-Transcript-
00:40 Amen, glory to God. Welcome to the cafe. Welcome to the program.
00:45 We’re here discussing the overcoming life. Doesn’t it sound great to be an overcomer? You know, think of all the obstacles that you face in life and those that you’ve overcome.
00:55 Is that not oftentimes your most joyous occasion to overcome those? The just happiest time in your life when you overcome obstacles.
01:04 Think of a college graduation and it’s so hard to get through all those classes and you finally do. It’s like, whoo, it’s celebrating or the big game and you’ve worked so hard and practiced so hard and you get to play in the big game and you win and it’s there’s nothing like it. Amen.
01:22 And the overcoming life is similar to that in the sense that we rejoice over having victory in this world but it’s sobering in the sense that it’s very hard to overcome this world.
01:37 That many, sadly, even those that call themselves Christian are not overcoming in this world. And so today we’re going to continue our series of the overcoming life.
01:46 If for those keeping track, we’re on part five. We’re gonna be going for a while here on the overcoming life because frankly the Bible has a lot to say about the overcoming life. The battle to be an overcomer means you must be in some kind of battle.
01:59 You can’t overcome if there are no obstacles. So the battle is raging and Christians are fighting it each and every day and these obstacles that they’re facing, they’re temptations.
02:08 So to be an overcomer, simply put, and I wrote it here very simply if I can find it in my outline, to be an overcomer simply put means to follow and believe in Christ and resist the temptations of this world.
02:23 Not perfect, not sinless, but be obedient to God in his ways. Right? That’s what an overcomer is. A follower and believer in Christ who resists the temptations of this world.
02:36 Not perfect, not sinless, that’s Christ, no one else, but obedient to God in his ways. Why is God’s plan this way? I mean I spent earlier episodes talking about how God can’t tempt us, only Satan can tempt us, but God will allow us to be tempted. God allowed Jesus to be tempted in the wilderness.
02:53 So why would God do that? Well it shows our love toward him when we overcome these temptations and his power over evil. And conversely, it shows how fickle most Christians are when they don’t even try to put up a fight against temptation
03:12 and they don’t even turn to God because they don’t have faith in him to have power over the evil. And so we see here a twofold story kind of working itself out, unfolding here on earth over the centuries and decades that we’ve been here on earth.
03:29 The several thousand years, amen, since Christ died on the cross for our sins, was buried and resurrected from the grave. We’re here, we’re in the age of grace, the church age, amen.
03:47 We’re part of, I believe, the Laodicean church age, the great falling away, but nonetheless the church age, where we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and Jesus Christ alone.
03:52 And so we’re in an age where churches are preaching, believe on Jesus, get baptized in the parking lot, get a t-shirt, go on with your life. Well, okay, you could do that.
04:03 Let’s see, how quickly will Satan come in and tempt you into some kind of evil? I’ll never forget a baseball special I saw about a pitcher who talked about how he went to a meeting,
04:17 like it was like a gospel presentation or something, and he said immediately after that meeting he went out drinking with the guys, like really, really hardcore drinking, because he said that’s what they did when any kind of Christian evangelism came their way.
04:31 They rebelled. It’s interesting, you know, what fuels that rebellion? Like what inside of you makes you want to rebel harder when someone’s telling you that Jesus loves you and died for your sins?
04:39 And so eventually he gets saved and it’s a great testimony. I wish I remember his name, but I don’t.
04:45 But what we see here is that a lot of Christians, or people that call themselves Christians, have no idea what it means to be Christlike. And the church, if they are preaching a message that being a Christian is easy or simple or does not deal with suffering, then they’re preaching a false gospel, amen.
05:04 To be Christlike means to suffer like Christ. How can we say we want to have glory with Christ and live like the world down here? Christ didn’t live like the world.
05:14 People will say, well, he was friends with sinners. He was a friend to sinners by telling them the truth. He didn’t tell Zacchaeus, keep robbing people.
05:28 Zacchaeus was convicted and said, I’m gonna make people whole manyfold, two-threefold. I’m gonna make them whole. You see? He didn’t tell the lame person at the pool of Bethesda, hey, go sin some more.
05:43 He said, go and sin no more lest a worse thing happen to you, right? So Christ helped heal and helped others understand that they should live such a life where they love their enemies and they pray for those that despitefully use them and they love their neighbor
06:01 and they give sacrificially and they give charitably and they have a deep love. And I’ve heard a preacher say that to lust is to take and to love is to give, and so to have that giving sort of love, that agape love, yes, that is to be Christlike. And Christ greatly suffered.
06:20 John 6:66 tells us how Jesus explained some harder things of God that they needed to live like him and drink of his blood and eat of his flesh and many walked and followed him no more.
06:32 Many didn’t follow him. Isn’t that number interesting? 666, when many decided not to follow him.
06:38 And many today don’t want to hear a message like this. They don’t want to hear some fundamental preacher telling them that Christianity is difficult, that suffering is inevitable, that we need to take up our cross and resist temptation,
06:50 that we shouldn’t look anything like the world, that if we are not for God we’re against him, amen, that we should be a light shining on a hill, amen, and what that means is to be a separate people, to be a peculiar people, amen. Suffering on earth, rewards in heaven, that’s what it means.
07:05 We are not to look for great gain here on earth personally, amen, we are not to look for great prosperity personally, but we are to suffer here, suffer well, and obtain great rewards in heaven.
07:22 And by the way, we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, so we’re not under the law. We are born of God when we’re born again, so this text verse is for believers, it’s for the born again, and it is for our good.
07:34 But we need to be aware of what temptations are coming our way. Think about this, we are born of God and not of this world, so the battle has to be fought with God’s help.
