Radio Broadcast Monday 06/20/2022

Classic Christianity – A Closer Look at Your Identity in Christ P43 (06-20-22)

You Are Reconciled to God Before You Were Saved

The whole world has been reconciled to God before anyone was saved. Now accept that reconciliation of God, receive it by faith in Christ Jesus. Jesus reconciled you at the cross so that He could come to live in you and give you eternal Life the moment you place faith in Him. You were dead in Adam, and need Life in Christ Jesus. Become born again with the Holy Spirit coming to live in you when you place faith in Him and what He did on the cross for you.

2 Corinthians 5:18,19
¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

Listen in to today’s lesson, from the Bible study booklet, A Closer Look at Your Identity in Christ, available for purchase from our online Bob George Ministries ecommerce store

Just as a person’s physical growth is based on proper diet and exercise, so is the Christians’s spiritual growth dependent on regular feeding upon the word of God and application of its principles. With more false teaching, shifting opinions and general confusion in the world than ever before, Christians need a solid foundation upon which to base their beliefs and build their lives. The word of God declares that Jesus Christ is that foundation of truth. With that in mind, let’s now take A Closer Look at Your Identity in Christ.

We’re picking up in chapter 6 in our book entitled Your Identity in Jesus Christ. And over the last couple of weeks we have been talking about this important subject of reconciliation. Now as we have described In past broadcasts, that reconciliation is an accounting term. In other words, every month when you receive your bank settlement, why you probably are going to reconcile your account, if you want to keep good records and making sure that your balance equals what, the bank balances says that it is. Now by the same token, 2,000 years ago, Christ balanced, the books of the justice in regards to, from God to man and all of that took place at the ushering in of the New Covenant that we have covered again on past broadcasts.

On the day that Christ Jesus died a New Covenant went into effect, a new will and testament went into effect. Prior to Christ’s death, which means while Jesus himself was here, physically on this earth, He taught under the old Covenant, I said under the old Covenant. Now He proclaimed the mercy and the love of God. But He taught under the old Covenant. While He was proclaiming this, He also in as much as as He was going to a cross to die for the forgiveness of all men’s sins, to reconcile all men unto Himself, and folks that included the most religious people on the face of the earth, the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all of the Jewish people who were diligent in their following of the teaching of those leaders. And so they were considered from a world standpoint, the most religious people probably on the face of the earth and He had to die for them. Why? Because there’s none righteous, no not one. And all of our righteousness is as filthy rags. As as we are told in the scripture there’s none righteous. There’s no one good. When someone came to Jesus and called Him good, He said, don’t call me good unless you’re going to call me God, because only God is good.

And so, in the midst of this event that took place two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ, knowing that He was headed to a cross to take away, reconcile all men unto Himself, taking away their sins, He had to show people their predicament. Because religion blinds us to our condition, to our true condition by keeping us preoccupied with what we are doing. So, religion keeps you blinded to the fruit of something or to the root of something by a preoccupation with the fruit of something. And so that’s what religion does. So these people were blind, Jesus called them that, the leaders, you’re blind guides and we become blinded to our own depravity by the practice of religious form, that can be observed by other people and hidden by the very people that are out doing them, hidden as to the reality of what they’re really like down under the skin. Now, you can’t hide that from your closest people like your family but they’re hiding it too, so that you don’t look bad. So that’s what religion is all about.

Now, folks, Christ entered into a point in time in history where religion was out on an all time high. And that was among the very people that God gave his laws to. But no man can obey the law and when you see the righteous restrictions of the law. So Jesus, when He was here on earth, He made statements, like, if you have violated the least of these my Commandments, you violated all of it. Now that annihilates all of us. He got beyond the outward form down under the skin. The law says, don’t commit adultery. It’s under the skin. I say, If you look at a woman with lust in your heart, you’ve already committed. adultery. The law, says outward, do not murder. I say, inward, if you’re angry at your brother, you’ve already murdered up in their heart. Why did he say this? Because that’s the righteous and the stringent, the stringency of the law. What does that do? It buries every man, shuts every mouth before God and brings us to a position of saying If these good deeds are not going to save me, what is? And Jesus said, unless your deeds surpass that of the Pharisees, no man will ever enter the kingdom of God. And here were the Pharisees who without question, were the most stringent in their obedience to the law and yet each and every one of them had fallen short of the glory of God.

