-Transcript-
00:36 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the cafe.
00:41 Welcome to the program. Pastor Clark Covington here with you today. Just brewed up some coffee.
00:46 Excited to be joining you here today to dive into God’s Word and study it. Amen. Study it.
00:53 I was talking about coffee with my wife and I said, when do kids start drinking coffee?
01:00 And so you know 20, 18, 19, 20, not everybody of course, but you study and maybe you’re in high school, college studying and gotta stay awake during your studies and it’s no different here.
01:10 We’re studying the Bible and honestly if you know the Lord you don’t even need coffee to be awake because the Holy Spirit living within you will be excited to study God’s Word. Amen.
01:19 And today we’re diving into a really interesting subject and that is the idea of the exclusivity of Christianity. The idea that being Christian, like believing in Christ, is completely exclusive from being involved in another religion.
01:38 And I feel like I kind of touched a nerve last week.
01:47 I made a video on why or can you be a Christian and a Buddhist. I made a video on that. You can see it on our Facebook page, facebook.com forward slash KJV cafe.
01:57 And it was on YouTube and people started to comment on it and it got a lot of activity. And people, I started to research this a little bit and people are very very bothered when Christians say that their way is the way to God.
02:12 And so I don’t want to get too much into the Buddhist aspect today of why Christianity is exclusive.
02:22 I want to take a step back and just look at general. Why is Christianity exclusive to anything? To Hinduism? To any kind of religion? Buddhism? Hinduism? Mysticism?
02:37 All the different religions of the world. Why is Christianity one where it is completely separate, amen, in the sense that you cannot, I don’t believe, truly be a Christian and also be part of another religion.
02:51 It won’t work like that. Now you say, well Brother Clark, has anybody been in another religion and they get saved but they can’t like tell someone they’re saved or they’re gonna be murdered?
03:00 Of course, alright. But I’m saying in your heart, in your heart, there’s not room for two religions if you’re a Christian.
03:07 There’s only room for Jesus Christ, amen. So let’s take a step back. What does it mean to be Christian? To believe in Christ and thus become Christ-like.
03:17 Salvation and sanctification. What does it mean to be Christian? I think you can boil it down to to believe in Christ because Christian means Christ-like, okay. To be Christ-like you have to believe in Him and what He did for you on the cross.
03:30 That’s salvation, amen. And then to be Christ-like, that’s the idea of sanctification, living as Christ each day, taking up your cross, and so forth. And so we’ll start with salvation, amen.
03:41 Salvation, when I think of salvation, I think of Romans Road. Now I know the gospel. The most clear picture of the gospel as I’ve always been taught and as I’ve found in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 15:1-4.
03:56 1 Corinthians 15:1-4. I’m just gonna pull it up here and I’m gonna read it.
03:58 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 and then we’ll get into Romans Road. Both of these epistles, both these letters in the Bible, both these books of the Bible written by Paul here.
1 Corinthians 15:1-4. Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you’ve received and wherein you stand, but which also you’re saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you believed in vain.
04:21 For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.
04:34 That’s it. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
04:39 It was buried and rose again three days later according to the Scriptures. And so we see that our our salvation hangs completely on the cross at Calvary. It’s Jesus Christ our Lord 100% believing on what he did for us.
04:53 And I like to delineate. I want to be clear here. We don’t believe in Christ as in, okay, I believe Jesus lived.
05:00 That’s not enough. Amen. Romans 3:23 tells us, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We need to not only understand that Christ lived and died and was buried and rose again the third day.
05:13 We need to understand that. Plus, we have sin in our life that’s unresolved. We have a sin debt that we cannot resolve.
05:20 We are sinners. The depravity of man. Man is depraved.
05:26 We are basically evil and sinful and we need a Savior to get right or to be reconciled to a holy God. That’s what we need to believe, right? Romans 3:23, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
05:39 Romans 6:23, for the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
05:46 So we realize we have a spiritual death and a literal death and that those are the wages of sin and I can get into that but basically when Adam and Eve they sinned in the Garden of Eden, that’s when sin entered the picture and that’s when death entered the picture.
06:08 As I understand it, there was no death in the Garden of Eden prior to sin entering the picture. And so Adam and Eve sin, they’re expelled from the Garden of Eden and they become sinful mortal creatures.
06:15 They’re no longer going to live forever. They have issues. Sin is messing everything up.
06:19 Last night in our little church fellowship we have here in my house we have a meal, amen, and we pray we go through scriptures and everybody seemed like everybody in here all the adults were talking about their eyesight being not great and who needs glasses and who needs contacts and it reminded me of the sin curse that we’re compromised, amen.
06:38 We’re not who God had initially made us to be. Adam and Eve were perfect before sin but once sin entered the picture they became mortal.
06:44 They became plagued and of course they were the first to deal with it so I’m sure they were much more healthy than us here today but still sin entered the picture and death entered the picture and the wages of sin is death.
06:57 That means the payment of sin is death. That means what we are owed for our sinful life is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
07:06 Romans 5:8 but God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. So God sees the problem, God knew the problem, he foreknew the problem, amen.
07:16 God the Father sends God the Son, the only begotten, amen, to die on the cross for our sins.
