Radio Broadcast Tuesday 06/20/2023

 

Join Bob George in this chapter by chapter exposition of the gospel of John. Available for download the complete series on the Book of John. Realize why Christ, Himself, is REAL LIFE and how He personally offers hope in daily living that you may:

 

• Discover an abundant and meaningful life as a Christian.
• Overcome fear with His assurance that you have His eternal life.
• Experience joy during adversity.
• Apply God’s wisdom in decision making, no matter how big or small.
• Experience freedom as you walk by faith in His love and acceptance. 

 

Purchase Online at Shop.BobGeorge.net

 

Announcer 0:12
Welcome to Classic Christianity Radio with Bob George Bob’s clear, timeless teachings on the complete forgiveness and unconditional love of Jesus Christ will transform your life as you learn about God’s amazing grace. Let’s join Bob as he teaches us from God’s Word.

Bob George 0:29
Well let’s turn to the 12 chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re going to get to these passages this week. We’ve talked about the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised Him from the dead continued to spread the word about Jesus. And there’s something about having a relationship with Christ Jesus that compels us to want to spread that good news to people. I don’t know about you but when I came to Christ, I just thought everybody would be just tickled to death to hear what I had to share with him. But you find out that that’s not true. But again, many times the persistence of a person is what enables a person to ultimately come to know Christ as their Lord and Savior. And so one of the first things that took place when Jesus performed this phenomenal miracle of Lazarus was that they began to spread the word about this man called Jesus. And many people it says, because they had heard that he had given this miraculous sign went up to meet him. And so the Pharisees said to one another, see this is getting us nowhere, and look how the whole world has gone after him. And now there was some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the feast. But before we get to that, again, I want us to see the conflict that was taking place there in that part of the world. Here was one of their own, Jesus, he was not a Gentile, he was a Hebrew. And he was going up against the Hebrew teaching that was taking place at that time, because the leaders of Hebrewism by then had become the authority on the interpretation of the word of God. And so they had their own interpretation. They had laws on top of laws on top of laws on top of laws. They had taken the law that God had given to Israel, not to the Gentile world, he didn’t give the law to us, He gave it to Israel. And the purpose of the law, as we later on study in the Word of God, by the apostle Paul was to show us our sinfulness that would lead us to Christ. We have to realize there’s a destination of Jesus, just what our brother was singing about this road to Delarosa, this road goes the road that Jesus was taking, to go to a cross to take away the sins of the entire world. It was a destination, that was absolutely a necessity for a man to be saved. Our sins had to be taken away, if we were ever going to be saved. But before a man is going to be ready for a cross, he has to admit that he’s a sinner. He has to see himself as a sinner. The law, they use the law, not to show ourselves to be a sinner so that we would turn to Christ for salvation, but to use it as an act of righteousness. And so it’s like anytime that you’re into legalistic form, you got to increase the bar, just like a high jumper, you get over, you got to jump higher, you raise the bar, raise the bar, so you can’t get over it anymore. And so there is an example almost 600 and some different laws around the Sabbath alone. And these people were the interpreters of the Word of God. And when they ran into the person who claimed to be the Word of God, they did not and the interpreters didn’t agree with the Word said, so they’re saying, What is this accomplishing us? We’re not accomplishing anything allowing this man to continue doing what he’s doing. He is teaching contrary to our Hebrew laws. He’s teaching contrary to our interpretation of the Hebrew laws.

And I think that was the case of Jesus all the way through his life. He was a bone of contention to the religious world. Because the religious world we have our own biases. The same is true today. We do not go to the source to find out what’s true. We go to our denomination and say, what do we believe? Think in your own life? What do we Methodist believe? Tell us and I believe it if we don’t go to the word to find out whether that’s true or not just tell us what to believe. What are we Baptists believe? Just tell me what we believe in and I will believe it. What do we Catholics believe? Just tell us what to believe and we’ll believe it. We’ve ignored the source. The source of what you believe is not what somebody tells you, including me, I could be lying out my teeth to you. And if you don’t believe that there’s a ton of people out there, I was just talking to one of our brothers from Tulsa, who has brother Tilton up there, there is a bunch of people who would lie their teeth to you. And we have to understand the truth of that. And so you don’t go to denominations to find out whether something is true or not, you go to the Word of God. This is our source of truth, folks. And if you have the Spirit of God living in you, then you have the ability to interpret the source of truth. And you don’t go to somebody including us to find out what you should believe. You go to the Word of God, and find out if the Word of God is consistent with what you’re being taught. If you are, you’re fortunate. But there’s all kinds of harebrained ideas that have been put forth in Christianity that have nothing to do with the Word of God. And yet, we grab a hold, practice it and act like it just Pentecost all over again. And so these Hebrew leaders were saying about Jesus, this man is messing up our little game. He’s messing it up. And if we allow this guy to continue Before long, the whole world’s gonna follow him, and we’re gonna lose our place. And we’re gonna lose our position. So what killed Jesus? Job security, jobs, job security. If we let him go on, we’re gonna lose your jobs.

