Radio Broadcast Monday 09/05/2022

Classic Christianity – A Closer Look at Your Identity in Christ P76 (09-05-22)

When a Person Receives Jesus, Places Faith in Him, He Places us Into the Body of Christ

~ Jesus is the only place we can find unconditional acceptance by God. We spend our lives looking for love in all the wrong places. The kind of love that only God can provide is found in Jesus. Yet people will search for it in their friends, in their work, at bars, in their spouses. And yet, none of those things can provide the kind of LOVE that is provided by Jesus. Reminder, it’s not that we loved Him but that He first Loved us. Once we realize the love God has given us, then the only thing we can do is say, THANK YOU to HIM!

Listen in to today’s lesson with more in-depth teaching, 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.

Bob George 0:43
So if you’re a right if you’re the right weight, and so we got people working out like crazy to the point that after a while, they begin to look like a broomstick. But if you’re the right weight, and you wear the right clothes bought from the right stores, and you wear the right makeup, and if you’re getting a little old, well you get some face lifts, and all of that type of thing, why is there more money spent on plastic surgery than there is donations? It’s because we’re more preoccupied with their body than we are spiritual things. And so that has been flip flopped. And so my acceptance is going to be in what I look like, if I’m an athlete, how good I am, how strong I am, how healthy I am, what I do with my body, all of those things are all forms of acceptance. And then, of course, being lost, the best you can go to is religion. So then it’s where the body plants itself on Sunday, and you’ll be accepted if you go to this church, or that church or this church, that’s where you’re going to find acceptance. Or if, if that isn’t an interest to you, why you will find acceptance in the bars, or you’ll find acceptance here, but you are desperately constantly using your body, and your human personality, your soul, mind, emotion, and well to find acceptance in the world in which we live. And every bit of that will never fill that deepest need in your in my heart to find our acceptance unconditionally. And our love unconditionally, which is a spiritual need, not a solace need that can only be met in Christ Jesus. This, incidentally, is the cause of the majority of marital problems is people getting married with the thought in mind that this person is going to meet this need for unconditional love and acceptance. And of course, when you’re courting each other why you each ot con each other into thinking you’re going to meet those needs. But when the honeymoon is over why it is over. And all of a sudden, instead of living to meet the needs of another person, you now are looking to your mate to get your own needs met. And that’s why you’ll see people say women say my husband just doesn’t understand me. He’s not meeting my needs. And the husband say my wife just doesn’t understand me. She doesn’t appreciate me why I’ve taken her on trips. I bought her dress, I bought this and that should settle it and the wife sitting there saying yes, don’t understand, do you? And the man said, No, you just don’t understand. And Brother, what is that? Pride only breeds quarrels. So folks, we have to come to grips with the fact that the very opposite of the type of love that we’re talking about is pride. It is not hate, it is not not liking someone, the opposite of agape love, is pride. And we’ll contrast that for you in just a moment.

But you see in a marriage situation, when I am trying to get that need desperately met and and folks, that’s the most logical place to get it man, if you’re married, when you’re a child, you’re going to try to get that met in your parents, and we can’t do it either. And then parents will try to get that met in their children. And then the children kind of walk out and get independent kind of like a cat on their own and, and, and now we’re kind of stuck again. And I guess probably the closest we can come to it is some lap dog. That does seem to satisfy a little bit of a need for unconditional love and acceptance. But that’s as close as we can get. So in a married situation, we become like ticks on a dog trying to suck the life out of each other in order to get our mates to meet those needs. When the fact of the matter is that there is no mate that can meet those needs. There is no man that can meet those needs. There’s no woman that can meet those needs. And it is strange, isn’t it Bob that men is so desperate to get that needs met that need met, that if they’ve if they’re a man and they’ve tried a woman and Another woman and another woman and they can’t meet that need. They’re so desperate they turn and try man to get that need and such you have homosexuality. And a woman has tried to get that need met in a man and another man, another man, or the father or whoever it might be, and they can’t get it met, and they become so desperate to get that met that they hook up with another woman and become a lesbian. And what in both of those cases whether you’re heterosexual or homosexual, the problem is that we are looking for that need for unconditional love and acceptance to be met in another human being here on this earth and it is an absolute impossibility, folks, you’re looking for that need to be met in the wrong place. That is a spiritual need. It is not a soulish need it is not a body need. A sexual experience will not satisfy the need for unconditional love and acceptance. It might satisfy a sexual desire, but it will not satisfy a need for love and acceptance. And it’s the same on the soul friendship will not satisfy the need for unconditional love and acceptance. Because again, when you’re courting or when you’re trying to get something out of somebody, you will act like you accept them and love them unconditionally in order to get what you’re trying to get. And that’s where manipulation comes in and people become master manipulators. You find manipulators in business, you find manipulators in Christian ministries, you find manipulators in church, you find manipulators in medical profession, you find manipulators for sure, in the legal profession, the whole world is a bunch of manipulators. What are we manipulating? Trying to get people to do what we want them to do. Because what that means to me is I’m accepted by them. And I’m loved by them when they do what I want them to do. And folks, it is a one way street to nowhere. And if you’re sitting out there today, as a married person trying to get your mate to meet that need for unconditional love and acceptance, I can say to you, as clearly as I know to say to any human being on the face of this earth, you’re engaged in an exercise in futility, and an impossible accomplishment. And you may as well try to jump over the Grand Canyon from one end to the next and figure out why you didn’t make it. Because it is just as impossible. That need that you’re talking about and you’re longing for is a spiritual need given to you by God so that it could be fulfilled by God and God alone. God gave you his body says, take care of it that yours. He gave you his Spirit and said, I’ll take care of that. That’s mine.

