sin tasteless.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the key that I've discovered, Red.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the Bible says very clearly that because of what Jesus did on the cross, I'm free of the curse of sin.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: But because I'm living in this human body, I'm still subject to the power of sin.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I've discovered that the power of sin over me is relative to my level of obedience to Jesus to do the things that he tells me to do.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: When I stop being obedient, especially in those small decisions, then I recognize that sin has greater power over me and I'm liable to step off the path.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_05: Uh well, that's why the Spaniards on their ships would have mass every morning for what possibly they did the the night before, right?
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you you you have to keep the relationship constant.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: You uh it's gotta be you you if you want to keep in touch with somebody, you gotta make phone calls, you gotta see them, you gotta have some conversations to keep the relationship.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_05: Seven times seventy.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you and of course forgive people for the things that they do.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think uh that there's any confusion about once Jesus has placed his Holy Spirit in us and he's seen the sincerity of our heart that he says he's sealed us.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um that we are part of his family.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_05: Can you imagine you're in a you're in a courtroom and you're standing before the judge, and the George lev levels the mount and says, Guilty is charged, the death penalty, but suddenly there's a man in the back of the room and he stands up with a beard and his white outfit, what do you call that uh garment that he has on, and says, No, no, no, I paid the price for this man.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the the reality is an actual court case in the state of California, this was in I think the late 60s.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I can't specifically say who the judge was, but there was a woman that was brought before him for drunken driving.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, drunken driving is huge now, but when I got my driver's license in uh 6 um 67, 68.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_05: The police would just bring you home sometimes.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they would just bring you home.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't it wasn't that big a deal.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: So this lady had been uh accused, uh found and she and brought for drunken driving.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: She'd been fined$100.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Brought in, she brought into the court, the policeman testified, the judge heard the testimony, fined her$100.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then the judge did this.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: He got up from his seat, he took off his robe, he walked over to the bailiff.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: True story, he took out his wallet, he handed the bailiff$100, he turned to the defendant, who was his daughter, and he said, Don't you ever let me see you in my court again.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Don't do this anymore.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was her father that was the judge.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so he had justice.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: He convicted her, he fined her, but he reached in his wallet and he paid the fine himself.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_05: We're doing stories here.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_05: Let me tell you this.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_05: You see the picture on the wall?
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_05: I interviewed Mahatma Gandhi's grandson.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_05: So um he uh he's out with his father one day.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_05: They go into town in their little 1928 model, whatever.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_05: That's why I picture it.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_05: They go into town in the village, and the father has business to attend to.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_05: He says, Here, son, take the keys to the car, take it, and get the repairs done for the car.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_05: So his son takes the car.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_05: And then the car's done about one o'clock in the afternoon.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_05: So he decides to go to the movies.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_05: You know how the Indians they love in India, they love movies, you know?
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_05: And so Bollywood and all that.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_05: So he goes to the movies.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_05: So then he gets out of the movies.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, it's 4 35, he's gonna be a little late, gets there late to pick up his father.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_05: He said, Well, what happened, son?
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_05: He said, Oh, uh, well, they they didn't they didn't they didn't get done with the car until and his and his father said, uh, I called the mechanic.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_05: And the car was done at one.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_05: I went to the oh I'm sorry, father, I went to the movies.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_05: He said, Listen, here are the keys to the car.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_05: If the sun is setting now, it's getting dark.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_05: I'll walk in front of the car with the headlights and the dirt road all the way back to our village.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_05: But I have to contemplate what have I done wrong?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_05: What have I done wrong that my son would think?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_05: He would have to lie to me.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_05: And he said, if he and his father had spanked him or beat him with a stick, instead his father walked in front of him the whole way, miles and miles and miles, to contemplate why my son would like it was the worst sentence.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_05: I will never lie to my father again.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_05: Isn't that a beautiful story?