Now it says there were some Greeks, these this is the Gentile world, folks, you got Hebrews and Gentiles. One of the biggest misconception there is in among Jewish people is they think that the opposite of a Jew is a Christian, nothing could be farther from the truth. The opposite of a Hebrew is a Gentile, and you got lost Hebrews and you got lost Gentiles, you got saved Hebrews and you got saved Gentiles. But the opposite of a Jew is not a Christian. But these Gentiles, they were there, and they went up to worship at the feast. Many times these could be Gentiles who had converted to Hebrewism. But they came to Philip who was from Bethsaida in Galilee with a request, said Sir, we would like to see Jesus. Well, they said, we’d like to see Jesus. So Philip went to tell Andrew, they’d like to see Jesus and Andrew went, and Philip and they told Jesus, that some people there want to see. Jesus replied to this, the hour has not come for the Son of Man to be glorified. In other words, to be made fully known. What is he talking about here? To be made fully known as to what he came to do. Because Jesus was sent to this world, to perform a function. He was sent to this world to do something, not just to be something but to do something. He was sent to this world to be born. He was sent into this world, that through his life, that he would live a sinless life. He was born a virgin, by a virgin birth by a virgin. He was born into this world to go to a cross to die and to take away the sins of the entire world. Unlike the blood of a bull and goat that came to cover sins, Jesus came to take them away from the sight of God, which he did. He came to this earth to be raised from the dead, so that that life that raised Him from the dead can raise you and me from the dead. Now, why is that important? Because we’re born dead. So I don’t care whether you’re a Catholic, Methodist, or Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Plymouth Brethren. That’s what you join. But the issue is, what’s your condition? God says you’re born dead. Now, if this Bible is true, then you’re born dead. And again, what is death? It’s the absence of life. You are not born into this world alive spiritually. You are born in Adam dead spiritually. What is death? The absence of life. What are you dead to? The life of God living in you. You weren’t born with a life of God living in you only Christ was born with a life of God living in Him. So if you’re dead spiritually, meaning the life of God is not living in you, you got a problem. And that is you’re dead. And a dead man has only one thing that he really ought to be craving and what is that? Life. And that only life that is available to you and me is the resurrected life of Christ Jesus. It is not my friends how bad you are or how good you are. It’s how did you are. How are you going to judge people on how bad you’ve been? How bad do you have to be before you’ve crossed the mark? How good do you have to be before you become acceptable? And there are many people who grow up never knowing the difference.

John Wesley was one of those, the Father, the founder of the of the Methodist denomination. And John Wesley, by his own testimony, was miserable in the ministry, he came over here to America, as he said, to save the Indian in hopes of saving his own soul. In other words, if I do enough good, and maybe go on a mission field, that’s wild enough, maybe God will accept him. Was going home, defeated, downcast defeated, was on a ship back to England, got it a shipwreck, in a ship, not a wreck, but in a storm. The storm was so severe that they were being tossed back and forth, like a bowling ball. And John Wesley said that he was petrified. And yet he looked over and he saw a bunch of Christians over there called Moravians, who were Bible believing Christians singing Christian songs. He said, How can this be how can these people be singing Christian songs when they’re about to go to their death? And it mystified him. He got back to England a few weeks later, was at a place called Altarsgate outside of London. And there he heard that same group of people reading from the premise of the book of Romans, that the judge shall live by faith. And he understood even though he had been in the ministry for all of those years, he understood for the first time that although he had been trying to do alot for God, he had never accepted what God had done for him, in the person of Christ Jesus. And at that moment, he accepted fully Christ Jesus for His salvation, and he said, his heart was strangely warm, and they went out and turned England upside down. What’s the difference? The born again person has a Spirit of God living any.
And so Jesus had his our was there, he had a time in history when he was going to complete his work or be glorified, be known for what he came to do. He gives an illustration, Unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies that remains only a single seed. You put a seed in the ground until it dies, it remains a seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. What’s he talking about here? Well, basically, we’re talking about I want to see Jesus. And so they went through a person said they want to see Jesus and other person they want to see Jesus. He says, If you had your salvation, and you were the only one who had salvation, and you just decided, praise God, everybody else can go to hell. I’m not gonna talk to anybody about Jesus, I got mine, you get yours. I got mine. Good luck. No, he said, there comes a point where you’ve got to die. And folks, I think a part of that is dying to the opinions of others. Because when you become a Christian, and you become a child of the living God, and you’re in a workplace out there, that are not Christians, you’re gonna be about as popular as a Titanic sinking. Am I right or wrong?

