Words of Jesus Podcast - You Can Please God Today

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

The gospel of Jesus brought is grace; the power to become a son of God."If you will, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice." Sirach 15:15“These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:” ... John 17:1-26 ***Chapter 4: JESUS AND HIS MESSAGE REJECTED AT NAZARETH (Part 1)HEARING that John had been cast into prison, Jesus returned to Galilee. He began to preach the gospel of God in the synagogues, saying:            “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye, and believe the gospel.”           His fame was spread through all the regions round about.            Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been reared, and went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, as was his custom. He stood up and read from the book of the prophet Isaiah, were it was written:           “’The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’”           All eyes fastened on him as he began to preach, saying:           “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”           Many of those present were bewildered, and others were awe-inspired. They questioned among themselves.           “Is this Joseph’s son?”           Others hearing him were astonished. They said:           “From whence hath this man these things? And what wisdom is this which is given unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?           And they were offended at him.           Jesus continued, saying:           “Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal thyself. Whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.’ But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah, when then Heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land. But unto none of them was Elijah sent, save unto Sarepta, a city Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many the lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.”                When they had heard these things, those in the synagogue were filled with resentment. They rose up in a body to thrust Jesus out of...

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus series with Don C. Harris Hello friends and welcome once again to the Words of Jesus series brought to you by the Think Red Ink Ministries located in Pytown, New Mexico. I'm Don Harris, I'll be your host and my job is to carry us through the red ink and hopefully as we get to be more and more familiar with what Jesus said,

it will overlay and perhaps obscure and perhaps if we're very, very fortunate, it will erase completely some of the silly ideas that we've gathered over the years, that we've carried around with us, that makes our theology extremely imperfect. And, well, we find that the more we try to trust our theology and our doctrine and try to worship our God, we find that it becomes more and more unfeasible to do so. And it's simply because we have preconceived ideas. And we've been told that this is the way it is. And we've heard this particular set of words or questions or sentences or paragraphs or whatever, the sayings that we say to one another when we have our little troubles and problems in life and our lackings and slackings and all the problems that come about. And when we seek Christian counsel, we get those cliches and those trite sayings

that don't really seem to help. It just seems like the more pressure that we put on our understanding of our Christianity, the more it fails us. I see people all the time that are just as happy as they can be with their Christian life, but mostly it's because they have a very satisfying physical life or secular life. They enjoy the job they do, they enjoy the clothes they wear,

they enjoy their families, they enjoy they wear, they enjoy their families, they enjoy their sports, they enjoy their vacations, they enjoy and it has very little to do with a serious and most solemn joy from the inside. The joy that comes from the inside is strictly gained through regeneration and through our relationship with God. So that all the other things, all the superfluous things in life, all the things that, well, essentially we feel is necessary for a happy life, become very unnecessary.

They become secondary to us. And as problems come to us in life, if we've lived according to His commandments, we're not sinning every day and we're not depending on His, what we call grace, which is an incorrect definition. We'll talk about that no doubt. But when we depend on grace and forgiveness and mercy and we're always depending upon God loving us so much that He's going to forgive us of anything we do, when we find ourselves

depending on that a lot, it's because we are constantly disappointing God. And we just need to stop that. We need to live lives that are not necessarily victorious in our secular living, not necessarily victorious in our social standing or in our financial standing, but we need to live victorious lives in that when we lay our head on our pillow at night we say, not I've accomplished this and this and this and this, which I have a tendency to do.

But we need to be able to say I've pleased God today. I've done what He wanted me to do. I've been faithful to what He's called me to do and I've done it with all my might and with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. And we can feel like that it's a pleasurable thing for God to even look at us and evaluate our lives. Do you realize that that is possible? I know that when we spend time before the Lord, we

understand His majesty and His might and who He is and who we are. It can get, well, a little discouraging when we compare ourselves in His light. And there are times for that. But it's not God's intention to constantly transmit to us His disfavor. As a father, sometimes I find myself because I want the best, you know, I mean, I'm thinking now

of conversations I have with my daughter sometimes, and I'm thinking, you know, just back off. Just, you know, can't you just give them, let them up to breathe a little bit. And I find that to be a characteristic of my God. Sometimes I know there's things in my life that need to be worked out. I know there's things that he needs to reveal to me, things I need to change my mind on, change my attitude about.

