-Transcript-
00:24
Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the Cafe.
00:32 Welcome to the program. Hopefully you’re having a wonderful day, a wonderful week. I’m here with some coffee.
00:36 I’ve got the sweatshirt on. I’m feeling pretty good here today. Just enjoying another day that God has given us and I’m sitting here getting into God’s Word.
00:45 I’m just excited about it. I hope you are too. We’re diving into God’s Word here at the Cafe.
00:51 We’re looking at God, the Heavenly Father, what that means. And what’s so cool about this, I love preaching about God’s love and I really love preaching about God’s specific love for us because you hear in church and maybe for a lack of time or whatever, you’ll hear that God is love or you’ll hear that God loves you so much and it’ll stop. It’ll just, you know, God loves you.
01:18 He loves you. He loves you. And okay, next thing.
01:23 Well, wait a minute. What do you mean God loves me? What do you mean? What does that mean? And I want to preface this message by saying God’s love for us is manifested most clearly in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. And when we accept Jesus Christ as Savior, then we can experience God’s love.
01:46 But if we haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as Savior, in fact, if we’ve rejected God’s free gift of salvation, then we will never experience God’s love as the way he intended for us to experience it. In fact, we’ll be headed for devil’s hell. Hell is real.
02:02 Heaven is real. God is real. Amen.
02:06 And we are faced with a choice and we must truly believe on the risen son of God. 1 Corinthians 15: 1-4, so clearly states it. I’m just going to go ahead and read it because it says it better than I could ever say it.
02:19 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, and I’m going to bring it up here. We’re going to use the King James version, of course. Okay.
02:31 All right. Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you have received and wherein you stand, by which also you’re saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.
02:52 And you can go on in 1 Corinthians 15, really beyond verse four, and then he was seen of Cephas in the 12, verse , and he was seen above 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, and on and on. So he was seen, it’s verified, this is what happened. And guess what? When we believe on Christ, and that we individually, us individually, needed a Savior.
03:19 Because you know, the Bible says, I believe it’s Romans 3:23, that all have sin and come short of the glory of God. A lot of people don’t believe that. A lot of people think, oh, I don’t have sin, I’m perfect.
03:28 I don’t have anything to repent for, I haven’t done anything wrong. And clearly you don’t understand sin, okay? That’s number one. Paul said he didn’t even know what sin was until he understood what coveting was.
03:37 And by the way, that’s a good one. If you don’t think you have a lot of sin in your life, look at coveting. The idea that we desire something that we don’t currently have.
03:45 That is within everybody. You know, anybody that goes to the mall or, you know, wherever, you know, the, how about for a guy, take a guy into a Bass Pro Shop or something, tell them they’re not going to covet a little bit. A good old country boy, or for the city boys, I don’t know where you take them, but the country boys take them into Bass Pro Shop or something.
04:07 Or if you’re in Smoky Mountains, Smoky Mountain Knife Works or something, you go in there and you say, oh, I desire this, I desire that. And that’s coveting, amen? We’ve all sinned, whether it’s coveting, whether it’s lusting after another, even by looking upon them, whether it’s lying, whether it’s any other manner of sin, you know, you go through the Bible and you realize that God being completely holy, his standard is beyond what we could even fathom and no matter what we do, we can’t uphold the law. We can’t, we can’t live sin-free, only one lives sin-free and that’s Christ, men?
04:40 And so we accept the fact that we’re a sinner and that we need a Savior and we believe on Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, then we’re saved.
04:46 And the reason why I want to mention that is number one, if anyone is not saved that’s listening today, please make today the day you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
04:56 You don’t have to do anything other than simply pray. If you’re in the car, you can pull over right now, whatever you’re doing, you can stop it just for a minute and just say, dear Lord, pray this prayer, dear Lord, please save me.
05:07 I believe that you died for my sins. I believe, Lord, that you were resurrected from the grave. Please come into my heart and save me and I will follow you.
