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Peggy Joyce Ruth, aka "the Psalm 91 Lady" is author of a variety of Psalm 91 book titles with over six million copies in print. She taught a weekly Adult Bible Study for more than 35 years in her church in Central Texas as she shared how to make God’s Word your final authority. Known for her easy-to-understand style of communicating the Word of God and warm storytelling, Peggy Joyce's heart is that her books and teachings will bring you into the same freedom from fear she experienced and help you put God's Word to work in your life.
Okay. Today I'm going to be dealing with a simple truth now: Totally Relying on Jesus. This Bible study is not going to apply to the ones who are in rebellion, whether it be simple rebellion or obvious rebellion. It's not going to apply to the one who now is in willful sin because they're also putting up with an area of rebellion. Okay, now let me give you my definition of rebellion.
Speaker 1:Rebellion is any area that God brings to your attention directly or through another person, and you find yourself justifying that area or are resistant to allowing God to change it. Okay, now that's a real telltale sign of rebellion. Now, I'm not going to be dealing with that group of individuals today, but if you'll sincerely want to be cleaned up in this area, if you want to be cleaned up at any cost then, this Bible study, I think, can be a real help. Now, this Bible study was really birthed out of an enemy attack against my faith. Now, I try to never let a day pass that I don't reaffirm my faith in God's promises and in God's Psalm 91 covenant.
Speaker 1:I'm just quoting it back in thanksgiving to God just as a reminder, mainly to myself, of his promises to me. Now, a while back, I was listening to a tape and the speaker was saying that there were only just a very few actual promises in the Word of God. He said mostly what we have called promises are actually covenants. And he went on to explain the difference. He said, A promise is unconditional.
Speaker 1:But he said, A covenant is conditional based on our fulfilling our end of the bargain. And as I studied that, I thought, Oh, that gave me a lot of answers. Now, are all true statements that he made. And he went on to name some of the actual promises. A promise that we'll never again have a flood like they had in the days of Noah, that was a promise.
Speaker 1:Another promise is that the Holy Spirit will come. Another promise is that Jesus the Messiah will come and he'll come again with his saints. Now, these are all promises. They're unconditional and they happen no matter what we do or what we don't do. Those are gonna happen.
Speaker 1:And then he began to name the conditional covenants. We can have long life, we can have health, we can have blessings, we can have all of the Psalm 91 promises, but those now are conditional covenants. Then he made a real strong statement. He said, there are a lot of you out there quoting the covenants as though they were promises. And he says, you're not doing your part, and that's why you're not getting blessings, you're not getting answers.
Speaker 1:And, of course, I had to admit, everything that he had said was true. But by the time I finished that tape, I was wiped out. My faith was kind of on the floor, and I began to quote Psalm 91, and my thoughts were just raging in my ear. How do you really know if you're dwelling in the shelter of the Most High? How can I really know if I'm abiding in that shadow?
Speaker 1:How can I know if I'm fulfilling my part? And so, it kind of confused me for a while. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of others who thought that they were dwelling in the shelter and found out that they weren't. Well, I began to listen to that lofty reasoning, now, that was tearing at the very core of my faith. Now, Satan was too smart.
Speaker 1:He's too smart to cause us to doubt God's word. He knows we're not going to do that. But he very subtly tried to get me to doubt and question my ability to do my part now to qualify myself to receive God's covenant promises. And so, I was faced with that, and it was kind of giving me a little bit of a problem. I knew I wasn't perfect.
Speaker 1:I knew I made mistakes, even when I desperately wanted to please God. So, I began to fear and to think, you know, what made me think that I was doing enough to exercise enough faith to bring these promises about? And I was really questioning myself. And suddenly, all that I could think about was how far short I fell in trying to do everything right because I knew my shortcomings. I knew the shark gummies that I had.
Speaker 1:Well, a subtle despair and a subtle hopelessness then, they started coming over me, and subconsciously, I felt myself lose some of the assurance that God's promises would work for me. I lost the assurance, not because of some sin in my life, not because of rebellion, or not because of deception, to a blind spot. I lost assurance because of the fear of maybe not doing everything all just right. You know, maybe not touching enough bases. Fear of overlooking some of the conditions in the Word of God without even realizing it, because I knew how many times I missed it and failed to live up to God's standards, even though I sincerely wanted to please God.
Speaker 1:So, I felt pretty hopeless because I knew that I wasn't good enough. Well, a week later, I was sitting next to one of our church members. We were at a dinner party, and we were just talking about the Word, and he said something, and now that started just an avalanche of truth up out of my spirit man. Now, I had asked him what his secret to success was, and he said, My secret is that I knew I wasn't good enough, so I relied on what Jesus took for me on the cross for me to be good enough to receive every promised blessing that His word offered. And I said, That's good.
