-Transcript-
00:24 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:28 Welcome to the Cafe. Glad you’re joining me here today. Thank you for joining me.
00:33 Hopefully you’re in a cafe kind of mood. Maybe it’s a little cooler weather out there. Got myself a big cup of Sumatra coffee from Pigsaw Roasters, local roasters.
00:44 Pisca. I said Pigsaw. Pisca.
00:47 Pisca. Man, that’s some good stuff. I’m telling you, it’s good.
00:51 Smooth. They said low in acid. I think it is.
00:55 Amen. I’m enjoying it. So I got me a coffee here.
00:58 And most importantly, I got God’s Word here. I’m going to share God’s Word with you today. You’ll be blessed by this.
01:03 Mountaintop or Valley, God is always with us. Here’s a very simple message here today. I want you to know that God is always with you.
01:11 Oh, he won’t leave you. If you’ve been saved, if you’ve accepted Christ as Savior, trust that you have the Holy Spirit living within you. Some people, they worry, they say, oh, I’ve sinned.
01:23 God’s going to leave me. No, no, he won’t leave you. Oh, I’ve not lived up to what God’s called me to be.
01:31 Well, he’s not going to leave you. Oh, I’ve fallen short of my calling or what, what Lord had me to do. Or I didn’t sing that great on Sunday or I didn’t preach that good or I didn’t teach that good or I missed church.
01:45 God will never leave you. And you know what? He really does show up in the hard times.Hebrews 13:5, let your conversation be without covetousness and be content with such things as you have.
02:02 For he has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. Let your conversation be without covetousness. We aren’t to covet.
02:10 Amen. And that goes deep, goes deep, coveting, not just coveting material things, but a lot of other things. But we’re to be content with what we have because what we have is Jesus.
02:23 And he says he will never leave us or forsake us. And again, I’m speaking to the believer here today. If you haven’t been saved to make it your number one priority, number one on your list of things to do to be saved today.
02:35 Tomorrow’s not promised friend to be saved today. I’m speaking to the believer. I would hate if someone heard me preach this and thought, oh, this applies to everyone.
02:42 No, this applies to those that believe on the precious blood of Jesus Christ for salvation. And when you trust Jesus to be saved, then that blood is applied to you.
02:52 And then when God sees you, the Bible says you’re reconciled to God because when he sees you, he actually just sees the blood of Christ, his beloved Jesus.
03:03 And so Christ’s righteousness is applied to us. And we understand the Bible says there’s no condemnation to those that love the Lord, to those that are called according to his purpose.
03:11 All things work together for good, Romans 8:28, a very similar verse.
03:16 We know that God loves us, has a good plan for us. There’s all kinds of promises we can hold on to. But we only can hold on to those if we individually, each person has been saved.
03:27 And to be saved, we must trust Christ as Savior. You say, Brother Clark, I was baptized as a child. That doesn’t mean you’re saved.
03:32 Brother Clark, I’ve been going to church for a long time. It doesn’t mean you’re saved. Brother Clark, I serve in the church.
03:41 It doesn’t mean you’re saved. Brother Clark, I got baptized in a parking lot at a big church. It doesn’t mean you’re saved.
03:46 To be saved is a personal relationship with Jesus. And it goes back to Romans 3:23, understanding that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
03:51 We all fail, basically, okay? In life, we’ve all failed to be righteous enough to be acceptable to God.
03:59 And that started with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Sin is hereditary from generation to generation passed down. We’ve all failed.
04:06 We’re all sinners. We all fall short. And when we acknowledge individually that we have sin that we cannot reconcile, then we can go somewhere.
04:15 Then we can say, okay, God, what will you do? And then we get into the letter books of Romans.
04:22 But God commended his love toward us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us so that we could be saved. Amen.
04:29 While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That’s past tense. It’s already been done.
04:35 That’s why the preachers say it’s the finished work on the cross. It’s already been done. So when we trust Christ as Savior, we believe on his death, burial, and resurrection for our salvation.
04:45 When we believe in what Christ did at the cross of Calvary, we’re saved. And once we’re saved, we know that God will never leave us. Amen.
04:50 That we have all these promises we can cling to, like Hebrews 13:5. And Paul is always writing to the believer, as I understand it. And I believe Paul wrote Hebrews.
04:58 So the question is, for the saved Christian, where are you today in life? You know, yesterday, I was driving up the mountain.