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful story.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I would encourage you all to um take time and open your Bible, look at the this letter to this church in Colossae.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: Just try to get through the first chapter and see the personally significant things as far as your relationship with Jesus, what he's done for you, and who this guy actually is, and it will be a life-changing experience.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_05: And don't forget you can get our coffee.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_05: Uh what the name of our coffee, of course, is um The Cup of Friendship Friendship, which is the name of the show.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_05: But also, if they'd like to get one of your books that you've written, uh they can go on Amazon and your name is Michael.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: Michael Bagby, and the book that uh a lot of our material that we're talking about comes from three books that I've written.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: One is called Living in the Spiritual World.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the second one is called Echoes Into Eternity, and the third one is called The Vision Behind the Verses.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of things that we just very naturally talk about is uh things that I've uh been re reading and uh teaching.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_05: And uh so he studied history in Europe, he also has been to Israel multiple times.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_05: Uh he's a uh history aficionado and uh teaches classes and uh known as a rabbi.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_05: Anyway, we gotta here come the rabbi.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna take a break.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_05: We'll be right back.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I thought uh in uh just finishing our conversation that we had uh uh last week regarding just words and matter, and of course, we just went through uh just this beautiful uh letter that Paul writes to his friends in Colossae and Heropolis and Laodicea, he meant for it to be read to all three of those communities.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um just the meaning of these words and how in English we read them, and sometimes the it just goes right by us.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: We don't really get the richness.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_05: If I say four legs rich sniffs a good smeller and has a wagging tail, what are you gonna tell me?
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, it's a concept.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_05: So we narrow down all I have to do is say dog, you got the whole thing.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_05: So words are concepts, and that's why they're very powerful.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: And right, uh so uh when we're s uh speaking the language that we grew up with, we're able to communicate those because we're all on the same page as far as the words.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're on a different page.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're reading a document written by somebody two thousand years ago in another language who lived in another culture in another historical setting.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the challenge for us is to understand the Bible in its historical and cultural context, and that requires that we have an understanding of what's actually being said.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_05: Before we go back, I'm going to be going up to that seminary to be with the seminary students just for one week, but it's an accelerated class on the uh book of John, eight hours a day, five days in a row.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_05: The only thing is they sent me some papers in advance, and I was I am distressed and I was and my heart sank.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_05: It is so filled with dollar not 75 cent words, dollar fifty right now.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_05: It concerns me because you know there are what we call intellectual idiots.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_05: We know that the Bible says the mind of man is enmity with Christ.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_05: But do people actually think that being verbose?
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, like Hemingway used simple language, and yet you know, really the stupider the person, the more they have to throw in these dollar.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, there's there's good great.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_05: I love concepts and I love a dollar fifty words.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_05: But when you when you don't call uh the book of John John, it's like Jonathan or something.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's just ridiculous.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm worried, am I gonna go to be with these seminaries?
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_05: Is this what they study?
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, well, yeah, as a matter of fact, you your um concerns are somewhat justified because there's been a branch of Christianity.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think Thomas Aquinas was the first guy to actually uh express this.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: He said when the fall of man occurred, it happened, uh sin entered our body, but our intellect was unaffected by it.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so um creates religions and so right, so that our intellect uh is still pure, well uh than uh worshiping God through our intellect and figuring him out and understanding him intellectually.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: See, the Bible doesn't say that.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: What we just talked about uh just a few moments ago was epinosis, not just intellectual knowledge, but experiential knowledge that we experience him, you know?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this was my uh dad uh when I was uh probably five years old started tossing the baseball with me.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, he started to teach me uh to try and hit the ball with the bat.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I took my swings and I was not very successful.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: And my first organized baseball team in minor league, I went there the whole season and I didn't get a hit.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: I had a foul ball one time, and I thought, okay.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but the next year when I was in little league, something happened, Rhett, and I started connecting with the ball.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_05: What had happened?
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, but I started experiencing long drives to uh center field, base hits through for the first and second baseman.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I started experiencing the joy of smacking the ball.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the highlights of my baseball careers was my friend Don Durham was on the mound pitching.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: He was uh on uh this is our little league uh uh uh game.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um he pitched to me, he put one right down the middle.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was such a big, fat, fast ball, and I knocked it over the center field fence, and I started laughing.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was rounding first base, I looked and he standing on the mound.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: He gave me the finger.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was such a moment.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: I experienced hitting the ball.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, before my dad was trying to teach me, okay, Mike, keep your eye on the ball, get the bat behind your shoulder, take a nice even swing, move the weight from back to forward, you know, all these theoretical things.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: But once I started hitting the ball, everything changed.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think with Jesus, it's this experiential knowledge.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_05: What the philosophers call empirical.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_05: They would walk and talk and it's Yeah, it is.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: What does empirical mean?
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't it mean practical?
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh practical generalization.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh taking uh the essence of uh of what the uh situation is.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_05: He goes, tell me that, Pastor.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_05: See, some famous pastor in his 80s, I don't even know who he is, but he's world famous.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_05: And he said, What would you say to your younger 18-year-old self?
