Words of Jesus Podcast - What Did Jesus Believe

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

The goal is to reinforce Christianity with the wisdom and words of Jesus. Examine His life, His friends, and His relationship with His father as recorded in the four gospels of the Scriptures. These written accounts are a gift from God; called to the remembrance of the apostles. Here's what Jesus said, "...If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. He that loveth me not keeps not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's which sent me. These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe." John 14***Ch. 30 - Jesus Teaches the Kingdom in ParablesTHE SEED (Mark 4:36-29)            Jesus spoke another parable, saying:             “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.  For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.  But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.”A MUSTARD SEED (Matt. 13:31, 32; Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18, 19)            Then Jesus, speaking another parable, likened the kingdom of God to a mustard seed that grows from a small grain into a large plant:            “Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what comparison shall we compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth. But when it is sown, it growth up, and becometh greater than all hers, and shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it.” LEAVEN (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20, 21)            Then Jesus compared the kingdom of Heaven with leaven, saying:             “The kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.”THE HIDDEN TREASURE (Matt. 13:44)            Jesus spoke another parable, likening the kingdom of Heaven to a hidden treasure.  He said:             “Again, the kingdom of Heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field-which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.”THE COSTLY PEARL (Matt. 13:45, 46)            Jesus told another parable to teach his listeners what the kingdom of Heaven is. He...

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus series with Don C. Harris Hello friends, welcome to the Words of Jesus series. I'm Don Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. What are we doing? Well, we're trying to reinforce Christianity with the wisdom and words of Jesus. Do you know what Jesus said and what Jesus did and what Jesus said to do? If you've been watching this series, you're getting more informed all the time. A series based on Jesus

his life, his friends, his ministry and his relationship with his Father as recorded in the Gospels. We've been in chapter 30 of our book called The Words of Jesus and you might be wondering about this little book and what this is and this is simply a collection of things that Jesus said. About a hundred, what was it, 1910 I believe it was that a man decided that

because the King James Bible didn't have any quotation marks in it sometimes it was dubious as to who said what. And so a man compiled a group of theologians to take a look and find out what exactly did Jesus say. When it was set aside, what Jesus actually said, according to the scriptures, I know there's a lot of controversy about it, but what he said and how he said it, what language he used and what he meant when he said it. But

the fact was is that this fellow having confidence in the King James Bible took what the findings of these people and having put quotations around what Jesus Christ said, he wanted to go further and change the color of the ink. He was a printer. So naturally his talent as a printer entered into it. He wanted to print the scripture in red letters. And so thus we have what we call our Red Letter Edition Bibles.

If you don't have one, and I find that a lot of people don't, it's pretty impressive actually to look through the Gospels and see what Jesus actually had to say. And to set those aside and read them individually like we're doing, we're getting a very good understanding of the way Jesus thought about things. And essentially, although I don't like the particular term, we're finding out what Jesus believed and what ruled His life. And He was good enough to share it with us here on the earth.

He was good enough secondarily to call all these things to the remembrance of the disciples at a later date. And He was good enough secondarily to call all these things to the remembrance of the disciples at a later date. And he was good also that he had these things recorded in scriptures and miraculously preserved them for us that we have them in our hands today. We've been talking about how Jesus was teaching about the kingdom of God, and he was doing so in parables. And I was talking about the fact that he was under a certain handicap because I'm sure the language that he and his father spoke

I don't believe that it's necessarily Hebrew. I know a lot of people feel like it is. I don't. But the language that he spoke, what he knew to be fact was very difficult to transfer that thought to the mind of mortal men. And he did so by giving us several parables so that we could understand. Last time we talked about the seed and how the seed is planted and that it grows eventually into a great tree.

But it starts out very, very small. He goes on to elaborate that very concept when he talks about the kingdom of God being like leaven, which is where we start today. He says, the kingdom of heaven is like like leaven, which is where we start today. He says, Now people who know something about cooking know exactly what's going on here. You put leaven into a cake mix, into a bread mix, into whatever you're doing. I don't know if you make cake with leaven. I don't know anything about it. But I know you make bread with it.

