-Transcript-
00:25 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:30 Welcome to the Cafe. Pastor Clark Covington here with another message here on KJV Cafe. Thank you again for joining us.
00:36 Thank you so much for supporting us. If you haven’t, visit kjvcafe.com. That’s our website. A little bit more about our program.
00:42 It’s got links to our YouTube channel, all kinds of stuff on there, so check that out. Or facebook.com forward slash kjvcafe. Keep up with us trying to do more online in this new year.
00:52 I’ve been saying that. I think I said it last year too. I didn’t do too much with it, but we’re trying to do more online.
00:58 So check us out if you can. And again, thank you so much for listening. This series here is on Jesus, the Great Physician.
01:05 He is the Great Physician. Oh, how good Jesus is. I’m telling you, just preaching on this here, just recording these messages, it lifts my heart.
01:16 It lifts a burden off of my shoulders to think on Jesus Christ, my Savior and Lord. Is he your Savior and Lord today?
01:23 Mark 2:17. When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, they that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.
01:32 I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. So Jesus here is saying, you know, he came to call sinners to repentance. Look, sinners, that’s me.
01:40 That’s you. Okay, that’s all of us. Amen.
01:43 How about Romans 3:23? For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. We all need Jesus.
01:52 And so the Great Physician, first and foremost, is our Savior and Lord. He’s our Savior. And I want you to think about this.
02:01 You know, the Bible says to work our salvation out with fear and trembling. Think about this. If you were living in a sinful, you know, you realize your sin nature, okay, maybe you didn’t do anything wrong.
02:13 Like you didn’t steal, you didn’t lie, but you realize, you know what, the more you thought about it, yeah, you’re not, you know. You have selfish desires and, you know, you lust after somebody or you’re coveting, you know, think about coveting.
02:28 Paul wrote that he didn’t understand, or he didn’t sin, he didn’t know that he had sinned until he knew what coveting was.
02:34 Look at a coveting. You covet someone’s house, their boat, their job, their spouse, on and on, coveting. Whatever the sin is, you start realizing that you can’t resolve it on your own.
02:44 That’s the first step. Understanding our sin nature is the first step, I believe, to salvation. Because it’s difficult to understand that.
02:52 But once we understand our need for a savior and that he is so loving and kind and he wants to save us, then we can be saved. We can accept his free gift of salvation. We can understand what Christ did on the cross.
03:05 The Bible word would be atonement or the substitutionary death. That Jesus took our sin, him being perfect, right? Born of a virgin, 33 and a half years, never sinned, never, ever, not once. He was perfect.
03:16 He’s God in the flesh, okay? Teaching in the temple at a young age and all these things, healing and all the miracles that he did.
03:30 The Bible says that if it was written, everything that he did, all the books in the world couldn’t contain it. And I believe that.
03:30 God in the flesh. Can you imagine what he did? 33 and a half years. So he goes to the cross as punishment?
03:37 He goes to the cross for something that he did? He goes to the cross because he couldn’t like get out of it? No, friend.
03:49 He went to the cross for you. He went to the cross for me. Jesus Christ died on that cross at Calvary so that we could have everlasting life when we believe on him.
04:00 And what that means is he took our sin debt, our sin nature onto him. And so that when he went to the cross, it was imputed on him, our sin nature. He had no sin.
04:13 He’s the perfect, spotless, sinless lamb. He dies on the cross for our sin. Now, when we believe on his free gift of salvation, we’re now saved.
04:21 We’re now no longer under the sin curse. We’re no longer under the bondage of sin. What does it mean to be in bondage? It means to be kind of in jail, you know, locked up.
04:32 No, now we are a bond slave to a whole new life. We’re now bond slave or bondsman or prisoners of Christ. We’ve been bought by his blood.
04:42 We are now his, amen. And he is ours. And he is the great physician because without him, we could not have that.
04:52 We can’t earn our way into heaven. Our good works, people say, oh, I’m trying to do the best I can. Our good works are viewed by God as filthy rags.
05:02 I think it’s the book of Isaiah. Like literally the translation is like dirty gauze pads. That’s what God thinks of our good works.
05:08 You know, if we go before the judgment seat, amen, there’s, you know, there’s two judgments. There’s the white throne judgment for the unbeliever and there’s the Bema seat or the rewards for the believer.