05:09 And I say yesterday, it was actually two days ago. I’m getting my days twisted up here. Two days ago, I was driving up the mountain.
05:17 I was going to Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is just an absolutely stunning place. I had never been there. I’d never been to Blue Ridge, Georgia.
05:22 I’ve been to the Tennessee Smoky Mountains more times than I can count. We live here in the foothills of Kings Mountain. We’re not but less than an hour from South Mountain, a little over an hour to Hendersonville and not far from Asheville and on and on.
05:35 But I’d never been to Blue Ridge, Georgia. And I could not believe just how beautiful it was. And on my way there, I drove through Helen.
05:42 That’s that town that kind of looks like a little German town. And then after I left Helen on my way to Blue Ridge, Georgia, I went through a kind of a national park type thing with a mountain that had a lot of twists and turns. As you drove up that mountain, there was no rest stops.
06:00 There was no gas stations. There was no really even shoulder to the road. It was just a road going through a park up a mountain, essentially, on the way to Blue Ridge.
06:07 And, you know, it was funny. There was a lot of twists and turns on that road. But I really believe the Lord was with me.
06:14 I had a good time with the Lord, fellowship with the Lord, prayer, you know, singing songs a little bit here and there to the Lord and listening to some preaching myself and just good time with the Lord.
06:27 I believe that as I went up that mountain, the Lord was with me. And, you know, I got to the top of the mountain and it was beautiful.
06:34 I’m talking about gorgeous. And I parked my car and I hopped out and looked around and I could just see, I mean, elevation where I got to was called Hogpen Gap. OK, and I looked this up.
06:47 The elevation is something like three thousand, three thousand five hundred feet, which is pretty crazy. I think we’re at about a thousand feet here in Kings Mountain. And where I used to live in Columbia, it’s like a couple hundred feet.
06:57 So three thousand feet elevation. The clouds look like they’re almost on top of you. And just so you can see from miles and miles away, you see the mountain peaks like you’re on one because you kind of are.
07:10 It is just spectacular up there. Crisp air. And God was there.
07:14 I just remember thanking God. And I remember, you know, God’s presence being with me. And then on the way down that mountain, as I went down and twist and turn, and I was right there by the river.
07:24 I saw a deer as I got lower and lower to to kind of ground level. I saw a deer buck kind of running through the water there. It was so deep.
07:36 All I saw was horns. It looked like horns were floating. Deer horns were floating in the water.
07:41 But that deer rose out of that water, out of that rapid river, rose out, headed to the other side. And I drove by and just couldn’t believe it.
07:48 Even at the end, I parked there at the foot of the mountain and grabbed some of that river water that just blew amazing water and just splashed it on my face.
07:58 I woke up. I said, I needed that. That’s some good stuff right there.
08:03 And I praised God at the foot of the mountain. And I said to myself, you know, the same God that was with me on the way up the mountain, the same God that was with me at the top of the mountain, the same God that was with me on the way down the mountain. He’s down here in the valley with me.
08:14 And if you keep driving, matter of fact, if you drive, I have to get to Blue Ridge. If you drive the other way back towards North Carolina, go through Murphy, North Carolina and some other areas there near Cherokee. And you really do feel like you’re in the valley.
08:27 There’s mountains surrounding you everywhere. And guess what? God was with me there. The peace of God was with me there.
08:32 That peace that surpasses all understanding was with me there. And it’s not just me. It’s for all believers.
08:37 Amen. We need to cling to that promise that no matter where we are in life, whether we are clawing up the mountain, whether we are on a mountaintop where everything is going great,
08:48 whether we are kind of on our way down for some reason downhill, whether we are in the valley and just everything is just in front of us and there’s all these obstacles wherever we are.
08:55 We need to cling to that promise that God will never leave us nor forsake us.
09:00 And that needs to be enough for us. That needs to be enough for us. You’ll think about that.
09:05 So many people, they want more than God’s promise, right? And we have to just take by faith. We have to believe that God is who he says he is and a rewarder of them that diligently seek him to paraphrase Hebrews 11:6.
09:18 So firstly here, let’s think about taking control because the idea is, and again, going up the mountain or being on top of the mountain can be very nerve wracking, even going down, you know, especially if you’re on a bike or you were hiking, it could be very nerve wracking.
09:30 And so we need to take control as we go through these different seasons of life.
09:36 What can we control? You know, we can’t control the weather. We can’t control our circumstances. There’s a lot of things we cannot control.
