Classic Christianity – Peace, Purpose, & Promise Part 1 – 8-17-26
~ You who are trying to be justified by the law have been severed from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. What matters is faith expressing itself through love. Galatians 5:4-6
There’s only one way to be saved today, and that is Faith in Jesus Himself. It doesn’t matter whether you were born of one lineage or another. God doesn’t treat one better than another when it comes to salvation. God is not a respector of persons. He treats everyone the same. Yet there are people today still thinking as a Hebrew, and thinking they can keep the old covenant law that was nailed to the cross of Calvary. So the point is not to become a Hebrew, but to place faith in Jesus and become a new creation in Christ Jesus. Because the two are made one. There is no more Hebrew and Gentile. There is only the body of Christ Jesus as one.
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Pray to God:
Do you really want to know the WHOLE Truth of what is going on today?
Lord Jesus, teach me the truth of the world today and give me the wisdom to know the truth and identify the lies of the devil. Thank you God.”
~ Bob George discusses the book of Ephesians, emphasizing God’s division of humans into HEBREWS and Gentiles, both in need of salvation. He explains the HEBREW adherence to the law and the Gentile heathenism, highlighting their inability to achieve righteousness through their own efforts. Bob contrasts the Old Testament’s miraculous events with modern skepticism. He illustrates God’s unconditional love through the prodigal son story, stressing that neither self-righteousness nor sinfulness can make one righteous. Bob concludes that only through faith in Christ can a new creation be formed, transcending the divide between HEBREWS and Gentiles.
“Now, Jesus did he not did he not amplify that truth in the message of the prodigal son? You see, in the prodigal son was a story of someone saying, “Hey, I want my inheritance in advance, and and I want it in advance. So the father said, “Okay, I’ll give it to you in advance. He gave it to him. He went out and he squandered it. Did he not, on all kinds of riotous living, and all kinds of promiscuity and booze if he was living today, and booze, alcohol, drugs-all the stuff that everybody does-and he found himself with the pigs, and suddenly one day, it said he came to his senses, and it said he realized that you know what, my father’s servants are living better than I am. My father’s servants aren’t living in a pigsty, and I live in a pigsty, and it said he came to his senses. He said, “I’m going home. On his way home, he had his First John one nines prepared. He had his confessions prepared, and he he had all of his little things all ready to go, in order to be able to tell his father how sorry he was and ask him to forgive him. Now, what did it say about the father? If I said the father was standing there looking for him every day that son was gone, the father was looking for him, and he said he saw him at a distance. He ran to him and he hugged him and he kissed him. Didn’t even give him a chance to confess. Isn’t that terrible? He didn’t even give a chance to First John one nine or anything like that. He just hugged him and he said, told his older brother that had been there the whole time with the father. Man, kill the fatted calf. We’re going to have a party. Well, this older brother didn’t like that at all. The older brother was sitting there saying, “Why is he getting a party? Why I’ve been here with you all along? You’re not throwing one for me, and so what you have? Self-righteousness and sinfulness. You had the HEBREW mindset, and you had the Gentile mindset. And what did God say? I love you both. And son, even though you’ve been with me all along, you’re no different than this person who wasn’t, both are my son, and I came to save both of them.” ~ Bob George
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Announcer 0:13
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
We’ve been studying through this wonderful book of Ephesians, and it’s a book of encouragement to us because it deals in so many aspects of the Christian life. If you’ll remember, as we started in our study, we talked about the fact of of what predestination and election is all about. That it is dealing with a category of men, as God divided humans into categories. His division of humankind and mankind was HEBREW and Gentile. That’s how the world was divided, HEBREW and Gentile. And then, in his sovereignty, he he saw that both HEBREW and Gentile were dead in our sins and the uncircumcision of our sinful nature, and therefore in need of life. To the HEBREW and to the Gentile, there was a contrast in lifestyle. To the HEBREW, he had given the law. When they came out of Egypt, he gave them the law. They wandered in the desert for some 40 years, did they not? They had been enslaved for years and years and generation and generation. When people are enslaved in that type of a situation, they really do not know how to do anything. In other words, they’ve been told what to do for some 600 years, generation after generation. They did not know how to govern. They did not know how to necessarily work on their own; they merely functioned, being told what to do, and so we’re told that there was something around two to 3 million HEBREW people that were that that passed through the sea, and were preserved through the sea at that time, the Red Sea. There are people who who will come up in intellectual circles and especially in liberal circles who will always try to discredit the stories of the of the of the Old Testament and the New, and there was certainly one situation of that in one college professor who was came down to say, well, he said, well, come on, you don’t really believe that all of that that the HEBREWS, you know, that God opened up the sea and the HEBREWS walked through. Why it just happened to be at that time of the year when the waters go down to a very very low ebb, about six inches of water, and the HE just walked across the water. So let’s not come up with this stuff of God splitting the water and the HEBREWS going through it.
