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00:35 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the cafe today.
00:41 I’m so glad you’re here that you’re taking time out of your busy day to listen to the KJV Cafe program. My name is Clark Covington. I’m the pastor of Heartland Community Baptist Church in Lincolnton, North Carolina.
00:52 Before you think of some big old fancy building, we’re just in a little storefront, small congregation. I’m nobody special, but God called me to preach His Word. Amen.
01:02 And I’m so glad He did. And I’m so glad that, again, you’ve taken the time to get into God’s Word with me. Today we’re in John 14, which is an incredible chapter.
01:13 I’d say one of the greatest chapters in the Bible, but I love all of them, really. I love all of them. I absolutely love them.
01:21 John 14 is incredibly important in the sense that Christ Himself is speaking in much of this chapter. The red text is here. Amen.
01:30 And when you read that, you have to say this is God speaking in the flesh. We’re exhorted to believe that Christ is God. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, Christ being God.
01:38 Only by Jesus do we have access to God. John 14:5-7, Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh under the Father, but by me.
02:00 If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also. And from henceforth ye know him, and have seen me. Here is the truth.
02:10 Jesus Christ and God are God. Jesus Christ and God are God. And here’s another truth.
02:19 Jesus Christ, Father God we’ll call Him, and the Holy Spirit. All three are He, and those three are also God. So the Trinity is what we are to believe, and Christ is saying you need to understand that I’m God.
02:38 And think of the context. Here Thomas is looking at Christ, right? And this is just before the crucifixion, and Thomas is wondering, he’s doubting, he’s saying, wait a minute, you’re God? And Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way? You know, where are you going to go, and how do we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
03:06 That’s capital F That’s Father God. If you had known me, you should have known my Father also, and from henceforth you know Him, and have seen Him. And so Christ is explaining to disciples, and in the greater part here, explaining to everyone that reads this and studies it, that He is God, and that He is part of the Holy Trinity.
03:30 And this is very important for us to understand here today. This is called the fullness of God, the three-in-one God, the Godhead, Matthew 28:19. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, capital SSon, and of the Holy Ghost, capital H, capital G. And so we have three entities here that are all the same.
03:51 We have Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If you want to look at it in a personal light, when you’re saved and you accept Christ as Savior, that’s when you not just believe that Jesus lived, or that Jesus is in the Bible, but you believe that Jesus is God, amen? You believe that Christ died for your sins, that you had a need that you could not resolve, right? You have a sin debt that you cannot resolve. Christ dies for your sins, and is risen the third day according to the Scriptures.
04:19 1 Corinthians 15: 1 – 4 describes this well. We understand Christ did this for us. We believe that Christ died for us, that he took our sinful… he put on our sinful shoes, or our sinful clothing, so that we could put on his righteous shoes, or his righteous clothing.
04:39 So, we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ when we believe on Christ. We’re saved. Well, what happens when you’re saved? You have the Holy Spirit living within you.
04:44 Now you have the Trinity right in your midst. You have God living within you. That’s the Holy Ghost, called the Comforter, Amen You have that Holy Spirit living within you.
04:55 That’s how you can know that you’ve been saved, amen? You have that Holy Spirit living within you. There should be a change in you, amen? Because that Holy Ghost is going to change you, convict you, Amen We don’t want to grieve the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost always speaks to and points to Christ, Amen So we have the Holy Ghost living within us.
05:13 And so when we pray, we pray by the working of the Holy Ghost, through Christ Jesus the Mediator, who’s at the right hand of the Father, to Father God. And you have the three-in-one fullness of God right there. That is the Trinity.
05:25 I’ve heard it described as, if you add water and it turns into steam, or it turns into ice, it’s all still the same thing, right? And that is another way to describe it as an element, I suppose. But the way that I look at it here today is, it is one God in three parts, and that’s the Trinity, Amen John 10:30, I and my Father are one. And if you can believe this, some people, as I understand it, don’t actually believe in the Trinity or don’t understand it.
05:52 But yet it’s so core to who we are as Christians. And when we understand the Trinity, what happens? Now we start asking ourself, well, how does it work? And that is why Christ wants you to know, Amen, inJohn 14:6, sixth number of man, Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.
06:14 Christ wants you to know that his way is the only way to be saved. Another way to look at it is, Christ is the exclusive way to be saved. And oh, we live in a culture that is not exclusive but inclusive.
06:28 We live in a culture where nobody can be left out. We live in a culture where in the public school, they can’t sing a hymn, they can’t sing a Christian song. They’re not supposed to because that is exclusive, and they want to be inclusive.
06:42 So, they’ll sing something from the world, which is of the little g-god of this world, the devil. And that’s why the devil is in public school, because of this wish-wash nonsense that we should just serve all the gods and live for all the gods. And that’s not what Christ is saying.
06:57 Christ is saying, you come to the Father only by me, right? And so we come to the Father by believing on Christ, and when we believe on Christ, we then get the Holy Spirit living within us. And now we understand the order of things, that Christ is God in the flesh as we could see him. He came to earth as a man.
07:17 And that’s why the angels beheld Christ in the manger. One of the reasons why, because that was the first time I believed the angels could see God, as I’ve understood it, as I studied it. They’re saying, oh, this is what God looks like in person.
07:26 And Christ is our mediator, the one that we go through, Amen And vice versa. Christ is the one that has applied to us for righteousness. So we don’t have any righteousness on our own.