05:22 But if we go with the white throne judgment in front of a fearful God and we say, well, you know, we gave to UNICEF and we helped somebody cross the street and we try to be a good neighbor.
05:29 God will say that’s completely insufficient. Here is my standard. Here’s your sin and you will not get into my heaven with your sin.
05:39 And that will result in hell. And what God and people are saying, well, that’s not fair. Well, what did God do? He sent Jesus Christ to die for your sins.
05:52 So all you have to do is accept that free gift of salvation. Now that takes belief. Amen.
05:53 If someone knocked on your door and said, I want to change your life and I want to give you something that’s going to change your life. You still have to go ahead and accept it and you may be cynical
06:03 and you may not have belief or you may realize, okay, if I accept this, it’s going to change my life, but I won’t have control. Right? You don’t want to give up control and all these things get in the way, but it’s very easy to accept it.
06:15 We don’t have to do it. All we have to do is believe. Amen.
06:18 And that’s why we have to have that childlike faith. You know, I’ve got little kids, I’ve got a five year old and a six year old. You tell them, you know, go get daddy’s phone on his desk.
06:28 You know, they don’t say, oh, is it really on the desk and do you really need your phone? They just go and get the phone.
06:35 They just believe dad that the phone is on the desk, right? You know? Okay. And they’re happy to do it.
06:41 That’s the beauty of five or six. We’ve got a teenager here too and he’s 17 and he doesn’t, yeah, I mean, he’ll do it, but he may do it begrudgingly, but, um, but he’s a good kid too. He’s a really good kid.
06:50 And all three of them are, and that childlike faith, and you know, by the way, he’s very innocent for 17 and he kind of same thing, you know, you tell him something, he’s, oh, okay.
07:00 You know, that childlike faith is what God wants us to have. And when we have that, he’ll heal us.
07:05 He’ll, he’ll resolve that sin nature in us. Amen. He’ll give us a new, he’ll make us a new creature.
07:11 He’ll give us that Holy Spirit living within us. Amen. And by the way, that’s God.
07:19 If you look at God, he’s in three parts, God, the father, God, the son, and God, the spirit, the Holy Spirit. So we have God living within us. We have the third part of the Holy Trinity living within us.
07:24 That’s when Paul, he’s writing about how our body is a temple. It’s like, you know, it’s the whole, God is within us. Don’t you realize, you know, you’re bought with a price and so forth because God is there.
07:38 Amen. So we don’t want to defile that temple because God is in us. He’s living in us.
07:41 We are literally reconciled to God and we have God within when we’re saved. And that’s, you know, I’ve heard saints of God talk about how you get around other believers. You don’t know them at all.
07:51 You’ve never been around them before. And within minutes, it’s like you’re great friends. What is that? Well, that’s the Holy Spirit.
07:57 Amen. You have the Holy Spirit. They have the Holy Spirit and there’s joy there.
08:07 I’ve seen that in my travels in the ministry, as I’ve been able to travel to other churches or even with a radio program or working with other people that are believers.
08:10 There’s that level there that you just can’t describe. And what that is, is we’ve been healed.
08:16 We’ve been saved. We’ve been reconciled to God. We have peace with God through Jesus Christ.
08:21 And then we also have promises. So he’s a great healer in that not only can he and will he save us and desires to save all.
08:28 The Bible says that the Lord desires all to be saved, all to come to repentance, all, A-L-L, everybody.
08:34 And then he’ll also give us promises.Psalm 147:3, he healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds. And you can take this verse a lot of ways, but how about the fact that,
08:48 look, he gives us promises that are uniquely ours, that are given exclusively by him, that when we realize what they mean, we realize that a lot of our worry and our care, that we are to cast aside.
09:03 The Lord doesn’t want us to be anxious. The Lord doesn’t want us to be afraid. How many times in the Bible does the Bible say, do not fear?
09:12 The Bible, I think it’s in Thessalonians, says pray without ceasing, right? We are to pray without ceasing.
09:14 We are to cast all our cares upon him for he careth for us, for you, all of these things. There’s a hope in a bright future that only comes from God.
09:26 And one other thing I want you to think about as the great physician, Jesus Christ, he’s our keeper, John 10:29, my father, which gave them me is greater than all.
09:36 And no man is able to pluck them out of my father’s hand. See, we are saved, right? By what Christ did on the cross. Now who gave us to Christ? Because we are the bride of Christ, right?