And so, as Paul later on explained, if righteousness could be gained through obedience to the law, then Christ died for nothing. So no man could ever be made perfect in the sight of God, through the sacrificial system through obedience to the law. So if we are ever going to be able to enter into the presence of a perfect holy sinless God we had to be made holy, sinless, perfect in the sight of God. Well, we could not make ourselves that way. So Christ Jesus entered into this realm of our own experience taking upon Himself, our humanity and fulfilled that law for us; living a sinless life, was holy, was sinless, was righteous, was all of those things as God In the flesh and fulfilled the law that was given to us as human beings, went to a cross to uphold the law, taking the punishment for those of us who could not live up to that law and fulfill it, and then was raised from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, giving us new life in, we’re by now we are indwelt with the only life that is available to us and that is the Life of Christ Jesus. So therefore, the life that I live, I live by faith in Him the only life that I truly have, the one who loved me and gave Himself for me. Now, that’s kind of a gospel in a nutshell folks. And so what we are looking at is that all of this took place two thousand years ago, when Jesus Christ went to a cross and, ushred in this brand new covenant that we stand in today, whereby because of what He did at the cross, He said, their sins now because of what I’ve done their sins and their lawless acts, I will remember no more. So it is not covering them as atonement did, because if you cover something, you can uncover something, but He came to take them away.

Now love we are told never keeps records of wrongs and so, therefore we know that Christ no longer keeps records of our wrongs and that is one of the things that is involved in reconciliation. And this thing called forgiveness, there is no such thing as true reconciliation or true forgiveness if it is ever going to be brought up again. If it’s going to be brought up again, then reconciliation is and has not taken place, neither has forgiveness taken place. And so, folks, the beauty of this forgiveness that we have in Christ Jesus as a result of entering into his resurrected life, the beauty of that is that our sins have been taken away, never ever, ever to see them again, and will never be brought up again.

We’re going to go and just briefly, again review, Romans, 5, 10 and 11 for, if, when we were God’s enemies, and folks, we all entered into the world in that capacity. Now what does an enemy mean? It means we are alienated from whoever the other person is there, it’s an enemy. There’s an alienation that is there. Well, what is that alienation? That we’re so bad and he is so good? Well, that’s a true statement, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that we are brought into this world because of our identification with Adam, dead. So we are dead and He is alive. And I want to tell you, folks, death is an enemy of life and life is an enemy of death. And so, so what we are reconciled to is a dead man being reconciled to a living God by giving life. In order for that to occur, a living man, Jesus, had to be reconciled to a dead man, us, by becoming death for us, so that we could also be reconciled. So it’s a dual situation. He had to die so that we could live. He reconciled Himself to us becoming one of us in our death and we reconciled ourselves to Him by becoming one with Him in His resurrection. So we were reconciled to Him and it says, through the death of His Son, how much more having been reconciled shall we be saved through His life. That’s our identification with the living Christ. And not only is this so but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have now received reconciliation. So it’s through our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ that we are reconciled to God.

Folks it is not the fact that we get forgiven and then have this relationship with God. It’s through your relationship with the living Christ that we receive that forgiveness that was offered to us 2,000 years ago. And that’s why the passage says in Him, that’s in Christ, we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Where is forgiveness? In Him. It’s not out here, dangling someplace. It’s in His resurrected life. And folks, that’s why to me, evangelism has missed the mark by streaming people down Isles to receive Christ for forgiveness. Instead of receiving Christ for Christ because I don’t get forgiveness, I don’t come for forgiveness, I come for life and in that resurrected life contains forgiveness. I come to be in the New Covenant because in that new covenant, is reconciliation, forgiveness, love, justification and all of the sanctification, glorification, all of those things are wrapped up and then incircled in this new covenant, this new agreement between God and man that we stand in today.

So we rejoice now we rejoice in God through our Lord, Jesus Christ through whom we now receive reconciliation. So the very moment that you step out of Adam and into Christ and Christ steps Out of heaven into you, you become a child of God. And as a child of God contained in that relationship, you have reconciliation. You don’t get it folks. You live in it, you live in forgiveness. You don’t get forgiven anymore by God, you live in His forgiveness. You don’t get loved by God. You live in His love. You don’t get reconciled to God anymore. You live in reconciliation. Do you understand it? That is your life. You live in it. I don’t get air, I live in air. And if the air wasn’t there, I couldn’t get it. I live in it. Do we understand that? It’s not something you get anymore. It’s a by-product of who you are. So what does that mean to a human being? It means that I never have to spend the rest of my life wondering. It’s rejoicing and resting which is called the Sabbath rest in what I already have and that is what living by faith is. I’m living by faith in what I have in Christ Jesus. I came to Christ by faith. I have all of these things by faith, now live in it and rejoice in it and quit working at trying to get what you’ve already got.