Now folks, when we’re dealing with this subject that we’re dealing with, it’s important for us to come to grips with asking ourselves the question, where and to whom are we looking to for our acceptance for unconditional acceptance? Am I really looking for acceptance through my body? In other words, what I wear, what I look like, how thin I am, how good of shape that I’m in? Do I belong to the right clubs? Do I live in the right neighborhood? Do I drive the right kind of a car? In other words, all of those points of acceptance are predicated on your body, who it is where it is, what it looks like. And we say is that where I am going for acceptance. Now folks, I’m not just talking out of out of theory that I know in my own life experience that acceptance is something that has been very much of a bondage at times in my life to me I desired to be accepted. Is that unusual? Why that isn’t unusual at all. As we mentioned earlier, all men all humanity is made with a need for acceptance by but I didn’t know that for 36 years and so I found acceptance. The only place that I knew how to find it. I tried to look good. I tried from a personality standpoint to be funny and humorous and halfway intelligent and making proper decisions. I found acceptance by joining the proper fraternity in college. I found acceptance in my state by going to my State University, I looked for acceptance from people. When I went into business, I found acceptance by being successful. I found acceptance, I thought by driving the biggest car you could buy, I found a lot of acceptance when I started hobnobbing with some Hollywood people. It’s amazing how little you have to do to be accepted. We’ve seen some of that in the recent trial that is so famous where a person is accepted around the world by being a houseboy. And yet the world accepts him. Because they’re known, the only celebrity they have is just they’re known not known for anything just known. And that’s all it takes for acceptance just to be known. And if we feel that we can’t be known why then I love to hobnob with someone who is because then I’ll be known for someone who knows somebody who is somebody. And we’re weird, aren’t we, that’s just quite frankly, the way it is, we just will not rest in the fact that the only acceptance that is going to satisfy us on the face of this earth is our acceptance from the Lord Jesus Christ, accepted in the beloved. I know what it is that after I became saved, that I found it was not necessary anymore to be accepted by my bar buddies and my cohort, my co workers, my cohorts, my racquetball buddies, or whatever it might be that now I could be accepted by a new bunch of people called Christians. Because even though in your early years of being saved, or your early months, and sometimes only early weeks of being saved, you realize that how you were saved was by the unconditional love of God that is given to you freely and abundantly in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And you might even have a clue of the fact that he accepted you at that particular point. But we immediately change arenas, and we get out of the last arena into the saved arena. And all of a sudden, that same desire to be accepted by my bar buddies switched, changed immediately praise God, everybody would say, and I sought acceptance with my Christian peers. And so depending upon what group you get involved in is going to depend upon where you look, what what are the criteria for acceptance.

Now, if you go into a certain group of so called Christians, a certain denominational group why, then you’re going to be accepted. If you say you don’t drink, and don’t dance, I mean, those two things would be horrible. And that you go to church three times, at least on Sunday, and you hit prayer meeting and visitation. You’re going to be accepted. And if you don’t do all of those things, and if you really miss a Sunday night why anybody watching will certainly say missed you ole buddy. And what that means is where were you I was here, why weren’t you? I missed the football game. Why didn’t you? And so we have our own criteria don’t we have our own standards of acceptance?