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_05: And there's dead silence, there's a pregnant pause.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_05: He said, I would not go to seminary, I would read the Bible.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_05: Most of these pastors read the Bible only when they're writing their sermons for Sunday.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_05: Read the Bible and hit the street, essentially what he was saying.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_05: Go do the work.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_05: Stop talking about it.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_05: Talking about Jesus is the milk of the word.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_05: It's great that you can quote the quotes and you know all the scriptures, but what's what's better?
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_05: What is better is is uh it's it's doing it's it's faith.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_05: It's action, faith the hungry cloak and visit those.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what you're talking about is there's a number of uh followers of Jesus that have not yet gotten to a place of recognizing the deep personal need they have of him, his presence, and his grace.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're willing to deal with him and have an intellectual relationship with him.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what you're concerned about is going to this uh seminar for a week, and that uh it's gonna be totally an intellectual exercise, and it's not necessarily going to be uh something that's gonna feed your spirit.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um I call the intributable.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: Jordan uh Peterson, who's a famous psychologist, yes, uh Canadian.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's uh academic.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: He's a real champion of uh freedoms and is uh just an incredible spokesman for that.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: He recently, uh this was about eight, nine months ago, he had a a bunch of uh theologians that he gathered and they were going to discuss the gospels.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so he's he's doing video and podcasts with us.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, well, this is gonna be really interesting.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: The thing about Jordan Peterson is he's taught on books of the Bible, but it never seems like he actually gets the essence of a personal relationship with Jesus.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: He's talking intellectually about all the incredible concepts that God is giving us.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I I'm and I'm just speaking for me, uh Red.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know the man personally, I've never met him.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I hope I'm wrong, I really hope I'm wrong, but it's
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_05: It just seems like he's missing this experiential element, this personal to what the twelve inches from the brain down to the heart.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I uh honestly I have to I have to confess to you that I watched the first episode with these theologians uh sitting around the table and of course they introduced so-and-so with a PhD in this, so-and-so with they all had like doctorates, doctor so-and-so.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: And there was one guy that was uh I I think it was uh he was either a Catholic priest, uh pastor, and he was the least uh qualified as far as his letters.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: But as I listened to that first uh discussion, he seemed to be the only one that really got it.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I never listened to another episode because I thought, oh, I I don't want to be filled up with intellectual knowledge.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've had that experience in my life.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I can be uh uh I can be drawn to that side of the argument, the intellectual side.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_05: That's what the Jews used to do on the Sabbath.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_05: They were not supposed to leave their household.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_05: So they would put fill up their pockets with pebbles, they would throw a pebble in front of them and technically step on those p p pebbles pebbles from their home, and therefore technically were able to go into town without leaving their household.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_05: Do you think you're gonna fool God intellectually?
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_05: What are they dealing with here?
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, it's I I had a friend that grew up in a religious Jewish family, and this was one of my uh actually he was a student at the uh uh school of worship in uh Jerusalem.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I met him.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_01: He said that on Friday they tore toilet paper and set it beside the toilet because they uh couldn't uh on Shabbat they could not tear toilet paper that was work.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they couldn't also not answer the phone, Red.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: Legalism of man.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: They could not answer the phone, but his father had a phone with a speaker uh phone function, and he had a pad that was uh on the floor beside the phone.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if you stepped on the pad, it would uh activate the speaker phone.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: So his father couldn't answer the phone on Shabbat, but if he happened to be walking by the phone while it was ringing and he stepped on the pad and he heard a voice, he could answer the voice.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay such foolishness.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus starts off his most famous teaching writ.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_05: I guess we've started the second segment.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_05: Let me play the song.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: His first friend was Abraham.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_00: Surely said Abraham.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hallelujah.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: The film of our show is the cup of friendship.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_00: We've had too many cups of friendship today.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_05: You gotta I I warned, I told the producer uh uh Dolan during our break, I said, You gotta come out at the beginning of that other show.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_05: I said, Sometimes when I get the coffee in me, I just shared.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I know what we just spoke about is something that if Jesus was sitting here with us, and he and he and he is, because he's in us, but I think he would identify with, hey guys, I'm happy that you're giving me your mind.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I really wish you would give me your heart.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_05: He said, if you say you this is Jesus, he said, if you say you love the father whom you have not seen, and don't love the brother whom you have seen, ye are a liar and know the truth dwells in you.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is gonna start his most significant uh teaching and recorded in the Bible, we call it Sermon on the Mount, with a section of scripture that we call the Beatitudes.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, even academics really admire these Beatitudes, whether they believe in him or not, right?