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Now, let’s go to Colossians. 1:19,22, and then we’ll continue with the rest of our study. God was pleased. He loved doing this. To have all of His fullness to dwell in Him, that’s in Christ and through Him, Christ to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth, or things in heaven by making peace through His, that’s Christ’s blood shed on the cross. So we became reconciled to God through the blood of his Son Jesus shed on the cross. Now, once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your mind’s, because of your evil behavior. Now folks, we need to camp on this for just a moment. Once you were alienated from God, once you were enemies in your mind’s because of your evil behavior.

Now how many of you can sit down and say that at a point in time, in life and even today, we have theology that says when you sin you’re alienated from God in other words, your evil behavior causes you to be alienated from God and an enemy of God? How many of you have heard that? I would venture to say a number of you would have heard that. Well, is that true? No, only in your own minds. It’s not true in the mind of God who has taken away your sin, never to see it again. So if it isn’t true in the mind of God, the only person that could be true is in your feeble mind and my feeble mind. And that’s what happens to us. We think that I’m alienated from God because of my behavior. He says, no, you’re alienated from God, because you’re dead, and a corpse stinketh. So you’re the alienation is not because of stinky. The alienation is because you’re dead, and religion deals with your odor and whereby Christ came to deal with your condition, dead. Dead as a hammer. And the only thing a dead person needs is His life. It also have to come to grips folks, that’s what corpses do. I’ve never known a good smelling corpse. So we don’t have to look at this behavior as being something unusual, that is what dead people do. So we have to realize that it’s only in our minds that we are alienated from God because of our evil behavior, before a Christian and after as Christian. So once that was true but now here He said, I’m going to teach you something. But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death in order to present you holy in His sight, not yours, not your friend’s, in His sight without blemish and free of accusation.

Folks, the world will accuse you, the world will say that you’re not a Christian, by the way you act. But God will never say that. He has reconciled you. The books have been balanced, He did that, by Christ’s physical body through death, and He did that so that He could present you holy in His sight without blemish and free of accusation that comes as a result of being in His resurrected life. So folks today, where do you think Satan lives with the Christian? Well or let’s take the non-Christian. Well, first of all he paralyzed numerous people by saying, you’re too bad. God would never accept you. You’re an enemy and because of that evil behavior, you can never be accepted. Well, a person finally gets beyond that like the Apostle Paul. How am I ever going to be saved and I was out killing Christians, He said well because My love is greater than your hate and so he was saying, now as a Christian, then we sit around and Satan comes in and says, well every time your behavior is off, why God kind of spins around on his chair up there. And he doesn’t look at you. In other words, you’re alienated again or what we call out of fellowship.

Now, before we go any further on that, you’re not going to find being in and out of fellowship in the New Testament. You might find it in a lot of churches teaching, but you’re not going to find it in the New Testament. Fellowship in the bible is either in fellowship saved, or out of fellowship lost. It’s two fellas, in the same ship. You are either in the ship with lost, or with saved, but there’s no in-between. So there’s no such thing as a Christian being in and out of fellowship. With God, if he’s in fellowship with God, it means I am saved. Now, that’s according to the Bible again, not according to a lot of Christian teaching. So, if you’re in fellowship, it means you have been saved. Now, you can be in fellowship with God and have behavior that is inconsistent with who you are, but you’re not out of fellowship with God, if you were, you’d be lost. And it’s a little hard to be lost when you’ve been saved by God, who says, I’ll never let you go, then it’s a little difficult to do. So all you’re doing is in your own mind alienating yourself again from God, thinking I’m out of fellowship, which is in your mind because of your evil behavior. But the issue is in God’s mind are you out of fellowship? Well, of course not. He puts you in fellowship when He saved you, well, are my out of fellowship cause they didn’t act right? Well, of course not, you’re my child. I love you. Was I acting like an idiot? Yes, you were. Is there a way of improving that? Of course, there is. I came to live in you and to renew your mind because your mind needs renewed. And that’s the life of the Christian, but in our own minds we become alienated from God. Now folks, that’s what causes true born again Christians to finally fall away, they’re not falling away from Jesus. They’re just giving up this, I just can’t do it.

And many many people that I see today, who are actually born again, Christians who have kind of walked away from the Christian life, so to speak, because they couldn’t live up to the standards of the church. And so, rather than be a hypocrite in their own mind, they just kind of fall away. Well, you see their rebellion is not against Jesus. Their rebellion is against Christians, Christian doctrines that have nothing to do with truth. So they’re running away, quite frankly from something you ought to run away from. Now if I’m going to grow in grace and to come back to God, as an example of kind of falling away from that vital feeling of a relationship with him, not from the relationship, but falling away from just communication with my God, it’s because we have denied the grace of God. It’s not because of what you’re doing. It’s because I have denied what God was doing in the mist of what I was doing. Denying the fact that in my mind, I think I’m alienated, but denying the fact that God says, no, you’re not. I reconciled you Bob, you’re not alienated. I love you. And I’m dealing with you now. Folks, what we have to do is to get rid of what is in our mind and let His mind be put into our mind.