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Bob George 13:53
And another group why they don’t meet on Wednesdays, they don’t have midweek services. So you can you can, you’re better off to just go to someplace that just meets on Sunday, because you don’t have to go so often. In order to get accepted, you can be accepted by just go on Sunday morning. But with that group, why you really need to, you really also need to do a few things that they’ve established as what a performance orientation is all about. You can get into another group where they say if you’re going to be accepted in our group, if you’re a woman, you ever wear a slacks, you’ll never be accepted. So you gotta you got to wear a dress. And it has to be a certain look to it’s got to be clear up around your neck. You know, we certainly don’t want to much below the Adam’s apple. And so So you got that group and then it would help if you wore your hair in a bun as well. And then you got another group over there that you’re going to be accepted if you were all black, and you certainly cannot drive around in cars we’re gonna drive around and horse and buggy and if you do have a car where you’re going to paint your bumpers black, so because as Chinese stuff was worldly, and you got that group, so all through mankind in the religious realm, you have all of these people who have now established their forms of acceptance. I went into a group that was very evangelistic. So how were you accepted? by being evangelistic. And if someone wasn’t sharing Christ with everyone who walked and a few people that didn’t, you were not accepted, I no one would come out and say, I don’t like you and don’t accept you. But you can tell, can’t you? And you get into another group that specializes in Scripture memory. And so you’ll come up and say, how many did you memorize today? And then you get another group down there that everybody’s gotta be accountable to each other. So how are you going to be acceptable if you’re accountable to one another? Which always want leads me to believe that if you can’t be accountable to God, why do you think you’re gonna be accountable to one another? And if I am accountable to God, well, then I don’t need to be accountable to someone else. But yet we think that’s the case. But in other words, I It doesn’t do me any good to promise to be faithful to Amy when I stood with a minister, but if I get with you, and to keep faithful to Amy, that’s okay. Well, if I’m not gonna be faithful to her, why would it be faithful because you and I are together? But I guess we haven’t figured that out yet. And so all of those deals, all of those things, which, incidentally, that is not biblical in any way, shape, or form. But all of those things start tying together as a means of acceptability, that if you’re involved in this deal, and you got your accountability buddy with you, why, then you are acceptable. And if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you, then you got another group, we gotta have a prayer partner. And if you’ve got a prayer partner, you’re acceptable if you don’t, probably just not quite as spiritual as you ought to be. And folks that can go on and on and on. And on. As a matter of fact, there is no end to that there is no end to what men will come up with, in order to find acceptability. Because after a while, if I have this certain set of criteria, that makes me acceptable, and I’m doing all those things. And, for goodness sakes, everybody around me is doing well, I certainly am not going to remain on the same level they are. So I’m going to develop something else that you need to do to be acceptable. And I’ll get ahead of the crowd again. And then when they catch up with me, I’ll develop another set, so that I can continue in the pecking order of one upmanship, Christian one upmanship. Now, folks, that’s what religion is. See, it doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus at all, because you could do every bit of those things and not know the Lord from a spook, believe me, I did those things. I could have done those things in my church attendance when I was lost as can be. You don’t have to be saved to do any of those things. You can you don’t have to be saved to have a set of morals that you subscribe, ascribe to. You don’t have to be saved to do that the lost world does that, that you find the Muslims probably are much more stringent that we call ourselves Christians. So you see, you don’t have to be saved for any of those things.

But what you do have to be saved for is to experience unconditional love and acceptance, not from man, that’s impossible, but from God, because it’s not that we loved him, but that He loved us first. And there is no religion in the world that deals with unconditional love. All religions are conditional. the only the only truth that was ever given to man about how to be righteous in the sight of God through faith, is the truth given to us by Jesus, all other religions, including some forms of the so called Christian religion, are contrary to justification by faith and faith alone. Now you see if, if my justification is not by faith and faith alone, then it’s going to have to be by works. And then my works are going to have to be better than your works. Because for goodness sake, everyone, just doing a little something isn’t going to get into heaven, you got to do a bunch. And now I’m gonna determine what a bunch is. or somebody’s gonna determine what a bunch is. And so you got a whole bunch of bunches out there, determining what a bunch is, to be sure that everyone’s done enough in order to enter in the pearly gates. And Bob, every bit of that is self righteousness. Every bit of that is pointed towards self period. That’s all that is, all of it is self. And self and pride go together. And it causes quarrels, because you’re not doing what you should be doing. I, whenever we make if you and I sat down today and said, Well, I’m going to make a commitment and you and I are going to get out and we’re going to run every The day together. Okay, it was weird to be buddies, because we’ll really encourage each other that way, I’d say, forever. Because if it isn’t forever, if it isn’t forever, there’s gonna come a time when I’m gonna say I’m tired, and I don’t want to run. And the minute I do, you’re gonna say, you’re losing it, you’re losing it. And if you tell me, I’m losing it, I’m gonna be telling you, you prideful, so and so you’ve already lost it. And you know it, well, how long it’s going to be before we’re not friends anymore? Not too long, not too long, Bob too, because unless you can do something forever, it’s someday, well, somebody’s gonna get disappointed in that transaction. That’s what the law said, If you violate the least of these, you violated all.