Speaker 1:I want to hear that again. So I had him say it again. And he said, My secret is I knew I wasn't good enough. So, he said, I rely on what Jesus took for me on the cross for me to be good enough to receive every precious blessing that His Word offers. He went on to say Jesus paid the debt for every sin that I would ever commit, and my only requirement was to repent and receive that gift that he bought for me in his own blood.
Speaker 1:As I sat there and listened, I thought, Lord, you have made it so simple. He said, every night I pray and I thank God that because of the punishment that he took on the cross in my place, he said, it was cleansing me of the guilt and the consequences, and it was leaving, me guiltless and free from the sin in God's eyes. And suddenly, just became so clear to me. It set me free that day, and I finally saw the difference that the cross makes and the difference between the Old and the New Testament. Now, he said, I can now rely on Jesus for my total prosperity, spirit, soul, body, finances.
Speaker 1:And he said, I rely on Jesus and not on myself, and that's what makes all the difference. That's what makes it work. Now, something suddenly clicked inside of me, and I wanted to jump up and shout. I realized that relying on Jesus was a phrase that had become just a cliche to most of us. It sort of lost its impact.
Speaker 1:Well, I went home and looked it up in the dictionary, and I found that to rely on someone meant to totally depend upon that person. Now, I had often said that I relied on Jesus, but it had kind of lost its significance. And the Lord began to show me that the promises in the New Testament, they are no greater, they're no better than the promises in the Old Testament. I realized all the promises in the Old Testament that we could be God's children, that we were promised health, we were promised protection and provision, we were promised that we could have a long life, We were promised perfect peace. We were promised Psalm 91.
Speaker 1:Psalm 91 is not a New Testament blessing. It's out of the Old Testament. Every blessing in the New Testament, I could find it also in the Old Testament. The the promise of blessings are all basically the same from the Old Testament to the New Testament. So what made them better under the New Covenant?
Speaker 1:What is it that makes the New Covenant better than the old covenant? And I started getting really excited as I started studying through this. We're all quick to say, Well, it's Jesus. But how does Jesus really make any difference? Because we've quoted clear from our childhood that it's all in Jesus.
Speaker 1:We've said that forever, that it's in Him that we live and move and have our being. But when it's all said and done, most of us have not really had it dawned on us what it actually means to live and move and have our being in Jesus. Most of us have never even thought about what what that really means. We've heard it taught over and over that I have been crucified with Christ, so it's no longer I that lives, but it's Christ living in me. The Bible tells us Christ in me is my hope of glory, and that I'm more than a conqueror through Christ.
Speaker 1:But for most of us, if we'll be honest, to some degree, those scriptures are still just cliches, you know. They're kind of just words to us. But God wants them to become alive and active and operative in us. Now, for God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son to die in our place, that whosoever would believe and receive the debt that he paid in our place on the cross, that that person would be forgiven for their sins when they repented, leaving them sinless and able to receive every one of His good gifts, every one of His good promises. Yes, the gifts named in the Old Testament health, healing, deliverance they're the same as the ones in the New Testament.
Speaker 1:The difference is the cross of the New Testament that can cleanse us and leave us sinless so that we can receive everything that God has to offer. And so, I got so excited about that. Jesus said, Apart from Me, you can do nothing. So, we need to let that soak in. We need to think about it.
Speaker 1:Because apart from him taking our every sin, taking all of our shortcomings on himself, apart from that, no one could be good enough. There's no way to be good enough apart from that. God knew that we couldn't stay in the shelter of our own determination, our own goodness. It was impossible. Oh, you know, we can choose not to commit some of the obvious sins that are wrong.
Speaker 1:We we can make those choices. But how can we know for sure that we haven't missed some little detail? And that's what I was saying, Lord, I don't know that I can receive all these promises because how can I know that I haven't missed something? What if we did accidentally leave some stone unturned? What if we just happened to take in some deadly germ from the elements and get sick?
Speaker 1:What about some subtle area of lack of knowledge that we've overlooked? And I said, Lord, it would be so easy to overlook some of those things. What if we overlooked it? What if we haven't met a condition with even all the good intention, and it keeps God from being able to fulfill his part of the covenant because of our failure to meet a condition? And maybe it's something we have honestly overlooked.
