-Transcript-
00:26 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:30 Welcome to the cafe. My name is Pastor Clark Covington from Heartland Community Baptist Church of Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today.
00:42 Today we are talking about how good God is, but how ready we need to be to meet that good God. Amen. There is a form of belief out there, and I’m sure there’s a theological term for this, but easy-believe-ism maybe, or universalism, one of these isms.
01:04 The idea is that, hey, you’re good as you are. God is ambivalent or doesn’t really care, so just live your life how you want to be. Just do what you want to do.
01:18 Follow your desires. The desire is your heart, and just see what happens. Get rich.
01:23 Do your thing. There is a form of belief out there, and it tickles the ears of those that hear it. But unfortunately, to burst your bubble, if you are into this kind of belief, it’s not biblical at all.
01:38 You study the Bible, and I’m not a Bible scholar by any means, amen. I’m just your average Joe, like literally ask my wife. I’m a very normal individual, and I can clearly tell you the Bible does not communicate this kind of belief.
01:55 Rather, the Bible communicates a very clear message, and Jesus himself communicates this in the New Testament often, early and often, that there is a judgment coming.
02:06 The question is, will you be ready? There’s a two-part aspect to that. Will you be ready personally, and will you be ready as in you’ve done all the Lord wanted you to do here on Earth?
02:25 The Bible tells us the Lord will return unexpectedly, and the example given would be like a thief in the night, right? And you got two people in bed, and one person’s taken out, and one person is not.
02:32 And if you’re not familiar, when I speak of taken out, what I’m referring to is the rapture. And the idea here at KJV Cafe, we believe in a pre-tribulation rapture, which means that God comes, takes his church home, and then there’s a tribulation period of seven years, which is the first three and a half years are peaceful, and the last three and a half are like hell on Earth almost. And then after that, you have the millennial reign of Christ, and then we have eternity onwards, forever in heaven with the Lord.
03:04 And so that is what we believe here at KJV Cafe. I always like to make that very clear. So when I speak of taken out, what I’m speaking of is the rapture, as I understand it.
03:15 If you’re not saved by the time that the church is raptured out, it will be near impossible to get saved during the tribulation. You’ll have to be martyred, be beheaded, not take the mark of the beast, but also to, I think there’s scripture in the Bible, if I remember correctly, it says you’ll be given over to blindness, like you won’t understand the truth anymore, because you’ll believe Satan, the Antichrist here on Earth, Amen.
03:41 And so now is the time to be saved, amen? And now is the time not only to be saved, but to be ready. Because I believe that this will happen, not only do I believe this will happen, but I believe it’s imminent.
03:54 You know, Paul writes about it as if it were to happen in his time. And when it does happen, there’ll be a series of events put into motion that have eternal consequences.
04:04 So what we do, how we live, what we speak today matters in eternity, because once the judgment begins, so to speak, we no longer have the ability to do anything, okay?
04:17 People think, you know, some savvy person goes to jail and says, I’ll represent myself in court and I’ll convince everybody.
04:26 And that person goes to court and the judge isn’t having it, and the savvy person all of a sudden becomes very afraid, because what they thought they would do, they can’t do. And the control they thought they had, they don’t have. And now fear takes hold, and it gets worse and worse.
So we need to make sure that we’re about our Father’s business today. Matthew 12:35-37, a good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.
04:54 But I say unto you that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
05:05 For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned. Okay, so for the sake of time, if I had the time, I’d read Matthew 12, and I’d go from 22-37, if you’re at home, read Matthew 12:22- 37,
05:17 to get more context for this message. But for the sake of the short amount of time we have, I will just kind of give you a synopsis of what’s going on.
05:26 It’s Jesus speaking about judgment, right? And about how the heart is dictating what we’re saying through our mouth, whether good or bad.
05:36 So if we have, you know, like evil in us, then evil words are gonna come out. If we have good in us, then good words should come out.
05:42 But every word will be judged by God himself, right? And this is in relation to Jesus Christ himself. He is performing miracles here in Matthew 12.