One student held up his hand and said, “Prop, that’s fantastic. That is marvelous. That’s a greater miracle than the first one. All of Pharaoh’s army drowned in six inches of water. So you’re you’re always going to have somebody wanting to discredit the stories, but the fact of the matter is, that’s how the HEBREWS miraculously were saved out of bondage. Now they went into that desert without an ability to govern or anything else, and that’s why God gave them the laws, the 10 Commandments, all the dietary laws that were given to the HEBREWS, for it was for the purpose of their own preservation, to keep them from annihilating themselves, because a man without government is chaos. And so he gave them those laws, and in so doing also set them apart from the entirety of the Gentile world, and we have to see that clear delineation. So, to the HEBREW in the time of Jesus’ time, and to the time that we know today, the HEBREWS were people. The HEBREW people were people. Thank you, who were involved in trying to promote and to let people know of the one true God.
To the Gentile world, they had a multiplicity of gods, didn’t they? And you go into Greece or any of the Turkey or any of those other areas where that were the predominant Gentile nations, and you saw heathen worship of every kind, and you saw them worshiping all kinds of gods. Remember when when Paul went into Athens, and and marvelous introduction where he said, “I see that you are religious people. All these gods, these these statues of gods around, and he say, ‘I see there that you have one statue to the unknown god. I’d like to tell you who that is, and it a marvelous introduction into how to.” Communicate the gospel to people, so you had total heathenism from our roots. Most of us in this room are Gentile. Our roots are total heathenism, and so.
But to the HEBREW, their roots was trying to to follow God, trying to obey God’s laws, trying to do all of those things, and in so doing, setting themselves apart from the rest of the world. Also, the preservation of that HEBREW line was the preservation of the Messiah through whom the Messiah was going to come was through the line of Judah.
Now, recognizing that truth, you had the HEBREWS who thought that they were going to achieve salvation through their obedience to the law, and so the scripture deals with that is how that the HEBREW, rather than accepting the righteousness that comes from God, sought to establish their own righteousness. In other words, they used the law not as it was intended to do to keep us to keep civil obedience in the land. They use the law as a method of righteousness that we’re obeying the law, and then on top of that, they added law to law to law to law, and so you got all kinds of laws. Well, we’ve carried the same thing over into the Christian world today. And incidentally, as we’ve said before, the Gentiles never ever were given the law by God. God never gave the law to the Gentile world. We have never been under the law as far as God is concerned. We just dragged it over so that we could be self-righteous ourselves, and so to the HEBREW they were trying to establish their righteousness through obedience to the law. And the Scripture says, rather than accepting the righteousness that comes from God, they sought to establish their own, and they stumbled over Jesus, the stumbling stone. And so the Bible declares, no man will ever be declared righteous in the sight of God through obedience to the law, because it’s through the law that we see our own sinfulness.
So here was the HEBREW with God’s law trying to make themselves righteous in in His sight through what they were doing. Here was the Gentiles not giving a flip what they were doing, they were they were enjoying their sin, and they they were enjoying their sin so much that they just developed temple prostitutes so that they could really enjoy their religion, and they were having all kinds of things going on, and so they were just enjoying their sinfulness, thought nothing of it. So you had total heathenism, and then you had self-righteousness. Now, to both of those, could any man be declared righteous in the sight of God? Either one of those ways, and the answer to that is no. So what God did was, when He went to the cross, He neutralized the entire world, and that’s what it says that he nailed to the cross the commandments that were against us. He nailed those things to the cross. To the HEBREW, he said, “These laws you cannot obey. You did not obey. No man on this earth can ever obey. But I, Jesus, fulfilled the law through my life, which you could not do, and now I’m prepared to die for those of you who could not. And so he neutralized the whole world. He fulfilled the law that was given to the HEBREW, and now through his death, burial, and resurrection, was able to offer salvation not just to the HEBREW but to the whole world, HEBREW and Gentile alike. Now, this to the HEBREW was an unthinkable thought, that these heathenistic Gentiles out worshiping pagan gods and doing all the things that the Gentile world was doing. Are you telling me that they are going to be able to have a relationship with God the same way that we are, who have been trying and trying and trying? He says, “You got it.