Speaker 1:And I knew we were incapable of doing all of it just exactly right. And then the Lord began to remind me of an infant nursing baby. And as He got through reminding me of all these things about a baby, suddenly it started making everything make sense. That new infant relies on its mother for food, in the true sense of the word relies. That baby is dependent now upon that mother for its nourishment.
Speaker 1:It's dependent on that mother to even stay alive. That baby can't help itself. He can't protect himself. He couldn't fulfill even one condition necessary for survival. Now, when that thing clicked inside of me, I began to realize I could not dwell in the shelter of the Most High.
Speaker 1:I I couldn't abide in his shadow in my own efforts. I couldn't do that any more than that baby could fulfill his own condition for survival. But God had made a way in spite of that. That baby had to rely on its mother for the soul's survival, and suddenly I realized the difference between the old and the new testament. Just like that baby had to totally rely on its mother for survival, I too had to totally rely on Jesus to fulfill my part for survival and let him do it for me, just exactly like that baby had to rely on its mother to do it for him for survival.
Speaker 1:And I remember as God started opening my eyes to see that, I was getting so excited. In the Old Testament, they didn't yet have Jesus. And when they sinned, they had to pay the consequences themselves because they didn't have someone who had borne all the punishment for their sins himself. That hadn't happened yet. They were responsible for their own sins under the Old Testament.
Speaker 1:Under the New Testament, when I sin, I can run to Jesus, and I can repent, and I can put my sin on him because he has already borne the consequences of my sin for me on the cross. Then all of a sudden, I knew why the bible said that we have a new and a better covenant now. All of a sudden, it was making sense. The promises in the old and the new were the same. The promises didn't change with the coming of Jesus.
Speaker 1:The reason the new covenant was new and better now hear me on this. The reason the new covenant was new and better was because under the new covenant, God had sent someone who fulfilled the conditions for me, did it as my substitute. They didn't have that in the Old Testament. I could rely on what he did for me that I could not pay for myself. God knew that man could not fulfill the conditions, so he sent Jesus to do that for us.
Speaker 1:Now, in Psalm 20 seven:one, it says that Jesus became our salvation. He became salvation for us. Wasn't anything that we could do for ourselves. Now the Greek and the Hebrew word for salvation means health, healing, deliverance, protection, provision, and and even more than that. Jesus became all of that for us.
Speaker 1:In other words, He became the fulfillment of every condition in order for us to be able to receive that health and that healing and that deliverance and protection. Now, as we rely on Him, as we rely on what He did for us, and as we depend on Him, He becomes the fulfillment of every condition for us. Are you hearing what I'm saying because this is so important. Those promises are all conditional and He became the fulfillment now of every condition for us. Now, need to reiterate again that it's impossible to be relying on Him while at the same time we are in a continual willful sin as a lifestyle.
Speaker 1:That's rebellion. And that's not being dependent on God. And rebellion knocks us out of the promise. Okay, in John six twenty eight and twenty nine, the disciples ask, you know, What are our works? What are we supposed to be doing?
Speaker 1:What's our responsibility? And Jesus said, Our works are to believe in. And I read that over and over. It's to believe in. Okay, what does the Greek say to believe in?
Speaker 1:What does the Greek say that means? It means to rely on and to be dependent on someone. Jesus said, apart from me, you can't do anything. You know, he said, you can do nothing. And that's what Jesus was saying.
Speaker 1:Our only work, the only work he's given us is to rely on Jesus. That's the only work he's given to us. So I want to say that again. Our only work is to rely on the one who did it for us. Now, if I want the promises of Psalm 91 or any other promise for that matter, I can't dwell in the shelter all the time, and God knew that.
Speaker 1:And that's why he sent Jesus and he said to us, now you've got a better covenant. You've got a covenant that's gonna take care of this for you. I can now have any of his promises by throwing myself totally over on what Jesus did on the cross. Now, the cross had not happened in the Old Testament, so they didn't have that privilege. But Jesus fulfilled in the New Testament the conditions for us by going to the cross and paying the penalty of sin himself.
Speaker 1:Now, if I need provision, I can't make that happen. I can't provide for myself except by the arm of flesh, and of course that never lasts. I have to rely on Jesus for the promise of provision. And you say, well, you have to give tithe and all that before it to work. Well, that's true.
Speaker 1:But the giving and the tithing are the easy part. That's that's clear cut. What's hard for people is the next step, moving into the harvest. That's where the relying on Jesus comes in. We have to come to totally saying, Lord, I rely on you.
Speaker 1:Nothing I can do is good enough. I have to rely on you. I have Jesus now. I depend on you to fulfill every condition that's out of reach or out of my knowledge. Maybe we don't even know about it.