But sometimes he's very, very good to me. And He covers me with His hand and we can spend time in fellowship and hey, good job you did out there on that whatever it was that I did. Well, thank you, Father. I appreciate that. I do it for you. This is the kind of relationship that we should have with our Father. But you can't have that if every encounter with Him has to do with you crying out for forgiveness

for slipping and falling or for doing what you knew you shouldn't do or breaking His commandments and all this kind of thing. It's just a matter of, well, I hate to say it because it sounds so crass, but it's a matter of our will. It's a matter of our will to please God and to keep His commandments and to do what is right. It's just, it's the right thing to do, and it's going to require effort on our part, and we just need to do it. Just do it. I love the scripture in Sirach that says you can keep the commandments if you choose to. If you want to. And you

can keep the commandments and you know when you realize I can keep the commandments, all of a sudden you find yourself without excuse for not keeping them. That verse goes on to say God has not given any man, any man permission to sin. We've had churches, huge churches, as a matter of fact the largest church in the world involve themselves in essentially giving permission to sin.

Now although the Protestants may condemn the Catholics for the ages and the times of indulgences and actually prepaying for sin, we're not clear in this matter. The Protestants are not clear in this matter. We have taught people that it doesn't matter what you do or how long you do it. I mean even if it's wrong, God, He always forgives, His mercy endures forever, and all you have to do is ask and you can be forgiven and these kind of things, essentially giving people license

and permission to sin. You do not have that. And we need not live like we do because we don't. If you want that joy that comes from inside and not necessarily the joy that I've seen Christians living in, that everything in their life is just wonderful. And so they just say, thank you, Jesus. And so their secular life becomes some kind of an extension of their Christianity. And if good

things happen to them, if they're comfortable, you might feel like that it's faithful of them and good of them to thank the Lord for that. But and good of them to thank the Lord for that. But our scriptures teach us to thank the Lord in everything. There's only one way to thank the Lord in tribulation and in lack and in want and in peril. There's only one way to do that, and that is to live a clean life before Him. And that way when troubles do happen, it's not

a matter of sitting around and wringing our hands and wondering what have I done to deserve this? If that thought does occur to you, by the way, it's a great indicator that you're not keeping His commandments and you're not doing what you know to do. Because if you were doing what you knew to do and you were doing what you were sure was the right thing to do, I tell you, those thoughts won't cross your mind. Not in illness, not in disease, not in troubles,

not in strife, not in financial reversals, not in social disorders, social disruption, political problems, troubles with the world, crops that fail, houses that burn. The list is pretty long. But I assure you that if you live a life that is pleasing to God and He's made it clear how to do exactly that, keep my commandments. If you do that, those thoughts won't even occur to you.

And through that you'll find the strength to get through it. But that's where joy comes from. Not necessarily from having all of our ducks in a row and making sure our insurance is all paid up and those kind of things. There's a lot about those things that are included in responsible living, but that's not necessarily the joy that awaits the Christian. There's a joy on the other side of that, that if you've never experienced it, you should make it your hobby to find out what it is. Jesus, a matter of fact we're reading from our book, The Words of Jesus, and our

scriptures are coming from Matthew 4 and Mark 1 and Luke 4 and this is chapter 4 of our little book. The title of which is Jesus and His Message Rejected at Nazareth. Let me read to you. We talked about John the Baptist at length in previous sessions. And I want you to remember that Jesus' evaluation of John was that he was the greatest prophet that was ever born of woman. And I was explaining to you that that greatness had to do with,