09:50 So who gave us to Christ? Those that are believers, those that have been saved, that’s God, the father.
09:57 And so what Jesus is saying here is my father, which gave them to me is greater than all. And no man is able to pluck them out of my father’s hand. We have security with the Lord.
10:06 We are helped and healed by the eternal security we have in Jesus Christ because we see the whole Trinity at work here. We’re saved. We have the Holy Spirit living within us.
10:17 We have the great mediator, Jesus Christ, that saved us by his finished work at the cross. He’s at the right hand of the father. And then we have the father which gave us to him.
10:25 And nobody can interfere with that. No force in this life can take us from God. And what does that speak to? As our great physician, he has ultimate sovereignty.
10:36 God is superior. And so we look around this world and we see all this chaos and all these problems and we say, how can God be superior if this is happening?
10:47 Well, we don’t have the mind of God and we don’t know, but there’s a lot of ways that you can start looking at it. I mean, think about this.
10:55 You have a politician and he’s wicked, right? And he keeps getting reelected. And you say, who on earth? Okay. Why doesn’t God just strike down this wicked reprobate heretic? Okay.
11:05 It’s perverting Christianity and all these things for gain. Well, maybe God’s saying, I’m going to let all those people that voted for him get repaid with his wicked leadership. Okay.
11:16 I don’t know. Or maybe God’s saying, I’m going to judge the world in a week and it doesn’t matter. Or maybe God’s saying something else.
11:28 We, the Bible says that his ways are higher than our ways. Like the heavens are from the earth. We can’t reach his ways.
11:32 We don’t have his intellect, but what we do have is his promise that he won’t let anyone take us from him and that he is sovereign, he’s superior.
11:37 And so we realize that all of these things that seem out of order, that seem chaotic are actually working for our good. I heard, I think it was Alistair Begg preach a message on Esther,
11:51 I think it was, and how chaotic things looked in Esther’s time before all of the wrongs were made right by the king in that situation.
12:02 I mean, at one point it looked like it was going to be genocide against the Jews and there was all this chaos and people were wondering, I’m sure, where is God? Where is God?
12:10 But then it was all made right and everything was good, amen, and as it should be and judgment came through. And what we can see in that example that I’ve borrowed here is what we can see is that in everything that we see in the world today,
12:24 God’s hand is still at work and that we can trust God, that he has our best interests in mind, those that love him, those that love the Lord. I mean, you can go through Jeremiah and talk about having an expected end.
12:36 That scripture was written when the Jews were held captive in Babylon and Jeremiah is saying, don’t worry, even though you’re in a very bad place, God has peaceful end for you, an expected end for you, it’s going to be okay.
12:47 We think of Romans 8:28, that all things work together for good to those that love the Lord, that those that are called according to his purpose, we realize that God has a plan and that he is the great healer and the great physician,
12:57 and that he actually can provide peace in the midst of the storm, that his plans are set in stone and we, the saved, are forever part of them, no matter what happens in the flesh,
13:09 we are forever going to be with God. You hear preachers preach on the saved, amen, what happens when the saved, you know, go astray, God will take them home early, right?
13:17 Doesn’t mean that God’s casting them away, right? No matter what, we are going to be with God, I believe that.
13:26 And so what should that do? That should give us peace in the midst of a very tumultuous world. That should give us purpose to serve God and to live for him because he truly is the great physician.
13:34 That should give us a priority to seek him first, not saying I’m going to go to the world for the first 10 attempts at resolving this health problem and then I’m going to go to God,
13:45 I’m going to go to God first, and then as Godinforms and guides and leads, then I’ll go to where he guides, but that’s the point is making God a priority in our life.
13:56 As I mentioned in the beginning of this message, my wife’s having surgery tomorrow and it’s in God’s hands. We’ve committed it to God’s hands. We have a prayer meeting tonight.
14:02 We’re going to commit it to God’s hands. We’re to commit that to God’s hands and I’m going to trust the Lord to guide the doctor’s hands and trust the Lord to be there for my wife because I can’t, I’m not a doctor, so, but he is.
14:15 God, Jesus Christ is the great physician and if you’ll trust him, he will do great and mighty things in your life.
14:23 He will work miracles in your life and he’ll heal that broken heart. Thank you for listening.
14:28 Tune in next time. Take care. God bless and amen. T