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the time, uh when you read the Beatitudes, we split them up and we talk about the different qualities.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um here's the Beatitudes.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is Matthew chapter 5, verse 1.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And after he sat down, his disciples came to him, he opened his mouth and he began to teach them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_05: Not the poor, but the poor in spirit.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the pure and heart, for they shall see God, and blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be so called the children of God.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now the poor.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Red, I just realized I just in my I copied this down and uh just put it here on my notepad.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_01: I missed one of the verses.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Golly.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Golly charging gross negligence.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay, let me give you.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let me as I'm reading it, I'm going, wait a minute.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_01: What what happened to those who mourn?
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_01: The first line is Blessed are the poor in spirit, uh, for theirs is the kingdom of God.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the gentle.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Even here in my notes, I've got verse three and uh missing verse four and verse.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Folks, please forgive me.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit of their.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they shall be satisfied.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the merciful, they shall receive mercy.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called sons of God.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we see these different aspects, and so we analyze them with our intellect.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_01: What could Jesus possibly be meaning?
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what comes across is a uh series of virtues that are so profound and to me so unattainable that I look at this and I go, golly.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take a moment and see what is Jesus really saying here.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the first thing that I have to uh say to you, Red, is I've done a little study on this, and one of my great sources for understanding the Beatitudes, in fact, he wrote a book about the Sermon on the Mount, is a Greek uh theologian, uh professor, uh doctorate of uh linguistics, doctor of theology named Spyros Zodiades.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Spiros, uh native of Cyprus, came to the U.S., got his degrees, uh, wrote 200 books, half of them in the Greek language.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if anybody understands the nuances of Greek grammar and Greek language, it's Spyros.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so he says when you read something like this in ancient literature, that you can't read it as disjointed sentences.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_01: It has to be read as a whole, context.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And has to be read in progression with one concept building on the other.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now let's just keep that in mind as we read this.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_01: The word blessed is a poetic word that gives a sense of transcendent happiness and of a life beyond care, labor, and death.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is from the theological dictionary of the New Testament.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Bliss.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_01: It indicates qualities of God.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_01: It the word refers to the joy that is experienced by having a relationship with God and inclusion in his kingdom.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's a sense of transcendent happiness beyond care, labor, and death.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh what that word blessed means.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the first word is poorer in spirit, is the word tochos.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_01: It refers to a helpless person who has no physical resources and he's unable to help himself.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is the first step in blessedness writ.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is realizing, as we would say in my fighter pilot days, uh, during air combat maneuvering when we're fighting one-on-one, one V two V2 or 4v4.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're in a fight with another airplane, we're flat on our back, we're out of airspeed, and we're out of ideas, and that guy's ready to shoot us down, right?
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do?
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_01: We're desperate.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is what uh poor in spirit means is we're out of resources.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: We have no political connections, no societal connections, we've got no financial resources.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_05: We know we have need of God, we're poor in spirit.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_05: We can have a gazillion dollars, but if you know that your source is God, that I'm poor before you, Lord, I have need of you.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so many people, Rhett, I have to say, there are many people who consider themselves followers of Jesus that have never gotten to this place of desperately needing Him to intervene in their life.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_05: The gift of desperation.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_01: I, as a, when I became a believer, my first uh uh thought was God chose a good man to be on his team.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_05: I arrogantly thought so too, because it's not not many noble, you know.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_05: I was brought up until I was 12, wealthy, and all these other things, and the golf clubs and the tennis clubs.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, you picked me, oh well, you know, what arrogance.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, God forbid.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was only uh after uh just major failures in my life, you know, of uh just things that I was saying, things that I was doing.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: And especially when I got married, I recognized that my actions were affecting my wife and my children.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I looked at my children.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh uh it's just like, and I suddenly realized I needed God to pull me out of these holes that I kept falling into.
• 1:16:47
  unknown: Okay.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_05: Religious holes.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because the next step in this progression that Jesus is describing here is those who mourn.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: This uh word is hoi penthosis, which in the context means to lament and have sorrow for one's sins or the sins of others.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, Rhett, I'm desperately needing God in my life.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, okay.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And why do I need him?