has to do with the prophecies that John expounded and exposed to the Jewish world in those days. You remember what his message was? It was, change is coming. Change. You're going to have to change. That temple's changing. That church is changing. The synagogue's changing. Everything around us is changing. The way you did it before is not the way we're going to do it now. And when Jesus got news

of John the Baptist being beheaded he turned and said the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand repent ye and believe the gospel. Jesus actually reiterated the crux or the foundation of John's message. It's time to repent. It's time to change. And we're going to have to believe the

gospel. The gospel has been defined in many different ways as well. It's one of the words that we define in seminary and unfortunately we carry those definitions with us for the rest of our lives. Some people feel like the gospel is, and some people have vilified the word gospel saying that it has the word spell in it.

There are people who have exalted the word gospel saying that it includes all that Jesus ever did or said. Some people have said that the gospel is simply taking some poor sinful creature down what we call or has been called the Roman road which is when you take a rank sinner and you show him this scripture and then this one and then this one and then this one. You have him repeat it. You have him read it.

And it all amounts to none of us are perfect, and we all need to be born again, and if we would just ask Jesus to come into our hearts that we're saved. Which is a, I mean, if I might say so, just for the sake of time, it would take two or three hours to talk, to take this idea apart. But the truth is that is a pitiful representation of the gospel. The gospel

being translated the good news I understand that, but I think the good news is just about as vague as the word gospel. What is the gospel? What is that all about? Well, John started preaching the gospel. And it was that the way things were are not the way they're going to be. And things are about to change, and they're going to change, I always thought, and I hope you think, that they're going to change for the better.

It will be for our betterment if we obey the gospel and if we believe the gospel. But the gospel also contains some very, very bad news for people who actually refuse to go His way. I have always felt that the opening words to the gospel of John, see we call each of those, the first four books of the New Testament, the stories of Jesus' life, we call them Gospels. These kind of things are, I know you've

done this all your life and perhaps you've been a Christian since you were seven, but there's people out there in the world today that's never picked up a Bible, never walked in a church, they care nothing about it. And when they do feel some call on their life, they go towards spiritualism. And they don't understand these words, and they don't even care to find out what they are. The reason they don't care to find out what they are is that they have found that people who use this kind of language are not exemplars

in the faith. They're not people that we want to be like or to mimic or to even associate with in a lot of cases. But the word gospel has many meanings but I've always felt like that at the beginning of John's gospel, he just nails this down so that it's hard not to see it.

He says that in the beginning was the word. Now, we don't really understand that completely, but we do know that in the beginning when God created this world, that he did it, the Bible says, by the word of God. Now many times people have taken that and attached that to the scripture that says, and God said, and God said, and God said. You remember how creation took place? God said let there be light, God said let the waters divide, God said let...you remember how this goes. And some people have taken

the Scripture that says that He created the world...we understand the worlds were framed by the Word of God. But even further investigation into the creation, you'll find out that when it's speaking of the Word of God, it's talking about none other than who we know now as Jesus Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah. He is, was the creator of this earth. He is, was the creator of this earth. He is, was the head of the family of man on this earth.

And this is, as a matter of fact, it's irrefutable. You'd have to close your eyes to a lot of scriptures to not understand that it was Jesus who created man. It was Jesus who walked with Adam in the cool of the day. I realize this was all before he took on a body in his pre-incarnate form. But we have to understand that it was he who met with Abraham. It was he who wrote the commandments in stone with his finger.

Friends, Jesus has been around a long, long time and we need not think that he suddenly appeared on December 25th or any other date. We need not think that this is when he appeared because that's really not so. 17th chapter of John, the disciples hear him praying in the garden, and evidently record this later, where Jesus is praying to the Father and saying,

restore to me the glory that I had with you before the foundation of the world. Now that's an interesting thought in itself. So whoever this being was, I don't suppose that he had the name Jesus when he was there in that time. He could have, but I don't suppose I always thought that name was conferred upon him for his namesake Joshua or Yeshua