And I do know that it has the ability to procreate itself to the point that it becomes so fast and furious that things can become over-leavened simply by time and condition. He wants us to know that the kingdom of God has power and life within it by itself. The kingdom of God even infused into

the world of sinful and mortal man, it has the ability to procreate itself. This is one of the mistakes, I think, that the modern church makes. When we read in the Scriptures where Jesus commissioned His disciples, by the way not you, but his disciples, by the way, not you, but his disciples, go ye therefore into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. We take from that, many people read that

and consider it their own personal commission. Many people preach that it is the commission of the church. And that particular verse is known as the Great Commission. But I assure you there are millions of Christians that have no business whatsoever going into the earth and preaching the gospel. First of all, you're asking them to do something that in many cases, within their own strength, it's impossible for them to do. Second, you have people that are telling people how to

get to a place that they've never been. They're out trying to share with people a formula that begins with something that they do not understand, which is faith. They are assuming a lot on the part of the person who is listening to them that God has indeed called them, that they have the ability to believe. There's just so many assumptions and presumptions involved in what we do under the guise of evangelism

that we have literally made fools of ourselves. Our church is full of lost people that will, many I believe will continue to be lost until the coming of the Lord or the coming of their own death. And then we have people who are deceived within the church about salvation in itself. There is a verse in Acts that says, and the Lord added unto the church daily such as should be saved. Now

boy, that language just does not allow for this mass evangelism that we see today. It just doesn't allow for people to go out and essentially make this decision for other people. Force them into a decision. Ask them to repeat after me and all the rest of the foolishness that's going on in churches. And then six, eight, nine months later or maybe six or eight or nine years later preachers look around and say, how did my church

get full of lost people? How did, you know, this establishment that we're trying to put together here, you know, we got people that are of no spirit whatsoever. What in the world has happened here? Well, you happened. You happened to it. You sent your congregation out to knock on people's doors when you're actually asking them to do the ministry of the Holy Spirit himself.

Jesus says, I'm going to send the Spirit and he's going to lead you and guide you into all truth and he will convince the world of sin. It's his job. And it's his job to grow the church, to add to the church such as should be saved. So we need to kind of back away from this, you know, trying to grow our congregations

or grow our little clubs by adding people to it. I know you think you're doing well, but in a lot of cases, well, frankly, friend, you're just not doing well. You're not doing well, but in a lot of cases, well, frankly, friend, you're just not doing well. You're not doing well at all. I think that the world is in need of seeing a church that is actually headed by Jesus Christ himself, a church that is actually run by God himself, that the power of that church is God himself, and not necessarily an articulate preacher preacher or a really good song service or a really good basketball team or whatever else your church is famous for.

It's very important that the church portion I really believe, you know, I know people say I'm against church because I tell people not to go a lot but I really think that the church, the spiritual portion of church would do well to be removed from what we understand church to be in our day and age. And let it, if you want to make a social club out of it, that's fine. We all need to get together.

We all need to, Christians need to get together and talk about things and discuss things and have fun together and enjoy one another's fellowship. I get it. I get it. But when it comes to spiritual things, we need spiritual leadership. We need people who are in touch with God well enough to know what God wants His people to know. And these are what is mistakenly in our day and age when we use the word prophet, we think it's somebody who's spooky

big round eyed goofballs with wild hair and speaking in perhaps another language or at least speaking in perhaps another language or at least speaking in dark sayings or things like this and predicting the future. We even say that when somebody says something that's going to happen and it does happen, we say, why? My goodness, that was prophesied.

Or, you know, you must be a prophet. Why? Because you spoke the future. Look, that was simply a sign that God gave his prophet so that his people would not follow a false prophet. That's all that was. That wasn't their main goal or intention or commission. Their commission was, my people cannot hear my voice. They can't hear what I'm trying to say to them. I need you to go and say, thus saith the Lord. Well, if you define prophet that way, what'd you just define? You define a spirit-filled preacher is what you define. Not Kreskin, not a magician, not a mind reader, not a guy who talks to the dead, or any of the rest of this spooky stuff.

It's just somebody who knows the will and the word of God and has the guts and perhaps sometimes not even the ability to speak in some fluent way or in some articulate way, they might stumble over their words. You know, they might not be entertaining to listen to, but what they have to say to you is the word of God. That's a prophet. But is a prophet a church builder? Not necessarily.