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm mourning the effects of sin in my life.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay and I'm looking around and I'm realizing there's others who are sinning, and we're all in the same boat, okay?
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so the next word is blessed are the gentle.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now that word is the word uh pratis.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_05: Now blessed are the gentle.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Are the gentle.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now I never heard that before.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_05: Because it says in the book of Samuel, thy gentleness hath made thee great.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_05: It says in the book of Psalms, Thy gentleness has made thee great.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_05: Now I never heard this before.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, this digent what does it say this way?
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, it's this is blessed are the gentle, uh uh for they shall inherit the earth, verse 5.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_05: How do we normally read that?
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me just tell you what the Greek word is.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, good.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: The Greek word is pratis.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, according to Aristotle, he's a good source on Greek language, wouldn't you say?
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Aristotle says pratis is the middle position between getting angry without reason or not getting angry at all.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_05: Hold on.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Getting angry without reason, or at the drop of a hat.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: You just you're just g you're uh tr you're prone to rage, and or you never get nothing ever bothers you.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: But pratis is a word that means you get angry for the right reason, according to Aristotle.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I'm desperately needing God because I'm mourning the sin in my life and the sins of people around me, and I'm seeing the bad effect they're having.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So suddenly I get angry at the sin that is going on in my life.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you see the progression?
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Desperate need of God, mourning my sin.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And now there's a certain point where I say, Enough, I've had enough.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_01: You've gotten to that point.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not, I don't want to do this anymore.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've had it.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, Lord.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_01: You come to the end of yourself, okay?
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you get angry at sin.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_05: And that's why now, like if I see a preacher and they're arrogant or they're yelling or something, I go, He just doesn't know yet.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_05: I don't really get angry, but I have to walk away because they're obviously uh still sucking on the milk.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm poor in spirit, I'm I'm desperately needing God.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm broken.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:19:48
  SPEAKER_05: A broken Detroit Heart is a great violent.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm uh mourning the effects of sin in my life.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a certain point that I get angry at sin and what it's doing to me.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_01: It took me a long time.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look just look at the picture on the back of my phone.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_05: Do you ever get angry?
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know about you, but as an older guy now, I don't look at others.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_05: That's God's business.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_05: I look at me and I get angry with my past sins and go.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not the man that I thought I was.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Precisely, okay.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the next thing that the next quality of blessedness is hunger and thirsting for righteousness.
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, this word is peinao, hunger, and thirst is dipsao, uh to car crave ardently, to seek with eager desire, according to Strong's lexicons.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So because I'm uh desperately in need of God, I'm mourning the effects of uh my sin, I'm getting angry at sin.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm desperately and ardently seeking with great desire for what?
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: For destacusune or righteousness.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this word uh strong defines as integrity, virtue, purity of life, righteousness, correctness of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm now wanting God's righteousness to fill me.
• 1:21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I want to do things his way.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you see the progression here, Rest.
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_01: That I'm desperately in need of God, I'm mourning the effects of my own sin, I'm getting angry at sin, and now I'm ardently and hungrily and thirstily desiring God's integrity, God's virtue, his purity of life, his righteousness, his correctness of thinking, feeling, and acting.
• 1:21:39
  SPEAKER_01: The next quality here is blessed are the merciful.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_05: For they shall obtain mercy.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_01: But now I'm recognizing my own brokenness, I'm mourning the effects of sin, I'm getting angry at sin, I'm hungering and now thirsting for God's righteousness, and I look around me and I realize everybody is in the same condition as me.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're in the same boat that I am, so I don't become judgmental anymore.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: I become merciful because we're all in the same boat, we're all dealing with the same issues.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the feet of clay, so to speak.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_01: The uh the uh solution, the recipe, the uh the the prescription for judgmentalness is recognizing you're in the same boat with that guy that's irritating you, that guy that's full of himself, that guy is still walking in his sinful ways and it's affecting you.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're in the same boat that he's in.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you become merciful.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_05: Who are you to judge another man's servant anyway?
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_01: So this word alios, mercy, allows Christians to have compassion uh with the sinful.
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um to uh be uh sorry for their sin and a willingness to help them, okay?
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_01: So blessed are the merciful.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now the next one is blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this pure heart is the word Karathoscardia.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: It indicates a purification by fire.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_01: It also refers to the condition of a vine that has been pruned and is ready to bear fruit.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_05: Now, purification by fire.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_05: Ouch.
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_05: And if anybody knows about pruning, you know about pruning?