I talk with people sometimes, and I’m just going to camp for a moment on this fellowship issue. We’ve been taught so effectively many times by people who I know that mean well, but we’ve really gotten into this in and out of fellowship routine and Christendom. And all I asked you to do is if you’ve been taught the way I certainly was, which was bouncing it out of fellowship, just check out the New Testament and see if you find it anyplace in there. It isn’t. If it isn’t there, folks, you need to discount it. So what a person is meaning is, well, Bob, I started sinning again and I start doing this again. I start doing this again, and I know God is mad at me and disappointed and he’s given up on me. And I, and I just don’t, I just don’t pray anymore, don’t talk to him anymore, and I’m just really not aware of his presence anymore. Just out of fellowship and then and to them that’s what out of fellowship means. Well, you see, again terminology is vitally important because I’m not out of fellowship according to the scripture, because fellowship is lost and saved. So there isn’t any way for me to be lost if I have been saved. So what a person is saying, well I’ve stopped talking with God, I’ve stopped communicating with him, I’ve stopped, you know, I’m just, he’s mad at me.

If you, with somebody, let’s say you’ve offended somebody and that person stops talking to you and turns his back on you. And every time you walk into the room, why he looks the other way and turns his back on him, doesn’t like you anymore. Do you think that you would want to continue talking with them? In other words, if someone doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to be around me, I don’t want to be around them. That’s just a by-product to say, well, why should I force myself on them, obviously we make them sick to their stomach, so I’m not really interested in contributing to their illness. So why should I, why should I be around them? So, you see, when I on the other hand, if you’ve offended somebody and the person continues to love you, takes that thing and puts it behind his back, never to see it again, loves to be around you. Are you going to then want to continue to turn your back and not be around that person? Well, of course not. Why would you not want to be around somebody who loves you perfectly? Why would you not want to be? So what causes people to think they’d fallen away from God is not the sin that they have committed, the biggie, it’s the sin of unbelief that they are committing in the denial that God still loves them and that God never stopped loving them. And that in the sight of God made them perfect in His sight. And there’s no condemnation awaiting them who belong to Christ Jesus. Now, you tell me why you’d want to walk away from someone like that, you know, you’d have to be an idiot to want to walk away from somebody like that. And then we give up on God, you see and say, well, I thought probably I’ve probably stretched the limit, you know, God, said, forgive 70 times seven but I think I did it. I think I did 450. So we’ve stretched the limits you see. So and say no, that’s just not true. There’s no, there’s no. no way you can to out sin the love and grace of God.

Now, that’s where it says in Titus that the grace of God is what teaches us to say, no to unrighteousness. In other words, why do I need to say no to unrighteousness unless I was saying yes to unrighteousness? So, if I’ve been saying yes to unrighteousness, and God wants to teach me to say no to unrighteousness, it’s going to be the grace of God that’s teaching me that. It’s not the condemnation of God that will not teach me that. It’s love that will teach me that.

And so folks, when people fall away in that manner, and course when you’re taught you’re out of fellowship, that means God has turned his back on you and we’re told that God can’t look on sin. Well, He already looked on sin and He judged it. So when He sees what you’re doing, as a child of God, he’s not dealing with that on the basis of sin. He’s already turned his back on that. He’s dealing with it on the basis of your behavior being inconsistent with who you are ais My child, you know that I’m going to help you grow up and mature and renew your mind and teach you truth that will set you free. So it’s a totally different mindset. Isn’t that what religion is constantly bombarding us with? But there’s no way to walk away from a God who loves you that way. It’s only when you think He’s going back, turning, he’s tired of flipping around on his chair. He’s sick to death of you. He’s got his bottle of heavenly Pepto Bismol up there, just because we’re not every day just can hardly stand it and then we wonder why people fall away. it’s the grace of God, the love of God, in the midst of what you’re doing is what is going to draw you back to the heart of God, not for him to draw near to you. For you to draw back near to Him again. Recognizing, man, he loves me in spite of it.

Thank you so much for tuning in to Classic Christianity, with Bob George. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s program. We truly hope that today’s message has inspired you to walk a life of faith in the Lord, find more information online at shop.BobGeorge.net. There you’ll also find available CDs, DVDs, and bible studies available for purchase. It’s through your help that we are able to spread the good word of Jesus Christ. Until next time, walk in faith, be good to one another and praise the Lord. Amen.