05:16 I’ll make you Lord of my life in Jesus’ name, Amen. If you prayed that prayer, you’re saved. I’d love to know if you got saved, but it doesn’t matter as long as God knows.
05:26 And once you’re saved, all of these great things happen. Your name’s written down in the Lamb’s book of life, never to be blotted out or erased. That means that you will forever be in heaven with Jesus once you’re saved.
05:38 And all you had to do is believe. No works will save you, nothing else. There’s a great old hymn, weeping will not save you.
05:48 It’s awesome. And it’s all about how the works won’t save you, the weeping, nothing, nothing will save you other than faith. You just simply need to believe you’re justified by faith.
05:56 So you believe on Jesus, you get saved, you have eternal life, you get the Holy Spirit living within you. And then what happens? You have all these great things happen. Holy Spirit’s there now.
06:07 And now you become a son of God or a daughter of God. Now you are what’s called born again. And you say, well, brother Clark, why do I need to be born again? I was born some years ago.
06:19 Me, I was born in 1980. Figure that one out. I was born in 1980.
06:24 Okay. I’m 43. I’m 43.
06:22 All right. The time of recording, of course, you know, born in 1980. Well I was born in 1980 and the Bible would say I was dead to sin.
06:36 I was born spiritually dead. Now I didn’t choose to be born spiritually dead. I just happened to be related to someone that you’re related to as well.
06:47 And that’s Adam. I’m related to Adam and Eve. All humanity can be traced back to those two.
06:52 And they sinned in the Garden of Eden and sin has perpetuated or continued on ever since. The idea is it’s hereditary. It’s in our genes.
07:00 It’s in our blood. It’s in who we are. Paul was a sinner.
07:04 Abraham a sinner. King David a sinner. Everyone that’s ever lived on this earth besides Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior has sin in them.
07:11 And when they’re saved, when they believe on Christ as their Lord and Savior, all of a sudden they’re no longer in guilt for their sin because their sin debt has been paid. You think of like Saul before he became Paul, he sees Jesus on the road to Damascus. He’s blinded and then he gets his sight back again later on.
07:32 He as now has a new name and I believe a new heart. And I believe that is a picture of salvation is now he believed on Jesus. He has faith in him and now he is saved.
07:45 And we are the same way. The old man’s passed away. Behold, all things become new.
07:55 When we get saved, a lot of things change. And so whether you were saved today, even hearing this recording, whether you’ve been saved 50 years, it doesn’t matter. Once you’re saved, you’re always saved.
07:59 We believe in eternal security here, the cafe. And when you’re saved, now you have these glorious promises from God. And one of the promises is that he is your father, your heavenly father.
08:11 Because again, he is a creator of all, but he’s not the heavenly father. His role of father is for those that have been born again. 1 John 3:1 behold, what manner of love the father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.
08:28 Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. So 1 John 3:1 is telling us that it is a great love of the father, that we are His Amen. And that is what I love about, I love preaching on love.
08:45 No, I love preaching on God’s love because that is what we’re looking at is the idea of what does God’s love look like in the context of him being our heavenly father. And it is a beautiful, deep, deep love. It’s hard to even scratch the surface.
09:06 I preached before this message, I preached a 30 minute message on the same topic and I couldn’t even get past nearly halfway of the first point without, and I’m not, I don’t think I was being long winded. I think I was just simply trying to give a overview of what that looks like as the father loves the son or the daughter. Amen.
09:26 Any of you that have been saved, man or woman have this applied to you. It is a deep love and it’s a beautiful love. And as we see in 1 John 3, there’s a couple of things to see.
09:36 Number one, God’s love in adopting us into his great family, his holy family. We see that in 1 John 3. We also see in first John three signs that we are of God’s family.
09:47 Signs like not sinning, loving brothers and sisters, the spirit living within us. Not like never sinning, but not desiring to sin. How about that? Being convicted of our sin.