God is the church builder. And he takes people in to his fold and brings them into his church. And they become a part of the church by his decree and by his will. Now, what we need to know is that kingdom of God, we were talking about how the kingdom of God actually can be described in two ways. One of them is a spiritual kingdom of God that is, by the way, on the earth today in the hearts of his people. Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you. There's coming a time when the kingdom of God will be manifest in physical form on the earth the nations of the world become the nations of our God and it will be populated only with the people who have who have honored and worshiped God throughout their lives but that

spiritual kingdom that we're living in right now has within it the power to multiply itself if we will allow it to do it. If we become the people that we need to be, the church will grow by default. Now what can we do? Let's ask a cook about the way the leaven thing works. You just push the leaven into the dough and everything's cool? Well, not necessarily. The dough has to be prepared in a certain way. Yeast likes to eat sugar, so there needs to be something sweet in that dough for that yeast to eat. Yeast likes moisture,

so this dough has to be moist enough and sweet enough. It has to be what it needs to be for the leaven to grow. When it is true, when all those things are present, you're going to get multiplication. It's going to happen. It's almost unpreventable. You can't stop it. It's just the way it is. It starts out small, but eventually this woman hid this leaven into three loaves, and eventually the whole was leavened. You see, now it's time to pinch off a little bit and save it for later. Now it's time to set off what's called starter for cooks who make breads and things such as that. And because it's fully populated. And so, you know, I understand church planting. I get that. But, you know, let's make sure that

when we're planting a church uh we understand that you know we might sow the church but and somebody else might water and and if you don't mind me adding to the scriptures a little bit and somebody else might add the sweetness you know the sugar to this thing and and create this uh environment for the yeast to grow. But God gives the increase. You see, it's very, very important that he increase the church, that he add to the church such as should be saved. And Jesus decided to describe this to us with this principle of leaven. Leaven has life within itself.

It is alive. And as microscopes and such as that came about in our lives, we were able to see leaven and realize as I think it was an Irishman who coined the term, we beasties. He said that these were we beasties. These were little tiny animals that were living.

And we understood that Lebanon is alive. It has a life of its own. And the kingdom of God has a life of its own. This is not to discount our efforts but our efforts are to be focused toward ourselves making us so that we are what we need to be within this kingdom of god so that what we do and what we accomplish on the earth promotes itself pushes itself supplies to the to the the life of the kingdom of god and and allows these things to grow we're not we're really not trying to grow stuff we are what we're really trying to do here is to allow things to grow and allow the kingdom of god to expand the reason that this is um so important is because

in in our in our day and age i don't know if it's strictly in our day and age it's the only one i can speak to but um we have our attitude toward the world and toward the church toward the kingdom of god all these kind of things it's it's all divisive we are we're constantly trying to carve off a section of people and say these are my people those are your people you know these are these are good people and those are bad people and we don't like we don't like people that don't look like us or don't act like us or talk like us same color as us whatever else whatever silly little division that we've made we're constantly in the in the business of dividing people we even take the most precious doctrines and theologies of the bible and use it as a carving knife to to cut up and set aside

certain sections of people that you know they they can't be right with god because they don't do this or or they do this and you're not so not supposed to do that or whatever else whatever reasons we come up with but i find more so the the christian faith being divisive in this area, not pulling together and loving one another like we ought to. Why is it that the three churches in town that all believe in Christmas can't get together and have a Christmas play? Why is that? Why is it that all the churches in town that all believe the same thing can't even get together and have a dinner on the ground or a baseball game or something together. What is that? How is it that we all have to be separate?

We all have to have our entities. I'm afraid you're going to find that the trouble is up there behind that box that everybody's staring at on Sunday morning. There's people that want to build their own little kingdoms. And they don't want to take second place to anybody else, and they don't want you going and listening to somebody else's sermon. You might find out it's better than theirs, or whatever childish reason we have for dividing the kingdom of God. I think that if we will just relax a little bit, and back away away a little bit and work on what needs to be worked on which is us and and and allow ourselves to be the people that god wants us to be you're going to find the kingdom of god growing right out from under you and it's it's it's going

to branch out and it's going to be great and it's going to it's going to work and it's going to branch out, and it's going to be great, and it's going to work, and all three loaves are going to be leavened, and there's just plenty to go around. There's plenty of God's grace. There's plenty of His forgiveness, and unfortunately, I'm afraid the seats in the church that should be set aside for the sinner to come into a congregation of people that love the Lord, I'm afraid that in a lot of cases it's being occupied by somebody that