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Bob George 14:17
You’ve got to die to run for sheriff. When I came to Christ, I had I own my own business. I had my own wholesale firm in California. I had employees. And I had a lot of customers, most of them in Beverly Hills who were Jewish. And I became a Christian. Did that change anything? Yeah, it changed a lot. I had to make up my mind. Do I want to be popular? Or do I want to be a child of God? And I had to die to that desire for acceptance, realizing that I necessarily am not going to be accepted. Now I could have been like this buddy of mine, who was a wholesale salesman, he had a good deal, he had a little thick little necklace he put around his neck. And on one side of it was a star David, and the other side was a cross. So when he called on a customer, if they were Jewish, he just flipped it over the star David and when a Gentile flipped over the cross. So he was headed, he’s bad he was going either way. You know, folks tell you the truth on this, that, in my particular case, with the people who heard that I had become a Christian, they respected me more than their own people many times. And I had no problem at all working with people who were the Jewish faith or anything else, as a child of God. I was more respected than it was before. And so the issue is, but you have to die to that you’ve got to die to the worry that if I say something, I’m not going to be accepted, you gotta die to that and say, If God is leading me to say something about the Lord Jesus Christ, and I’m gonna say something about the Lord Jesus Christ. And so he’s saying that, a seed, if God has made you to seed, don’t remain alone, don’t sit there and hold on to it. It’s like he talked about to keep it under a basket. Let your light shine. That’s what he’s saying. Let your light shine where you are. And so, if the seed dies, if you die, to having to hold on to self acceptance, then it says, you’re going to lose your life. And it says, A man who loves his life will lose it while the man who hates his life in this world, we’ll keep it for eternal life. And again, folks, I don’t think I used to wonder about that hating his life in this world. I don’t know for many years, I said, I don’t particularly hate my life in this world. But I’ll tell you guys, that was from my sphere of influence. In other words, saying from where I live, everything’s kind of okay, you know, you got a nice wife, you got nice kid, you got a nice business, you got all that kind of stuff. Not much to hate. But guys put that into perspective of the overall world in which we live today. Put that into perspective of the wars and the atrocities. And the Saddam Hussein’s killing people and poisoning people and Hitler and all of the things that you see going on in the world today, just to this day, all over the place. And now you’re actually going to be able to say that you love the world, you may be getting all right, in your own sphere of influence, but I’m talking about in light of the whole world. It’s saying, Is it really anything to love? Is there any really anything to love when you when you think about it?

And so we come down to a point of saying, you know, this is temporal, this world that we live in is temporal. At the very most, its temporal. I had a young man that my son was talking to, and he was talking about the fact he had become a millionaire by the time he is 30 years of age. And it was during the time of Johnny Carson died, and he’s searching right now. And one of the things he said was, you know, what good was all of this? What good is he’s gone? Life is meaningless. And that’s really true. There’s no meaning to life. There’s no purpose to life. I had that in my own life before coming to Christ have cried out to God, God, there’s got to be more to life than what I’m experiencing. There’s no meaning to this life. Get up every day and work your tail off in order to make some money to go to bed to get up the next day and work your tail off, make some more money in order to go to bed and get up the next day and work your tail off to make some more money in order to pass it on to your kids who then get up the next day and work their tail off, go to bed get up the next day, there’s got to be more to life than this. And my prayer was Lord Jesus, if there’s any purpose to this life at all, you’re gonna have to show it to him because I haven’t found it. I can’t find it. 36 years I’ve been looking, never find anything. And thank God, that I was led to a man who was bold enough to reach out to me with the good news of Christ Jesus, he wasn’t embarrassed. He too, had been a businessman. He too had devoted his whole life to Christ, and was willing to tell me about Jesus always be grateful to Dr. Bill Bright, the founder and president of Campus Crusade who loved me enough to tell me about Jesus.