We’re talking about a spiritual pecking order that we seem to get into in the religious realm, we can also do that in the business realm or the professional realm. So I’m not picking on one specific brand. But what I do know is that once you’ve left the arena of the lost world, and you enter into the arena of the saved world, in that saved world, within that arena, are other arenas within the arena of acceptance bases. And, and you’re gonna have to find your way in one of those, if your desire, again, is to be accepted, and you haven’t found your acceptance in Christ, then you’re gonna have to find it in this religious arena. Now, Bob, that’s what happens to people who many times truly come to Christ Jesus, they are truly born again. But they immediately get into this Christian arena. And then they gotta find an arena within the arena. In order to play. It’s like a circus, you’re in the circus, but there’s different arenas out there. And so you got to find which one fits you the best, whether you’re going to sit in the arena of the trapeze people, or the lion tamers, or whatever it might be, but you’re going to be in one of those circles, looking for acceptance in there, looking for acceptance in my church, in my Sunday school, or wherever it might be, but I’m going to be looking for acceptance. And I know that to be true. In my own experience, and I know that to be true. Now what happens is, in that arena, sooner or later, you’re going to get the daylights disappointed out of you. That’s just all there is to it, because people cannot meet that need. And yet our pride says, I have that need see. And if I have it, then brother God has a need. And brother when oh, god here has a need, you better get busy fulfilling it. And what happens when you don’t fulfill Oh, God’s needs here. Guess what happens? Oh, God gets mad at you.

And, and, and now the descension takes place. And I’m going to pull away from you. Even though Bob, you may not even know you’re not meeting my needs. You may be sitting there all fat, dumb and happy thinking I’m doing great. And but I’m sitting there mad as a hornet at you because I got these needs. And boy when all Bob has needs, I mean, that’s that’s like God having them. That’s what our pride says to us. And you’re supposed to meet him. And you don’t even know you’re not meeting them. But I know you’re not meeting them. I have concluded that. And of course, when God concludes something that takes care of that as well. So he so I’ve concluded it, oh God Himself has concluded. And so I get angry and bitter, and resentful. And all of those things, and I pull out. And normally it will spend the rest of my life trying to destroy you over here because you didn’t meet my need. And that’s something. But that’s what takes place. When dissension takes place. That’s what say, Well, that’s what breeds quarrels, pride, My pride is hurt, because I have needs, and you are not meeting those needs. Now, when that person then says, I’m going to leave this arena, well, when you leave it, you’re going to have to go into some arena. And so if you don’t want to go back into the bar arena, why of course you got religious arena out there and other religious arena that says, Well, this arena out here isn’t quite as stringent as this group over here. So I’ll go into another arena and you’re back into another arena looking for acceptance. And folks, you’ll be going from arena to arena for the rest of your life looking for something that is impossible to get from the world itself. Now that’s where we have to come to grips with that. And I asked you how many arenas Have you been in? And I asked myself, How many arenas have I been in? How many places have I gone? To try to find love and acceptance? And I look at and say it’s been a bunch. I’ve tried a whole bunch of things to try to find love and acceptance. And the only place that I’ve ever found love and acceptance is in Christ Jesus, my Lord. It’s permanent. And of course, that’s what Paul was talking about when we concluded last week in Romans eight, that I had become convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. And in other words, Paul found his love. And he found his acceptance in Christ. He went into trouble from who? people. Did that bother him? No, he wasn’t expecting them to give him anything except trouble anyway. He wasn’t he didn’t have an unrealistic expectation toward people. So when trouble came from people, he turned to the only place that he could find an unconditional love and acceptance from Christ. So troubled in separate me from God, it separated me from people, but it didn’t separate me from God. How about hardship, hardship from WHO? People, people? Well? Did he have an unrealistic expectation that people were ever going to do anything except bring hardship? I don’t think so. And so when they did, it didn’t separate him from a love of God, it separated from the people who were bringing hardship, but not from the love of God. Persecution, persecution from WHO? People. Well, did he expect anything except persecution probably at one time, but when it came that’s why he realized that, why should I expect other I’m never going to find acceptance from people. I’m going to find it only from Christ Jesus. How about famine, nakedness, dangerous sword, all of those things he went through as a result of people, people, but nothing separated him from the love of God and because he drew upon the unconditional love and the unconditional acceptance from God and Him alone. Then he said, I am convinced that neither life nor depth, nor angels nor demons are the president nor the future, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us or me from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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.