07:47 The battleground is this world, and specifically the battle we face is with temptation, and temptation simply means lusts.
07:54 They come from the devil, and God will not tempt, the devil is the one tempting. And these lusts typically fall into about five categories, money and security, financial security, sexual desires, food, drink, and drugs, power, pride, fame, status, and vanity,
08:13 and I know of those five you can probably condense them down to three or so, but these are kind of the things that people typically are tempted with, the common denominator being quick gratification, right? And you could take that down the list.
08:29 Money, what is quick gratification? Winning the lottery, betting it all at the casino, pyramid scheme, some kind of get-rich-quick scheme, stealing a bunch of money.
08:47 So money, the quick gratification would be something not right, not orderly, not moderate, amen, not of God. Sexual desires, again, quick gratification would be fornication or adultery, things where you’re thinking you can do something outside of God’s design. Also homosexuality would be another one.
09:00 Food would be eating too much. Gluttony. Drink would be a drunkard.
09:07 Drugs would be taking drugs, amen, that’s pretty clear. Power would be abusing power, thirsting after power, being corrupt in power, on and on. Pride, fame, status, vanity would be living as improper use, living as God had not intended you, lifting yourself up, lifting your name up, all of the ego stuff, all of the desires of wanting to be lifted up, popular, looked at, loved, and worshipped, essentially.
09:34 And so those are the temptations the devil will stick right in front of you. And let’s see, which one did I not give an example for? Power, I said someone living corruptly. Pride, fame, status, again, would be doing things just to make your name known, doing things that doesn’t give God the glory.
09:53 Maybe God delivered you out of a situation and you try to take credit. Maybe God gave you a certain talent or skill and you try to pretend like you did something. And you see that so much where God has blessed people with unique skills and talents, and they take all the glory for themselves.
10:06 That would be an example of that. And so we see here, that is the world we’re living in today. And they have real, it’s real implications here of these temptations we deal with.
10:15 And how we become an overcomer? It’s only by the grace of God. And the idea is overcoming in the end. Enduring today, the idea of endurance, right? All the way to the finish.
10:30 You think of an endurance runner. What is that? Who is that? Who’s an endurance runner? Someone running a long distance, right? Well, we are in a race and it’s not a sprint. And so we may be able to avoid temptation today.
10:37 And the devil says, that’s fine. I’ll tempt you tomorrow. We’ll see if you can avoid that.
10:40 And you say, well, how do you avoid temptation? Well, overcoming starts with, number one, realizing there’s great reward in heaven for the overcomer. So God isn’t saying do this forever for no reward. God’s saying I’m gonna give you a reward.
10:55 If you have faith, you’re gonna have a great reward in heaven. And then secondly here, it doesn’t come from you alone, but it comes from God in you. It’s not you doing something.
11:07 It’s God doing something through you. 1 John 4:4, year of God, little children and have overcome them because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. I remind myself all the time of that.
11:15 1 John 5.5, who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God. So those that are believers in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as the Messiah, as your Lord and Savior, those alone, the saved alone, are the ones that can overcome.
11:38 And they overcome not by what they can do, but by what the Holy Spirit can do within them.
11:43 And these verses help us understand that if you have not been saved, you can’t overcome temptation because you don’t have the Holy Spirit living within you. You can’t even discern the temptation is there, amen.
11:46 The Bible talks about woe unto them that call evil good and good evil. And yet everywhere we look, people are calling good evil and evil good, right? And so they don’t even know.
11:57 They can’t even discern the sin in their life. And so the Spirit helps us discern it, helps condemn the world of the sin, and helps us fight that temptation. It’s God in us that is greater than our enemy, the devil.
12:09 We’re no match for the devil, and nobody is, amen, but God. God is sovereign. God is superior over the devil.
12:16 And you guess what? You have God living within you when you’re saved, and he can overcome the devil and his temptations. So then shouldn’t we want to work to strengthen the Spirit, not grieve the Spirit?
12:25 Faith in Jesus means being an overcomer. So the idea is like, hey, let’s believe on the Lord, and let’s believe on the Lord living within us to overcome these obstacles, which means that we need to study our Bibles.
12:39 We need to saturate our life with biblical teaching and preaching and biblical songs and biblical fellowship and all the things that go along with God’s Word and who he is, amen.
12:49 When Satan tempted Jesus Christ himself in the wilderness from Matthew 4, what did Christ do? He quoted Scripture. He quoted God’s Word. If it was good enough for Christ, it should be good enough for us.
12:59 We need to stay in the Word, and the Word will help protect us and strengthen us and give us discernment over these temptations and keep us in a right mind so that we’re not yoked up with this world and convinced of some perversion and then give in to the temptation.
13:14 Think about it. If you have an app on your phone and you’re constantly watching videos and people are doing drugs in these videos over and over again or rapping about it or whatever it is, and you’re listening to these songs over and over again about doing drugs, you’re more likely to do drugs because they’re all talking about it and doing it and so on, or you’re hanging around a group that’s doing it and so forth.
13:32 But if you’re in your Bible day in and day out and you’re praying to God and you’re seeking the Lord, I believe the Lord won’t even allow you to be tempted by that. And if you were tempted by it, you would know exactly what it is, and you would turn and run from it, amen.
13:42 When we have Jesus Christ in our life, we can overcome, and we should overcome, and we don’t even have to have fear, which is what I’ll get to in our next episode. But for time’s sake, I have to wrap up here today.
13:56 Trust me better yet than from trusting me. Trust the Lord. Get into his word.
14:02 Seek his ways to overcome the devil and his temptations in this world so that you could overcome this world and have great reward in heaven. I thank you so much for listening today.
14:10 Tune in next time as we get to more great truths from God’s word.
14:15 Take care, God bless, and amen.