is part of the problem and not part of the solution. So we need to be very careful in this area. Make ourselves available? Absolutely. Make our churches available? Absolutely we should do that. But to add to the church, to push towards evangelism, which is really nothing more than pushing church membership today, our evangelism efforts ought to be personal. It ought to be the people we know, not strangers that we knock on their door, not people who aren't aware of our checkered past, not people that have any particular problem in general, but those that we know and those that we love. Someplace we can have an

influence. Anyway, Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is like leaven in that it has a life within its own. And to hinder that is a huge mistake. Let leaven do what leaven does, which is multiply. Multiply like crazy. And I don't know if you know the difference in the smell of flatbread or the smell of leavened bread baking, but one is very, very appetizing. And the other one, it may nourish you, it may take care of you, but it doesn't have near the draw that leavened bread does. Bread with life in it. So we need to have life and light within ourselves do we not now

he is moving toward uh here the what you've heard me talk about about the treasure and the fact that the the wisdom and knowledge of god is not something that is hidden from us it is hidden for us. And it comes from scriptures like this. It says that, again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure, hid in a field, which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth, and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. When I was a child and and having heard this scripture

i remember thinking that when it says he found treasure in a field uh because of i don't know just the movies or my own imagination or whatever else uh i imagine this guy finding a box full of gold or silver doubloons or or jewelry or something you know like the old pirates box and and so he goes and buys the field and I used to think why is he buying the field why doesn't he just pick up the box and go and then later on in life when i heard him say that he sees he finds this treasure in a field and immediately he hideth and then he goes and goes to buy that field what's going on here what do you mean he hides it what does he mean he hides it well because that treasure is something to be mined out of that field. Not something just to pick up and carry into town to the assay office, but this is something

that is mined from this field. This guy didn't find gold doubloon. He found a gold vein or a silver mine. He found something that was still in the earth. This is going to require work for him to get this out. But he does know that he's going to have to own this land in order to own this treasure. And so what does he do?

Well, the first thing he does is he hides it. He goes and gets branches or whatever and covers up the mouth of the cave or he covers up the gold vein that he's discovered. So it won't shine in the light. Nobody else will find this. And so he goes and finds out who owns this field. And he sells all that he has to buy it.

And when he realizes what a wonderful thing this is, the Bible says that he sells everything he has to buy this. And you know, there's something that's missing, is somebody who has found something in Christianity that they are willing to sell everything they have to get it. Is that because christianity is poor and ineffectual or is it because um uh the fellow might be blind uh he might he's not looking in the right place what where's the problem here and i assure you it's because the the church itself is bankrupt and when he looks in that direction he sees nothing of value. You're not going to get anybody to sell their house and hand you the money to pay for new pew pads or asphalt for your

driveway or any of the rest of that stuff because the reward is just not there. It's just not there. But if a person understands that what God has given them is a new lease on life. It is a new chance. It is atonement. It's, you know, has promises of forgiveness and regeneration and all the wonderful things that go with it. Here's a man that says, this is worth everything I have is to have this in my life. Secondly, I want to make sure that I understand this and that it is a part of my life so that I can share this with my loved ones. This is what makes Christianity the sweet and wonderful thing that it is. This is why people want to invest in the truth, and they don't necessarily care to invest in church. Well, they might invest in your church building because it's tax deductible.

They might invest in your church building out of just pure competition with the other prominent families of the church. I don't know what their motivations are, but buddy, when somebody finds something that really makes a difference in their life, they don't know what their motivations are, but buddy, when somebody finds something that really makes a difference in their life, they don't mind investing. Not their time, their money, their life. They don't even mind investing in it. Our time's gone. My goodness. It just seems like the time shoots by. I'd like to know where you are and how you're listening to the broadcast. Can you send your questions to me? I'd love to hear that. I'd like to know where you are and how you're listening to the broadcast. Can you send your questions to me? I'd love to hear that.

I'd love to hear your comments about the show and when you're listening and where you're listening. Just simply write to Don at thinkredink.com. If you would like to write to the ministry, you can do so at Think Red Ink Ministries, P.O. Box 718, Pye Townown, New Mexico 87827. Are you thinking ready? Do you know what Jesus said? Yeah, well, it's starting to happen within you. Alright, we'll see you next time. Till then, bye-bye. ¶¶ you've been listening to don c harris of think red ink ministries ThinkRedInc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com.

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