Now, Jesus did he not did he not amplify that truth in the message of the prodigal son? You see, in the prodigal son was a story of someone saying, “Hey, I want my inheritance in advance, and and I want it in advance. So the father said, “Okay, I’ll give it to you in advance. He gave it to him. He went out and he squandered it. Did he not, on all kinds of riotous living, and all kinds of promiscuity and booze if he was living today, and booze, alcohol, drugs-all the stuff that everybody does-and he found himself with the pigs, and suddenly one day, it said he came to his senses, and it said he realized that you know what, my father’s servants are living better than I am. My father’s servants aren’t living in a pigsty, and I live in a pigsty, and it said he came to his senses. He said, “I’m going home. On his way home, he had his First John one nines prepared. He had his confessions prepared, and he he had all of his little things all ready to go, in order to be able to tell his father how sorry he was and ask him to forgive him. Now, what did it say about the father? If I said the father was standing there looking for him every day that son was gone, the father was looking for him, and he said he saw him at a distance. He ran to him and he hugged him and he kissed him. Didn’t even give him a chance to confess. Isn’t that terrible? He didn’t even give a chance to First John one nine or anything like that. He just hugged him and he said, told his older brother that had been there the whole time with the father. Man, kill the fatted calf. We’re going to have a party. Well, this older brother didn’t like that at all. The older brother was sitting there saying, “Why is he getting a party? Why I’ve been here with you all along? You’re not throwing one for me, and so what you have? Self-righteousness and sinfulness. You had the HEBREW mindset, and you had the Gentile mindset. And what did God say? I love you both. And son, even though you’ve been with me all along, you’re no different than this person who wasn’t, both are my son, and I came to save both of them.
Now, folks, that is the picture of salvation. Every person who lives on the face of this earth knows that there’s an emptiness inside of us. Do we not? We are born into this world with an emptiness inside of us. It is not how bad we are. It’s how empty we are. It’s the fact that we are constantly looking for a fulfillment to life, and we cannot find it here, folks. The whole essence of this book is teaching us a truth that we were born into this world with a need for unconditional love and unconditional acceptance. God gave you that need. Every person sitting in this room has that need, and their heart is strong as horseradish to be loved, and to be loved unconditionally, and to be accepted, will anybody out there just accept me for who I am? Just accept me, just love me, and everybody is searching for meaning and purpose to life, a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to live. And I can remember, in my days prior to knowing Christ, that that was the thing that was getting to me, is there’s got to be more to life, Lord, than just getting up every morning and working my tail off and making some money so that I can go to bed at night and get some rest and get the next day and work my tail off, make some more money, so that I can go to bed next night and get up the next day and make some more money. So one of these days, though, I can pass my money on to the kids so that they can get up every morning, work their tail off, and go to bed at night. There’s got to be more to life than this, and that’s where I cried out to the Lord. Lord, what’s it all about? Because I saw no basic reason to life at all-just to get up and exist, just to work, make some money. You can only live in one room at a time. You can only wear one suit of clothes at a time, and you find out that all this stuff you’re trying to accumulate isn’t worth what you’ve accumulated.