09:46 And I’ve seen that so much in my life this year alone for good and bad. There’s things that we just can’t control. My wife has to have emergency surgery.
09:56 I was hoping she wouldn’t have to have surgery. And now she’s gonna have emergency surgery. I can’t control that.
10:02 But God’s in control. And so I have to trust him, right? It’s for her thyroid and she should be fine. We definitely would covet your prayers.
10:09 And you’d be praying for my wife, Sue. It’s for her thyroid. But, you know, we don’t control those things.
10:16 You know, you can’t control whatever else is going on. I have a business which helps support this radio ministry. And sometimes we have a good amount of sales and sometimes we don’t.
10:27 I can’t control it. But what can I control? What can you control? We can control our behavior. And the Bible word for behavior is conversation.
10:33 So in Hebrews 13:5, it says, let your conversation be without covetousness. Well, that word conversation in Greek is tropos, T-R-O-P-O-S, which means manner, way of life. The idea kind of turning from.
10:47 And so what is this? This is kind of our attitude, right? It’s our attitude. So what we can control is our conversation being that was the Bible says, but not really speaking as much as our attitude and our behavior. We can control that friend.
11:02 You can control that. And what does that mean? That means that you would take this attitude and you would have a faith about you to believe that God is telling you the truth in his word. And you would live like that.
11:16 And you wouldn’t covet other things, you know, to covet. We can get into that in the next episode because there’s a lot on coveting. And again, it goes beyond coveting like some people think, oh, I don’t covet.
11:29 You know, I don’t want the newest phone or the newest car, but coveting is much deeper than that. You know, you could be coveting someone’s situation, someone’s circumstance. You’d be coveting someone’s job, someone’s husband or wife.
11:38 You’d be coveting all kinds of things. Amen. And the marketing people out there, and I work in marketing.
11:44 So I understand that really work hard to make you want to covet these things. Right. And so we can fall into that trap.
11:51 And what God’s telling us in his word is don’t covet, be content with what you have because you have me and I will never leave you. And then I almost feel like God is putting a question mark there saying, do you believe me?
12:02 You know, I will never leave you. Do you believe me? Do you understand that to be true? And again, I’m not adding to his word.
12:08 I’m just interpreting this for the modern day believer, because so many believers get caught up as they claw through all of life’s struggles as they try to get to the mountaintop.
12:18 And even when they get there, they get caught up with all the cares of life and they’re not able to enjoy life. They’re not able to enjoy what God would have them to enjoy, to understand that he is sovereign, that he has all power and all knowledge, that he’s given you talents and skills that he wants you to use for him in the ministry.
12:36 We’re all called to the ministry, even if it is witnessing to someone at work, sharing a testimony on social media, abstaining from the sinful things, writing a book, writing a short story, playing a song, writing a song, sharing a song, teaching the children, on and on and on
12:54 taking care of the needy, the homeless, the hungry, those senior saints of God, those out there in the church that have a need that you can provide. Doing all these things is what God’s called us to do.
13:05 And how can we do those things if we have a bad attitude? How can we do those things if we’ve fallen into sin?
13:13 If we have chosen sin as our way of coping with this evil world? Now you think, Brother Clark, that’s crazy.
13:19 Who would do that? Well, how about those that go to drinking? How about those that try to forget their problems on a Friday night? How about those that go to numb themselves and self-medicate with alcohol or drugs or both?
13:31 Is that not exactly what we shouldn’t be doing? Is that not exactly running away from God and not putting our trust in God? Amen. And I’m not going to get legalistic and say, oh, don’t you ever touch alcohol. I don’t.
13:45 I can’t because I know that I couldn’t just have one. Amen. So I won’t go near it.
13:49 Amen. The Bible tells me to be of a sober mind, but I’m not getting legalistic on you. What I’m trying to tell you is, are we turning to God or are we turning to the world?
13:56 Because the devil is the counterfeiter of this world and he’s providing a bunch of counterfeit goods saying, this is what you need to get by in life.
14:02 And God’s saying, just trust me. Don’t covet anything. Have faith in me.
14:07 I will be with you on the way up, at the peak, on the way down, in the valley, and on the way up again, at the peak, on the way down, in the valley.
14:14 All of those cycles of life, all through the ups and downs, I’ll be with you. And if you trust me, you will have peace that you can’t even describe.
14:23 Tune in next time as we get to more detail about how we can apply this to our life.
14:27 Thank you for listening. Take care. God bless. And amen.