And so he says, Whoever serves me must follow me. Now again. Jesus was still on this earth, wasn’t he? He still had his ministry on this earth. And he said must follow me. Where did he say we are to follow him to? Do we follow Christ today? Where did he go? Where was he going? To the cross. That’s what he’s saying, don’t stop, before you get to the cross. There are many people who follow Jesus before he got to the cross. And when he when, even when he was, Peter almost got to that point of denying him because he was being beaten half to death. He said, You’re gonna have to follow me to where I’m going. Now, today, if you’re born again, you’re indwelt by Jesus, aren’t you? And so you don’t follow someone that lives in you, you’re led by that person that lives in you, right? But you have got to follow him first to where he was going. And he was going to the cross and to the resurrection. And so he’s saying, Whoever serves me must follow me. And where I am, my servant will also be. He’s given us great assurance there. And another place that absent from the body present with the Lord. That’s why there really is no fear in death for a Christian, because we know something, that we just go into another realm. And it’s around the doesn’t have all of the stuff that we see. And I think we should enjoy the things that we have here on this earth, I certainly enjoy the beauty of nature. Enjoy the animal kingdom, enjoy most of the human kingdom. We have our ability to enjoy those things. But guys, this compared to what heaven is going to be we can’t even enter into it. You say what we try to proceed what heaven is like and pearly gates and all that kind of stuff. It’d be like talking to a baby in his mother’s womb. Say boy little baby, you can’t wait, you get out of there. Because man had beautiful skies and all that stuff a little baby and say thanks. But just the same with you, I’m gonna stay where I am. I’m comfortable here. And we’re the same way we can’t perceive what it’s like in heaven, but we do know it’s there. And we do know that when we die, we’re going to be absent from the body and immediately present with the Lord.

So Jesus says where I am, my servants will be also. And my Father will honor the one who serves me. But he said, now my heart is troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? No, it was for this very reason that I came to this hour. So Father, glorify Your name. Now you remember, this is a statement that was made prior to his arrest. Do you remember when he was saying, Father, if it’s possible, take this cup from me. Remember that? And here He’s saying, Father, save me from this hour? Shall I say, Father, save me from this hour? No. So when Jesus was saying, to save me from what I have come to do, he’s saying no way in the world. That’s why I came here. So what in the world was this thing, Father, if there’s any way to take this cup from me, take it? I’ll tell you what it means. I think what the Lord Jesus Christ was saying, in his agony is, Lord if there is any other way to save humanity, except from me having to go to a cross and take upon myself the sins of the entire world, they are He who knew no sin, became sin, he literally was so full of our sin that he says he became sin, so that in him, we could become the righteousness of God. And he said, if there’s any way in the world, that I can save these people apart from my having to become sin, do it. However, it’s not my will, but yours be done.

I was teaching a Sunday school class one time of some youth, young people and one of the kids in there was saying, I just don’t understand how anybody could be so full of agony and everything that they would sweat as it were a great drops of blood? And a little girl asked that question, oh, teenager, I said, let me let me ask you a question. I said, Do you think that if you were sentenced to die, I’m saying the electric chair with an injection of some kind, do you think you’d sweat as it were great drops of blood? Said no, there’s there’s been lesser men then Jesus that have gone to their death and never done that. I said, let me ask you another question. What have you had to go out tomorrow and you knew that you were going to go out in a bar and be in a field and stripped of all your clothes and be molested and raped by 200 or 300 guys? You think you could sweat great drops of blood? Yeah, yeah. See that’s what Jesus did, it wasn’t death that bothered Jesus. It was taking upon himself all of the vile sin of the entire world, all of the things that you and I have ever done or thought in our lives, and one of us alone would be enough to put Him to a cross and take all of that upon himself. And that’s what he was agonizing over. But he said, should I say, save me from this hour? No, God saved me. He couldn’t save you. Because our salvation is tied up only in one man, and that’s Christ Jesus. So if God saved him, we wouldn’t be saved today. But it’s for this very hour. The reason I came to this hour is to bring salvation for mankind. So Father, glorify Your name, make, make this plan now known.

You see a plan proclaimed is proclaimed, but a plan that is proclaimed and then demonstrated, you’ve made the plan known, haven’t you? And so it’s a kind of putting the action into the words. It says, a voice from heaven came out and said, I have glorified it. I’ve glorified my name, and I’ll glorify it again. And the crowd was there and heard it said and heard it said it had thundered. Others said an angel had spoken to him. And Jesus said, this voice was for your benefit, not mine. I didn’t, I didn’t need to hear that you did. But now is the time for judgment on this world. Now the prince of the world will be driven out. Now guys, you’re dealing with the prince of the world. And who is that? That’s Jesus, no wait. I’ve heard that of Satan. But it’s Jesus who was driven out of the world? Who was driven out of here?Jesus, right. If you can mark these Isaiah 9:6 are Acts 5:31. You will see that Jesus is identified as the prince.

Announcer 27:16
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 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 in praise the Lord. Amen.

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Listen to the Salvation message today!

Stand on the firmness of truth. Don’t keep going back and forth. Thank Him that the forgiveness issue is settled.

Let’s pray together:

• Lord Jesus,
• I thank you for taking away my sins on the cross,
• never ever to see them again.
• Having done that, I now thank you for giving me eternal life,
• through your resurrection.
• I now receive that life.
• And I am going stand in the fact that I am a child of the living God.
• In Jesus Holy name I pray.
• Amen

All believers are now brothers and sisters in Christ.

 

 

John 3:3
³ Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

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