07:22 He lived a perfect sinless life 33 and a half years here on earth. He was born of a virgin and because he was sinless and he died on that cross, amen, when he was buried three days, three days also symbolizes full death in Jewish culture as I understand it, he’s raised again on the third day, miraculously raised again, he’s resurrected by God.
07:44 The Bible says he was seen by over 500, amen.
07:45 He walked the earth 40 days and 40 nights after his resurrection and we see that when when Christ did that that we are now forgiven of our sins.
07:55 The Bible says there’s no remission of sin without the shedding of blood and so we needed blood to be shed for our sins but we couldn’t sinfully take one of our ourselves and give ourselves to God because we’re sinful man.
08:07 So God comes himself in the form of man but is sinless and when he dies on the cross he is literally putting on our sinful shoes and he’s giving us his holy shoes or his holy robe and he’s putting on our sinful garments.
08:23 That’s why it was such a brutal death for Christ because he didn’t deserve to die on the cross. He hadn’t done anything wrong, amen. He didn’t have any sin in him and yet he took upon sin for the whole world to die on that cross at Calvary so that we could be saved and when we simply believe all we have to do is believe.
08:38 It’s a free gift. You know if I knock on your door being a big imposing man with a beard I say hello I have a free gift for you. You may look at me and say this guy doesn’t I don’t want to take a gift from him.
08:49 You say no no no thank you right no thank you. Well you had a chance to receive a free gift but you had to accept it. I’m not gonna force it upon you.
08:58 If you say no thank you if you close the door hey then I won’t give you that free gift. The Christ is there. If you let him in if you accept that free gift of salvation what does it mean? It means you recognize you’re a sinner.
09:11 You recognize the wages of sin is death. You recognize the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. You recognize that it was all God but God commendeth his love toward us and that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us and you’re saved.
09:24 Romans 10:9 that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead thou shalt be saved
09:33 so we believe in our heart the deepest place in our souls we believe we believe intellectually we can understand but in our hearts we have to believe
09:42 so we believe in our heart we speak it with our mouth we’re saved and Romans 10:13 tells us that anyone can be saved for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved
09:51 and then once you’re saved Romans 8:1 there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit that means that once we’re saved
10:05 we’re no longer under condemnation what does it mean to be condemned amen it means to have a problem it means to be shut down it means to be guilty before a holy God
10:13 and now we don’t deal with that condemnation once we’re saved and nothing can separate us from our salvation amen Romans 8 38 through 39 for I’m persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord
10:35 and so we see here that Christ is the one that saved us that Jesus Christ is our salvation that this is the idea of the atonement the idea of a substitutionary death that Christ died for us
10:48 because we couldn’t pay that debt on our own and therefore our faith is exclusive the first that keeps coming up in my mind over and over again as I’ve chewed on this message and this concept
11:02 and as I’ve seen the response from the world for lack of a better way to say it John 14:6 Jesus sayeth unto him I am the way the truth and the life no man cometh unto the Father but by me, so Jesus is the truth the life and no man cometh to the Father but by me
11:30 Acts 4:12 says neither is there salvation in any other for there is none other other there for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved
11:41 and so you see here there’s an exclusivity that if you believe in XYZ which tells you that you have to do something and again I’m not picking on Buddhism but Buddhism for example tells you to suppress your desires and to suppress this and that and for you to do this in that okay
11:59 that is something you’re doing right and I’ve heard great preaching on Islam and how Islam requires you to do something you have to do this you have to do that for your God
12:10 and in Christianity our God did everything and all we have to do is believe and when we believe that means that we are making him Lord of our life that he all he all he did was give his all and in response
12:24 he expects our all and how can we say that we are giving our all if we’re dabbling in other religions and I think this is a very serious thing I I take this very seriously
12:32 I don’t like the word yoga because yoga deals with pagan practices and I know yoga is very popular and it grieves me that good well-meaning Christians are involved in that stuff look up the history of yoga it’s pagan
12:43 and I don’t like it stretching is great I love sports I love stretching stretching is great but yoga is awful we don’t do that amen we love the Lord so much that we take it literally
12:54 we are to have no other gods besides him we are to love him with all our heart mind and soul the Bible is full of scripture telling us that we need to be completely sold out to God
13:03 and yet many in the world don’t understand this and don’t like it and it is an offense to them the gospel is offensive because number one people are being called sinners which they probably don’t like very much
13:19 number two they’re being told they can’t do anything to fix it on their own and number three they’re being told that they need to accept one God and and and make him Lord of their life
13:29 so now they’d have to take themselves off of the throne and make this God Lord of their life and all three of these things are very offensive in this modern culture that tells us to mishmash
13:39 and meld all these other things and so we see here that the gospel is exclusive and I’m not I’m not believing everyone will be saved I understand that that only a remnant will be saved only a small group will really truly believe but what I do understand
13:54 is that this is very clear like it’s not like the Bible is wishy-washy about this so a Christian to say that the only way to be a true Christian is to only serve the Lord Jesus is
14:08 I think an accurate statement and I pray that you will take this to heart here today
14:12 tune in next time as we get deeper into this message take care God bless and amen