in the Old Testament who actually led people out of bondage, out of the wilderness and into the promised land. So we find that Jesus actually is, or at least has been, around for a long, long time. And when the Bible says that the worlds were created by the Word of God, you will understand as you study this out that, my goodness, this is not saying that it was just God who we incorrectly

call God by a name that is not a nominative name at all. It's a descriptive name. But unfortunately the King James is kind of brainwashed us to call him God all the time. I guess it's like saying boss to the guy you work for instead of calling him by his name, I guess. But nevertheless, when the Bible says that the worlds were framed by the word of God, we kind of think that God, Jehovah, the Father God, that when he spoke these things into existence, that this is what John is referring to. But the truth is, or at least my understanding of this and revelation of this was, is that when the Bible says that

we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, it was talking about Jesus Christ Himself. Now, from the very beginning, I think it's interesting that as John starts his gospel, he starts at the beginning. And he tells the story essentially of creation and says that this is where Jesus was. Let me give you a little history on this guy. And so he's telling us where

Jesus essentially came from, that he is our creator and he is the Father of all living. As a matter of fact, when it was prophesied that He would come, have you ever been a little confused about one of the titles that was given to Him with the, you know, it says that He was going to be a counselor and He was going to they gave Him one name after another and one of them was the Everlasting Father. Now we all know that even the Trinitarian

doctrine won't take Jesus and say that he is the Father. There are some Jesus only denominations that will. But I don't know of anyone other than them, I guess, or people like him, people like them, that would even equate Jesus Christ with the Father. But how did he get the title that he's going to be Wonderful Counselor and then Everlasting Father is in the list

of what we're going to call him. Well, he's Everlasting Father because he's the father of all living. He's the creator of mankind. And he laid down whatever rights he had to mankind and the earth in order to come here and redeem it. John continues in the first chapter of John that he came unto his own

and his own received him not. Who was his own? Was it not the people that he chose? The children of Israel, of Jacob that had the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve tribes of Jacob these were the people that God chose to be His people and occupy His city, His land. And when it says that he came unto his own

this was not just a drop in visit by, oh look the Lord's come to visit us. He came to his own for a purpose. And if you hold these thoughts as you read the scripture you will see the purpose clearly understood at the end of this scripture. He came unto his own and his own received him not

but to as many as received him to them gave he what he came to bring to his own. All right. I'm changing the scripture a little bit. But I want you to understand that that is exactly what this scripture is trying to tell us. That he came unto his own to bring them the power

to become the sons of God. But they rejected him. So he opened that opportunity to essentially the whole world. Anyone who is called of God and answers that call has the ability, according to the scripture, he gives them the ability to become a child of God.

Now, friend, you know what I just described? I know you look in your Bible dictionary and you find the word grace and everybody knows what it says in there because we've all read it a hundred times. We've heard it said a thousand times. But the truth is that grace is not unmerited favor. John just described grace in the first chapter of his book. And that was, he came into his own, his own received him, not to, but to as many as received him,

to them gave he grace. The power to become a child of God. Friend, that's something that you did not have a foretime. This is something we need to thank the Lord God for. Because this is the greatest news that could ever happen. If we take that and understand that to be the gospel, that's when we understand, oh my goodness, there's a dark side to this. What about those who received him not?

Well, we're going to talk about those things. Jesus talks about those things in no uncertain terms. And as we get more and more familiar with the red ink, it's all going to be indelibly imprinted in your brain. That's right. You're going to find yourself thinking red ink. You're also going to find that your life's going a little smoother and things are just better for you than they've ever been. Well, our time is gone today,

and so we'll join you here again. If you'll become a part of what we're doing here we'd love to have you. We hope you're enjoying the Words of Jesus series. If you'd like to get in contact with us we would really like to know that you're listening. Just send an email to Don at thinkredink.com or write to thinkredinc.com or write to Think Red Inc. Ministries at P.O. Box 718

Pytown, New Mexico 87827 Alright, so you've got questions? You're trying to understand exactly what the Lord wants you to do? Here's the advice. Think Red Inc. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. ThinkRedInc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you