05:50 A blind and dumb person, dumb meaning someone that couldn’t speak, comes to him because they were possessed with a devil.
06:01 And Jesus casts that devil out and heals that individual. And then the Pharisees, they witness it along with a crowd. And the crowd says, isn’t this the son of David? They’re looking at Jesus in a very earthly manner.
06:14 And the Pharisees then say, oh, he didn’t do that by the work of God. He did that by the work of the devil. And they refer to the devil as Beelzebub, okay? The prince of the devils.
06:23 And they’re saying, yeah, that’s how Jesus did that. And Jesus, you know, he corrects them and says, look, why would the devil cast out a devil? Why is he going to divide his kingdom?
06:33 I mean, that’s silly, you know? And if it’s not the devil doing it, then who is doing it? It’s God. And that means the kingdom of God is at hand.
06:39 And so they may have murmured that he’s doing this by the power of the devil or that Jesus is a devil. But what Jesus is telling them, and this is where he mentions the unpardonable sin, you might have heard that before,
06:49 is that you can’t blaspheme the Holy Ghost and get away with it. That your words have meaning, right? That your words have meaning.
06:57 And whether they were idle words or whether they were shouted or whatever it was, they have meaning. And God says, Jesus says, their words are indicative of their heart.
07:07 And so we see here, Matthew Henry wrote a great commentary on this verse, the heart is the fountain, words are the streams, a troubled fountain and a corrupt spring must send forth muddy and unpleasant streams.
07:21 Nothing but the salt of grace cast into the spring will heal the waters, season the speech and purify the corrupt communication. And so we see here a very great principle explained through, firstly, what Jesus said to the Pharisees.
07:37 And then later on, with the commentary in Matthew Henry wrote that without the grace of God, nothing will cure the sin in our hearts.
07:53 We all have a sin nature. Ever since Adam and Eve, we all have a sin nature. And even when we’re forgiven of sin, amen, we still have a penchant for sin.
08:00 You know, have you ever wanted to say something bad about somebody? You know, you ever have someone, imagine someone walked up to you, lied to you, took your wallet, smacked you and walked away.
08:11 Now let’s say you are a like picture perfect Christian, right? Are you just going to say, oh, bless them. You know, they lied to you, they took your wallet, they smacked you, they walked away.
08:22 How dare them? Okay. Now, what a point I’m making is you’d have every right to say something bad in terms of like, hey, give me my wallet back.
08:29 But we don’t want to turn this around to how dare they and do they know what I’ve done for the Lord and so on and so forth.
08:37 We need to see that without the grace of God applied to our lives, no matter who we are, what we’ve done in our lives, we are doomed to produce bad fruit.
08:46 This grace is only upon us because of the cross, because Jesus died for us at Calvary. And when we believe on Jesus Christ, we’re saved and we’re born again, become new creatures, Amen.
08:56 And that the old things pass away, amen. Behold, all things become new, as the Bible says. We get the Holy Spirit living within us, but yet we’re still in these mortal bodies and we’re still needing our feet cleaned as Jesus cleaned the feet of the disciples.
09:09 We still need that sanctification. And Jesus lets those Pharisees know, and also to us, that words, even idle chatter, have grave consequences. So we need to look at this in the scope of the judgment and see, you know, what does it mean for our life?
09:27 And here’s the end, at kind of the middle point of the message, I’ll just give you the end right here.
09:28 And we’re going to tackle this in three messages, to be honest. But the end point here is we need to guard our words, and that means we need to get our heart right so we can guard our words. But firstly here, let’s picture the judgment day.
09:43 The lost will experience a full lack of control, a feeling of helplessness. You know, I kind of painted that picture earlier of the man that wanted to represent himself in court, right?
09:52 And then all of a sudden that plan is foiled and they kind of panic. You know, think about, you know, people, they want to be the captain of their own ship.
10:00 They reject the free gift of salvation offered through Christ. They are living at odds to a holy God. They were living in sin.
10:09 They were boastful of their sin. And they have no evidence in their mind to change, right? Like so the witness didn’t work, the preacher didn’t get through to them, they ignored the street preaching, they rolled up their windows, they took the track and they threw it out, on and on.