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Bob George 14:21
It is empty, and it’ll never fill the need of the human heart. Never. That’s why you take the richest people alive. ______ ________ asked someone, asked him one time, how much it will take to make you happy. He said, just a little bit more, and that’s the way we are. Do you think ______ _______ happy? You see, I could walk up to a ______ _______ if he doesn’t know the Lord and look him straight in the eyes as one of the wealthiest men in the world and say, “I want to tell you something, my _______. You’re as empty as a pork barrel inside. That’s just because we were made that way, folks. That’s the way we were created. And as we’ve said before, just as a car cannot run without gasoline in it, people go out and buy. A $60,000 automobile, and the dumb thing won’t run without $1’s worth of gas in it. Why? It was made that way. A car without gas will not function. A lamp without oil will not function. A man without God cannot function. We’re made that way. And so we walk into this world not with gasoline in the car, oil in the lamp, or electricity in the bob, but we walk into this world empty, and we’re born into this world empty. HEBREWS born that way, Gentiles born that way, the whole world born that way.
So at the cross, Jesus neutralized the entire world and said, “I’m going to form a new creation, and that creation is going to be called the ecclesia. Now, the ecclesia is a Greek word we’ve translated church. Quite frankly, it’s an atrocity what the church is today compared to what Jesus meant the church to be, because basically the church has become an activity center. It’s become a place for potlucks, and a place for activity, and a place for interaction, but not a place to learn. The early church was held in homes, and it said they used to meet daily for the apostles’ teaching and for fellowship and for prayer, that’s the only function of a true church: teaching, fellowship, prayer. And so, what we see today as the ecclesia, I think many times, is a far cry from what God ever intended it to be. Because what the ecclesia is is made up of only born again people, people who have truly come to a personal relationship with the living Christ. And again, if you would have said something like that to me back when I was 30, a little in my early days of 36, I would have known what you were talking about, because I sat in church for 36 years and never heard the gospel of Christ Jesus. I didn’t know that what born again was. I never heard the term. I didn’t know I was a sinner. I knew I was a sinner, but didn’t know God called me one. I mean, I would have been the first to admit that I was a sinner. Amy would have also admitted to that. But but the fact is that I I didn’t know I was called that I didn’t know what that was, I thought a sinner was someone like myself who was out boozing up or or doing cussing and doing all the stuff that we guys do, but in the Bible the word sinner is an unbeliever. Now you see I would have thought that I was a believer in Jesus because I certainly historically believed that Jesus was alive. If someone would ask me, “Do you believe in Jesus? I’d have said, “Well, of course I do. Are you a Christian? Well, absolutely. I’m not a Muslim. You know, I’m not a Buddhist, so I’m a Christian because I live in America, don’t I? And so, I mean, I I would certainly have been a Christian from that standpoint. Do you believe Jesus is the Son of God? Sure, I believe that. What’s that mean? I don’t know. Maybe God had a baby. I don’t have any idea what that means. Never, never cared what it meant. It was just all surface stuff. Do you relate to what I’m talking about? We celebrate Christmas that way, and I think back on Christmas Christmas experience and hearing those words, they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.
And I can remember singing those songs, not having a clue what that meant, never taking time to think, what’s that mean? What’s that mean? And so, yeah, historically, I believed Jesus was the Son of God, the same way I believed ___ ______ was president of the United States, and ______ _________ was president, and and and all those kind of things. It was a historical acknowledgement that I believed he existed, and that’s who he was, without a clue what it meant. I did not have a clue that I could know him personally. I did not. I didn’t know I was supposed to. I just thought I was supposed to know about him, but I didn’t know I could know him. I didn’t know that that there was something missing in my life, but I knew there was something missing in my life. And so you go through life always gaining something, and then after you’ve gained it, you look back and say, what was that all about? You know, basketball you win a tournament after you win it, big deal. Can always remember my dad. Dad was a very wise man. He was a very religious man, but he wasn’t born again. He did not know Christ as his Lord and Savior until a couple of days before he died. I had the privilege of introducing him to Christ before he died. But my dad was a very wise man, and I can always remember him saying to me, my senior year of high school when I played basketball, and he said, “Bob, let me tell you something. He said, “Right now, you walk in the gym and everybody’s applaud.” And why they’re just goo gooing over you and all that kind of stuff? He said, “Next year when you go to college, you walk in that gym there they won’t know who you are. And I thought, “My poor dad, he’s he’s deranged all of a sudden. Why? That’s not true. That ain’t got to happen at all. And I can remember the year, my freshman year. I was getting ready to go back to one of the high school games, and I could hardly wait. I probably was anticipating a standing ovation when you. And I walked into that place, and nobody had a clue who I was. They had new heroes now, new heroes. And you sit back and you say, “What’s it all about? Short-lived stuff, isn’t it? Short-lived stuff. I think so many times that football players and that type of thing. What price glory do we pay of going out and getting her knees ruined for the rest of her life for a little bit of applause from the stands?