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_05: Because I remember I had a friend of mine and she had uh uh groves over in Ocala, Florida, and we were driving there about 40 years ago, and she said, You always ask your neighbor to prune your trees.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_05: Why?
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_05: Because you'll never prune them enough.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_05: And if you see a tree properly pruned, it is cut down to the nub.
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_05: You killed the tree.
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_05: And so now here's the bad news is if you're faithful to Jesus, every tree that bears fruit shall be pruned that will bear more fruit.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_05: So the more you do for the Lord, you you got my attention here.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_05: You're growing that.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is this is you're in the classroom.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is all uh part of uh the process.
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm desperately needing God in my life because I'm poor in spirit.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm mourning the effects of sin.
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting angry at sin.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm hungering and thirsting for God's righteousness in my life.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking around and I'm seeing that everybody's in the same boat, so I'm not judgmental.
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm merciful to them.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And all this is purifying my heart.
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's causing me to get pruned of all the sinfulness, of all the bad attitudes, of all the habitual behavior.
• 1:24:33
  SPEAKER_01: You see how this process is?
• 1:24:36
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, blessed are the peacemakers.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that word is eranopios, which means it's not those that are just stopping fights, but these are the ones who've experienced the peace of God in their own life, and now they are just desiring and comp and compelled to help other people receive this peace.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_01: So look at the process, Rhett.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_05: We're not just talking about war and peace here.
• 1:25:03
  SPEAKER_05: No, no.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about Right.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus starts off his most famous sermon by saying, if you're going to be my disciple, recognize the process that is going to happen in you.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing is you're going to realize your desperate need for me in your life.
• 1:25:22
  SPEAKER_01: And when you start examining yourself, you're going to realize you're doing things that go against my will for your life as and you're doing things that are harmful for the people around you because you're living a self-centered life.
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And there's going to be a certain point where that behavior starts to bother you and you're going to get angry at it, and now you're going to want to do things my way.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to walk in my integrity, my virtue, and my way of thinking and feeling.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And as you do that, you're going to look around and see that people are dealing with the same issues that you are, so you're not going to be judgmental.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a process as it continues and goes stage after stage after stage, you're going to find yourself pruned of all those habitual behaviors, the wrong thinking, the self-centeredness that you lived so many years of your life with.
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you're going to realize you're being transformed.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is transformation.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_01: This is uh 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever a man or woman comes to Christ, they are a conosquist, a new creation.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_05: So this is why Billy Graham probably was so embraced by the uh by the multitudes, is because if you ever notice when he spoke, he always included so we, we sin, we do this.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_05: I know I do this, you do this.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_05: It was always we instead of somebody, you know.
• 1:26:50
  SPEAKER_05: Like I said, the one thing I remember about President Clinton when he was at his darkest hour and he committed sin, the whole world was on his case.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_05: He said, Billy Graham flew in to see me.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_05: He didn't speak at me, he spoke with me.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think Billy uh exemplified the true humility that comes from God.
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And say, Jesus is starting out.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_05: Did I tell you when I was interviewing him, I brought up the word humility.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_05: He leans into me, goes, Well, Rhett, if we're talking about it, we haven't got it.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_05: Shut me right up, you know.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that was a good word.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was a good word for you.
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, good word for you.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_05: I noticed you put the emphas on you.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, Billy lived in Vero Beach, uh, and uh he stayed at the Holiday Inn and he rented a house up on Jungle Trail.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_01: My aunt my aunt and uncle lived in that house.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_01: No, but my aunt and uncle lived in that house.
• 1:27:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and uh so I knew about Billy being here, which I thought was pretty incredible.
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_01: But but Rhett, yeah, Jesus wants true disciples.
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_01: He wants He doesn't want those that intellectually think about him, he wants those who know him.
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And if you truly Know him, you recognize he is far and above everything else that we can compare him to.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's what that word kadash, that word holy in the Hebrew language, it means set apart.
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_01: The word is set apart like at such a high level we can't even touch him.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Once we recognize that, that he's not just another guy, as the Doobie Brothers, remember they sang their song Jesus is just all right.
• 1:28:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, that was the birds.
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_01: No, the Doobie Brothers.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's it.
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_01: The Doobie Brothers.
• 1:28:33
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus is just all right.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus is my friend, okay?
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_01: They took a very casual attitude.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_05: Dolan, would you find out who made the hit song?
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_05: I know that.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_01: I say it's the birds.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_01: You said it was the Doobie Brothers.