09:57 And we see also this theme in 1 John 3, the world won’t accept or understand who we are since we’re no longer part of it. And that is the crux of the messages that we’re going to do this week. We’ll do, I believe all five parts.10:12
10:14 So this is the first part, but we’ll have four more parts here covering this great truth. Amen. And so let’s just get right after it here in the time we have left and we’ll pick up where we left off in the next episode.
10:24 You know, who are the sons of God or who are the sons and daughters of God? The idea of a son or a daughter, and I’m going to say son a lot, but just understand I mean both. Okay. In this context.
10:36 You know, what does it mean? I’m a dad. Amen. I’ve got kids as young as five, as old as 17 in the house.
10:46 So I’m a dad. I’ve got, I’ve got the scars to prove it. Amen.
10:50 Or I should say the gray hair is to prove it. Amen. And I promise I won’t make too many teenager jokes, but oh, it’s been fun raising that teenager.
10:55 That’s a special time. That’s a special time. Oh my goodness.
11:03 Look, all the ages are, are, are really interesting to parent. And it’s been a joy. I would say it’s probably been the joy of my life.
11:07 I mean, that’s a deeper kind of a earthly life. I should say the joy of all life is to be saved, but here on earth, in terms of what I’ve done, that would be my biggest accomplishment is simply just being a dad to two boys and a girl. And I know the characteristics.
11:25 Now I’m not an expert, but I know that, you know, for example, as a dad, I am the caretaker to my children. So my youngest, he was taking a shower and he said, dad, dry me off when he got out. And I said, no, you dry yourself off.
11:42 And he said, no, I need you to drive me off. And we went through this thing for like 10 minutes. Now he is finally taking a shower on his own.
11:52 We praise God for that. Okay. Daddy used to give, you know, or mommy used to give him showers before, but he’s taking a shower on his own.
11:58 But as his caretaker, number one, he’s dependent upon me. So he’s looking to me for me to do this for him. But then I’m looking to him to grow up a little bit and learn to do it himself because it’s time, right? It’s you just kind of know, okay, it’s time to go ahead and wrap this up.
12:13 Probably all the other nearly six-year-olds are tallying off on their own now. It’s time for you to get to it. Well, I’m the caretaker.
12:21 And so number one, I’m there for him, but then number two, I’m also letting him grow. Now let’s look at God in that context. Is he not the caretaker? So number one, we should be dependent upon him.
12:34 A lot of this deals with dependency, going to God for all our needs, right? But then also to understanding that sometimes he’ll leave us there to do something on our own so that we can grow.
12:45 You know, we may have to go through something to just help us grow that we may not fully understand, but we know that God is right there. So like CJ, my son was in the other room, say two rooms away, but I was within, I don’t know, 50 feet of him.
13:01 And that’s how God is. Even when we are growing, he is not far. He is our caretaker and he is near.
13:08 And so while we’re growing, he is still right there to help us. And God, I believe, wants us to look to him as our provider, as our caretaker. I mean, not only that, but, you know, think of my child.
13:23 I’m responsible for my child, right? We went to the library the other day and the book, the librarian came out and said, oh, our library is closed. The heater is broken. Now, the librarian knows we’re in the children’s library section.
13:38 She knows the kids are there. She knows the kids, that’s for the kids. She’s not telling the kids that the library is closed.
13:44 She’s approaching me and telling me why, because I’m responsible for them, right? I am the responsible one. And so I tell the kids, okay. And she was very generous.
13:53 We were able to get, grab a couple of books real quick for homeschool. And then we were on our way, but I’m the responsible one. Well, we need to look at God, the father in that same light.
14:02 And I believe he wants us to hold him accountable that he is the responsible for us. Once we’re saved, once we’re born again, we are his, amen. And we can take peace and rest in knowing that he will never forsake us.
14:16 He will never leave us. There is so much to this. And for time’s sake, we’re going to have to stop here.
14:22 But please tune in next time. Tune in all this week as we look at God’s great love through him being our heavenly father. Thank you so much for listening.
14:29 Take care. God bless. Amen.