And so we we we we have to realize in life that everything that we seem to try to achieve is very much meaningless, isn’t it? In the final analysis, and so you come down to the point and say, “Well, is there anything that has meaning to it? And guys, one of the reasons that I’ve devoted my life as a Christian to trying to teach people the grace of God. It’s not because that’s a theology that I like better than another theology, or it’s that I don’t like legalism but I like this grace. It’s because of what it does to you. Because you see, you and I both know that there is no unconditional love and acceptance available here on this earth. We know that, don’t we? I would like to be able to love Amy unconditionally, but I can’t. And I’d like to be able to accept her unconditionally, but I can’t. And she can’t love and accept me unconditionally. That’s an impossibility. Now, guys, if you if you can’t find unconditional love and acceptance here on this earth, and yet you’ve got a need as strong as anything you’ve ever had for unconditional love and acceptance. And then you go to church to try to find maybe God will love me unconditionally, and here you find you got to do this, you got to tithe in order to be blessed. You got to do this. You got to follow the rules. You got to look like this. You got to act like this. You got to, you know, you got to go to the prayer meeting, and you got to go.
And you know, if you go on Sunday and don’t go Sunday evening, something’s wrong with you for sure. And you’ve got this little pecking order that we have, and you sit there and say, “I think I’ve just had it, because if God doesn’t love me unconditionally, where am I going to go? There’s no place to go. I live here in the world, people, places, and things, and none of them can meet this need of this heart. Where am I going to go? And you know what you do? You live in hopelessness, and so you just start saying, “Well, I’ll just practice religion, and maybe someday. And here’s what ultimately legalism does: is I know that God is disturbed with me now, but I’ll work hard enough, and I’ll do enough things, and I’ll go to church enough, and I’ll tithe enough, and I’ll do all of these things, so that just maybe, on the day that I die, I will have done a few more good things than bad, and maybe God will take me in. Maybe. So how do we die? Wondering, wondering, and that’s why many people are scared to death of death because they’re wondering, did I do enough? Was I good enough? Did I go to church enough? Did I confess my sins enough? And I just hope so. Now, is that a wonderful way to live? And folks, do you realize that the vast majority of the so-called Christian world lives their life like that, not knowing, dying, not knowing? I thought, what a sad thing, because that’s exactly what Jesus came to do was to form this new man out of the two. So what did he say, HEBREW? You can’t get there through your works. Gentile, you can’t get there through your heathenism. So later on, the Gentile starts doing good works, pulling some of Israel’s laws over and then pretending to obey them, so so maybe maybe we’ll get there by our good works. I know the HEBREW can’t, but maybe we can’t. And so that’s what religion is, folks: is man attempting to find acceptance in the sight of God through his own effort. What is Christianity? God reaching down to man. By his effort, so religion is man trying to find acceptance in the sight of God through what he does. Christianity was accepting what Jesus did to make me acceptable.
And so he said, “I’m going to form a new man out of this too. Now, in chapter one, beginning at verse 14, well, let’s go up to verse 11. So there he’s dealing with the Gentiles. Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called the uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, that done in the body by the hands of men. Remember, at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in this world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ, for He Himself is our peace. Verse 14, who has made the two one. Now, who’s the two? The HEBREW and the Gentile I’ve now created a new man, the two one. I have destroyed. It says the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. There was a wall of hostility between the Jew and the Gentile. I have now destroyed that barrier by abolishing in His flesh-that’s Jesus-the law with its commandments and regulations. So through Christ Jesus, there was a barrier, and through Christ Jesus, that barrier was broken down, and the law was taken away, because the HEBREW couldn’t find acceptance in the sight of God through the law. For sure, the Gentile could not, and so I took away the law in order to make a new man that becomes a child of God by faith and faith alone, and therefore being able to be led now internally by the Spirit of God rather than externally by the laws of the land.
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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, and praise the Lord. Amen.