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, if I was a betting man, what kind of car are you driving?
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we'll go pink slip.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Pink slip, pink slip, okay?
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_03: All these years I thought it was the bird.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_01: But they took a very casual attitude toward Jesus.
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_05: Jesus is just a good one.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Which we take a very casual attitude, that like he's someone that gives us suggestions.
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_01: That he's somebody that's our friend.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well, he is cool.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_01: He is cool.
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_01: He is the epitome of cool.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_05: He didn't want to start religions.
• 1:29:28
  SPEAKER_05: Man wants to start religions.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_05: Jesus wanted to have a relationship.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Jesus starts off his most significant teaching, and he says, if you're going to be my disciple, the first step is to recognize your desperate need of me in your life.
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't have that need, then we can't actually talk.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Desperation.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_01: So brokenness.
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_01: We call this brokenness.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the Psalms, I think it's Psalm 42, says, uh, you will not reject uh a broken heart.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um a broken contract heart, the Lord will not reject.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, yes.
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you, thank you.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_01: So David understood this.
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_01: And David was a guy that uh was a man after God's own heart, yet he committed some of the most heinous sins in the Bible.
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he had sex with a m uh one of his great warriors, a man who's listed in his riots of the front lines of the side.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then he sent him to the front side to be murder, you know, he murdered him, okay?
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_05: And yet he had a heart after God.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_05: But I was wondering, well, you said what you said, David had a heart after you, because as soon as he realized the deceit of sin and came to him, and he got on the ground and said, Please don't kill me while I live.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_05: And then Samuel the prophet says, You will not die, but the the the the the the the sword will never leave your household.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so I mean there was a consequence to his sin.
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Psalm 51, cast me not away from your spirit, oh God.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know uh He loved God.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Take not your Holy Spirit from me, create in me a new heart, O Lord.
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is such a great repentive uh psalm that uh I've sung that one often, you know.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_05: I'm so glad God found a real friend in David because he he's someone we should follow.
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_05: In that our hearts should follow the same way.
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_05: It's a love relationship, first and foremost.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_05: It's not a dictate, it's not a dot the I's and cross the T's, it's not legalism, it's a love relationship.
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Rhett, if you're gonna go to this seminar in New York.
• 1:31:26
  SPEAKER_05: Oh no, in uh Pennsylvania.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_01: In Pennsylvania.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_05: A seminary school.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_01: I would encourage you to engage your teachers and ask them, do you really understand what the Beatitudes are about?
• 1:31:39
  SPEAKER_01: They might because they'll probably they they might break them down into virtues of feeling like you're just the worst guy in the world, so you're poor in spirit, and being mourning, so you're just walking around all day talking, oh woe is me, my condition, that you're gonna be gentle or meek person that people can walk right over, or that's you're looking always for God in his ways, and everything that happens to you, you're gonna be merciful, and people uh they offend you or they step on you or hurt you, and that you're going to be just such a pure-hearted guy and always about peace.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_01: See, see, see, this is not what the Beatitudes are about.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_01: What it's is doing here, Red, if you look at it in a grammatically correct Greek language manner, which Spiro Zodiades is suggesting, it describes the process that happened to me and to you.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_01: That we recognized our need for God.
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_01: We looked around at our uh uh what was causing us to need God, and it was our sinful, self-centered behavior.
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_01: And at a certain point, we got desperate and angry at it.
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_01: We decided to start doing something about it, and we we knew that God's virtues and his morals and his character, we wanted that to become our morals, our virtues, our character.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that as we did that, we looked around and we weren't judgmental against people because they were we realized they were dealing with the same issues with us.
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_05: That said, I am a man of um uh poor words uh was it Isaiah was it Isaiah that said I am unclean my lips are unclean.
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_05: Unclean, yes.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_05: And so then this, yeah.
• 1:33:26
  SPEAKER_01: So but see, this is a process, and that in all of this we become people that are changed, we're purified in our heart, and that we become now compelled to tell other people about what's happened to us.
• 1:33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus says, if you're gonna be my disciples, this is the starting point.
• 1:33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if you meet people that have never understood or experienced their brokenness and experience the grace of God on their life, then they're missing the most critical element in what Christianity actually should be.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's a personal relationship with somebody that's so h much set apart and higher and higher.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_05: May I say this too?
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_05: Now, this will shock some people because I had somebody who's in radio locally all his life, he's now retired.