07:37 We have family altar time, we’re reading the Proverbs, you get in the Proverbs, there’s a whole lot in the Proverbs about righteousness and goodness and the good man and the righteous man, etc. And we talk a lot about this idea that it’s not of us, but only of Christ when we’re saved, amen? There’s none righteous, no, not one. It’s only of Christ.
07:56 So, we realize there’s a role here between the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ the Son, and God the Father, and they’re very important for us. So Christ is our righteousness. When God looks upon us, he doesn’t see our sinful nature.
08:08 He sees Christ’s righteousness, Amen And that is imputed to us when we believe on him. And Christ does the will of his Father. Christ was obedient to his Father.
08:17 And we could, you know, we don’t have, for the sake of time, I can’t get into all the ways, but he was in the flesh, yet he was fully God. And we see that he was obedient to God in his fleshly side by living a servant life, by being humble beyond humble, and being obedient even unto death. So this is an exclusive way.
08:37 1 Corinthians 1:18- 23, for the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness. But unto us which are saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.
08:52 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God. It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom.
09:12 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness. Here, in 1 Corinthians 1:18-23, a truth emerges that while we understand through the scriptures, it’s only by Christ that we get to God. To the world, to the unsaved world, this is foolishness.
09:30 Paul is saying, verse 18 of 1 Corinthians, for the preaching of the cross is to them that perish, that would be to them that die, foolishness. It’s foolishness. It doesn’t make sense.
09:43 It doesn’t compute. With all the complexities in this world, how could there be one God? With all the choices in this world, how could there be one choice? With all of the archaeological history of a prehistoric era and so forth, how can we say that the Bible is true, and that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and on and on and on, right? It’s foolishness to the world. It’s foolishness to the schools.
10:11 It’s foolishness to the workplace. It’s foolishness to all those that are living in the world. But to those that believe on Christ, it is salvation, Amen It is salvation.
10:24 But to unto us which are saved, it is the power of God. And so we see this is an exclusive way. And we see that to live for Christ is not something that we might do, or something that could be one way to be saved, Amen It is the only way.
10:42 So, Christ is saying, take up your cross. Believe on me. Make me Lord and Savior of your life.
10:48 Forsake your ways. We see this throughout the Scriptures. Remember that was that young rich person, and they had done everything legally they were supposed to do, following the Old Testament, the Mosaic laws and so forth.
11:01 And Christ said, okay, sell all your possessions, give to the poor, and follow me. And that young person was grieved because they had a lot of possessions. And oh, how this world worships materialism, and wants to have materials, but also have the ways and things of God.
11:13 Now God’s saying, look, you want to live for me? It’s gonna be tough, and you’re gonna have to change your ways. You want to live for me? You’re gonna have to be of a sober mind. You want to live for me? You’re gonna have to keep those cuss words out of your mouth.
11:21 You want to live for me? You’re gonna have to stop gossiping. You want to live for me? On and on and on, right? But that’s not the ways of this world. So what does the world do? They say, that’s foolishness.
11:34 We’ll live as we fleshly want to live. We’ll be the captains of our own ship, and we’ll develop our own religions. We’ll call it New Age.
11:41 We’ll call it yoga. We’ll call it whatever. But it’s not of God, amen? In fact, many denominations have quote, evolved.
11:50 I would say devolved into this. They’ve devolved into this thinking that they should be more like the world, and that they should bring, the world should come in to the church. And that’s the biggest mistake of all time, Amen We are to be unspotted from the world.
12:06 We are to be separate from the world. We are to be a peculiar people. We are to be a city set on a hill that cannot be hid, Amen We are to get that light out of the bushel, Amen We are to live for God wholly, and not be a part of this world.
12:22 I’ll leave you with this, okay? The way is exclusive. We are to practice this in our life. John 14:15, if you love me, keep my commandments.
12:29 You know, if you love me, keep my commandments. John 14:15, one of my favorite verses in the Bible. That’s Jesus speaking.
12:35 If we love him, we should keep his commandments. And what is the inverse of this? If we don’t love him, we won’t keep his commandments. If you don’t love Jesus, you will constantly live in sin.
12:45 You won’t repent. You’ll live for yourself. Think of that, Amen How many people today are showing Christ they love him by keeping his commandments? We know we’re saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.
12:55 We don’t have a works-based salvation. We are saved by the blood of Christ, Amen It’s nothing that we could do on our own. The scriptures teach us that.
13:06 That being said, if we’ve been saved, truly, then we should have a desire to live for the Lord wholeheartedly. And we should show the Lord that we love him, Amen If we believe on Him, if He saved us, oh, our devotion to Him should be so clear. And we should live for Him.
13:27 Rather than, in these last days, just give up and go with the flow. It’s time to stand up and stand up for Christ. It’s time to live for Christ with our whole hearts, minds, and soul.
13:35 We are to show people that there is a better way to live. And that way to live is what God wrote in the Bible. And it is for our benefit, number one, to accept Christ as Savior so we don’t go to a real living hell, Amen And number two, to have peace in this world, to have joy.
13:54 John 14 starts out by Jesus saying, let not your heart be troubled. We are to live in a way that our heart is not troubled. That we have joy and peace in this world, knowing that God is in control, that God is real, and the only way to God the Father is through the Son, Jesus Christ.
14:10 The only way to God the Father is through the Son, Jesus Christ. Thank you for joining me. Take care, God bless, and Amen.