10:24 And they’re saying, I’m doing fine, I mean, my paycheck is still good, you know, my life is great and I’m doing what I want to do.
10:31 I can drink as much beer as I want, I can smoke this weed or do these drugs, I can cheat on my spouse, I can do this, I can go to the casino and gamble all night, I can steal some money and gamble.
10:41 I got away with it. See, they think they got away with it, right? And then the Pharisees thought they would get away with these idle words, right? But then what happens? They’re at the judgment.
10:53 And at the judgment, you know, we’re all going to face judgment, whether in front of God at the white throne judgment, that’s for unbelievers, or at the bema seat, which is for the believers where we will receive reward.
11:04 So believers, reward, unbelievers, judgment seat. The unbeliever, they’re going to feel a lack of control.
11:12 They’re going to feel a lack of control. You know, think about this. The religious people were the ones that Jesus was telling them that their words will be counted against them, that they’ve blasphemed the Holy Spirit, that that’s not forgivable.
11:25 Now, we can’t do that today because Jesus is not in the flesh, so we cannot look at Jesus and blaspheme the Holy Spirit, but they did do that. They were the religious crowd.
11:38 What does that say about them? What does that say about people today? We live in a society all about like moral, you know, relativism, and we all have our own truth and all these things, and so society says it’s okay, and you may think it’s okay, and everybody at the college campus thinks it’s okay, and God’s saying one day you’ll be judged for what you’re doing.
11:55 If we recognize it and we understand, as believers, I say we, as believers, speaking to the believers here, if we understand what this means, that we wouldn’t wish this on our worst enemy, that they will literally be shocked and appalled and terrified before a holy and righteous God,
12:12 then what should this inspire us to do? If not increase in our own faith how to walk with the Lord? You know, we need to live for God in a way that models Godly behavior.
12:24 You know, Jesus is speaking of the heart, right? Out of the heart comes these evil things, and out of the heart comes these good things. So if our heart is not right, then how can we be a witness to that lost person that will go to a real and literal hell and burn for ever and ever?
12:41 How can we witness to them if our heart is not right? We have to make sure that our heart is right with God, which means that we need to cleanse our hands to draw nigh to God.
12:51 We need to ask the Lord to forgive us our sins. We need to earnestly repent. Maybe there’s something held up in, you know, your heart, your mind, that you’ve been up to, that you’ve been sinning for a long time.
13:00 You haven’t brought it before God, friend. Make today, you know, if you’re in your car, maybe pull over. If you’re at home, maybe just stop what you’re doing and ask God to forgive you of that sin and recognize what that sin is and say, God, I recognize it.
13:12 I see it from your eyes. It’s awful. And I don’t ever, ever, ever want to do it again.
13:17 Lord, forgive me of this sin. Help me to never do it again. Now, that’s how you’re going to get close to God.
13:23 When you get right with God, you ask God to forgive you of your sins, Amen. And the Bible tells us he’s faithful and just to cleanse us from all our sins, from all unrighteousness, to cast them away in that sea of forgetfulness. But we’ve got to bring them before Him, Amen.
13:38 We don’t want to have any unconfessed sin in our life. We get repentant before God.
13:42 We’re close to God. We get into his word. We study his word.
13:47 And that will blossom into authentic evangelism. That’ll blossom into witnessing to others in a way that’s impactful, that’s not obnoxious to the point where they won’t tune you out, they won’t listen to anything. That’s not effective, is it? They will listen.
14:01 They will see you. Your walk with Christ will be something they desire. They’ll see the peace and joy that you have, and they’ll want to be part of it.
14:07 And then they may listen, and some will be saved. And some will be saved so gloriously you’ll see them in heaven, and you’ll know that you had a part in that,
14:18 that God used you to help save that individual so that they don’t have to go to hell, that they don’t have to be in hellfire forever. Tune in next time as we get to part two in this three-part series.
14:27 Thank you for listening. Take care. God bless and Amen.