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_05: And I said this to him, surely this is he didn't think this was true.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_05: I said it's in the Bible.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_05: Jesus it's written that Jesus learned obedience by the things which he suffered.
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_05: You're telling me Jesus had to learn obedience?
• 1:34:29
  SPEAKER_05: The the man part of Jesus, he was one percent connected to the Father, but also man had to do that in order to suffer.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_05: It also said he was a man acquainted with many sorrows.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_05: Of course he was later in life.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_05: I've been had my own time for bitterness.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_05: I've had a lot of sorrow.
• 1:34:45
  SPEAKER_05: I'm sure many probably have it more.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_05: We're not comparing.
• 1:34:47
  SPEAKER_05: I've had a lot of sorrow.
• 1:34:49
  SPEAKER_05: And suddenly in my latter years I go, Oh, it's actually favor of God because the more he squeezes uh you know uh things out of out of me to get get rid of them and purify me under the heat.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_05: You put the gold into the heat, what happens?
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_05: The dross, the impurities go to the top, you sweep them away, and then hopefully you become pure gold.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_05: And so my ro my thing has changed in this.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_05: And this is the past year that if I this is technically, now I got this down technically.
• 1:35:20
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not saying that I have it, I'm doing it.
• 1:35:22
  SPEAKER_05: But I I'm in this room, it's you and me.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_05: I'm technically here to serve you.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_05: If there's ten people in this room, I'm to esteem you, according to Paul, better than myself, and I'm to put you first.
• 1:35:35
  SPEAKER_05: And the more that I can put others first, the more joy I will have.
• 1:35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what Jesus tells us happens, and Red, I have to say, in my life, um I found that to be true.
• 1:35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um living a self-centered life.
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Never I knew there was always a high above me that I wasn't experiencing.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yet when I had my experience with God in 1981, I received Jesus as my Lord, my savior, and I recognize him as my king, that's huge, okay?
• 1:36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Recognize him as your Lord and King, okay?
• 1:36:14
  SPEAKER_01: He has absolute authority over my life.
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_01: But he's my friend.
• 1:36:20
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Well, if you do the things that I say to you, we're friends now, you know.
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_05: What happens when we don't do those things?
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, I swore again in traffic, or you know, I was hateful, you know, uh to somebody in traffic.
• 1:36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's just another reminder of how much we need him.
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I know you have this besetting sin too, right?
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, a few years ago I came to your class, I was in your class, and I have my own things, my own uh what do you call it, triggers.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_05: And I got upset with somebody who would hurt me because anger usually is either fear or hurt talking.
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_05: And I perceived that this person hurt my feelings, so I was in the class and I got angry.
• 1:36:58
  SPEAKER_05: And and I was amazed at how you took the anger.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_05: You did not respond with anger, you c maintained your gentle spirit, and I was very impressed with your um you know, uh seasoned approach to me.
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_05: And it was not you did not condemn me for my anger.
• 1:37:19
  SPEAKER_05: You said you said, Well, we don't whatever it was you said, whether we we don't want to really uh do that, what what's this or anyway?
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_05: It was love prevailed, and I was like taken aback.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_05: And of course, what did it do?
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_05: A soft answer, it is written in Proverbs, turneth away uh wrath.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_05: I once had somebody yelling at me, and I remember reading that in Proverbs, and I said, Let him yell, and this man who I was doing business with said, yellow blah blah blah blah.
• 1:37:43
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't return aught for aught.
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_05: And then he finally calmed down, and I've learned that a soft answer turns away wrath.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_05: You know what did it put me in the power position.
• 1:37:52
  SPEAKER_05: If somebody runs me over in traffic or they go in front of me, and I don't get angry, guess what?
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_05: They've not controlled me because well, guess what, Rhett?
• 1:38:01
  SPEAKER_01: God designed this world according to his fabric, his wisdom.
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_01: The way this universe works is the way he works, and if we do things according to his ways, then we find results that are generally very positive.
• 1:38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you obey him and say, don't return evil for evil, then something positive comes out of that situation.
• 1:38:24
  SPEAKER_01: You and I have both experienced it.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_05: I think we have a pastor coming on, right?
• 1:38:29
  unknown: Yeah, at 11.
• 1:38:30
  unknown: Oh, at yes, nine.
• 1:38:31
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, we're gonna say goodbye for now, folks.
• 1:38:36
  SPEAKER_05: We'll be back next week with a cup of friendship.