Speaker 1:And then I have to just walk it out in trust and watch him provide. Oh, what we have in Jesus is I don't think any of us ever come to a place where we realize what a miracle. That's what dependence and reliance involves. For example, God sometimes gives us customers. If we have a job, he gives us opportunities.
Speaker 1:He's the one that gives us the miracles. He's the one that's providing, and we believe him for that. I don't care whether it's budgeting our time to get everything done, or believing maybe for a loved one to come to know him, or getting victory over some area of flesh, maybe losing weight or whatever, the only victory, the only hope is I have to rely on Jesus for it. I can't come to it any other way. And when the Lord began showing me that, I was getting so excited.
Speaker 1:I was just bouncing up and down. Our only work is to believe on the one who God sent. That's the only thing that He expects out of us. I want to say that again, because the only work that God is asking us to do is just to believe on the one that he sent. Believe in, cling to, trust in, rely on Jesus, because it's all in Jesus.
Speaker 1:So don't let that become a cliche. Yes, you're going to take authority over the enemy. You're going to do spiritual warfare. You're going to do all the things that the Bible tells us to do. But even in your obedience, there has to be a total dependence on him.
Speaker 1:No matter how much we're obeying what we're told to do. The bottom line is our dependence on Him. The same thing with deliverance. If I want deliverance in a certain area, my fulfilling my part of the bargain to qualify the blessing comes from not what I can do. It comes from relying on Him, realizing that He has already done it for me.
Speaker 1:When a person, Christian, realizes that Christ has already done it for them, it starts making everything fall in place. And you say, well, what about those areas of strongholds that we hang on to willfully? Maybe a continued willful lifestyle of sin in some area that's not reliant on Jesus. But when you come to a place where you choose to hate a stronghold, and you want free, then that's why Jesus came. He came to make it possible for us to be free from those things.
Speaker 1:Now we can say, Jesus, I'm relying on you to have fulfilled the conditions. I'm relying on you to make me qualify for for deliverance because deliverance by man is in vain. So, that's the way you tell me that I can fulfill the condition. See, under the old covenant, they had to fulfill their own conditions, and they couldn't do that. They couldn't do it under the old covenant.
Speaker 1:Now it's in relying on him, depending on him, you know. It's on what He took for us on the cross that the conditions are fulfilled. And that's our new and better covenant, that He's done it for us through Jesus. We have a false connotation that we have to muster up faith, to feel faith. No.
Speaker 1:It's it's that's depending on self again. When the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of Jesus' garment, she wasn't thinking, oh, if I can just build up enough faith. So many times, that's what people are doing. I just gotta build up build up enough faith. And, no, her eyes, her thoughts, her hope, her whole focus was on him.
Speaker 1:If I can get to him, he can make me well. We have to get to the place where we're not thinking what I can do to get myself better, what I can do to get well. We have to realize it's all in Jesus. Now, a very subtle way, the enemy has perverted the faith message into a form of self reliance. And I started looking at how many times what we're teaching sounds like self reliance, and a lot of people are in that.
Speaker 1:For most people, it's not the realization that if I can get to Him, He can make me well. That's not what most Christians are thinking about. Instead, they think it's if I can work up enough faith. If I can get my faith strong enough, it works. If I do this, then it's all gonna work.
Speaker 1:We forget faith is a servant. Faith is just a choice to depend on Him. That's all it is. That's what faith is. When you're believing for someone else, it's still out of our grasp.
Speaker 1:It's out of our control. More than ever, it is the choice to depend on him, to rely on him. Every time we have anything we're facing, we need to come to a place of realizing, Lord, apart from you, I can do nothing. But if I rely on you, then you are the one that causes me to be victorious. That's all that faith really is.
Speaker 1:It's a total dependence on him. It's a total reliance on Jesus. When we think of faith, we have this preconceived idea of being a great man of faith, a great man of power. And for most of us, our connotation of faith and power is wrong. In reality, a great man of faith and power is one who is totally and completely relying on Jesus.
Speaker 1:That's what it means to be a great man of faith and power. When we come to a place where we say, Lord, I'm totally relying on you. That's what faith is. Totally dependent on Jesus. Totally without a plan and totally hopeless and helpless without the assurance of the manifested presence of Jesus to sustain our every breath.
Speaker 1:Now, that's a true description of a man of faith and power. It's Jesus did it all. Jesus still does it all or we can't make it. That's faith. Realizing that we are hopeless and we're helpless and then choosing to believe that He will do what He says He will do.
Speaker 1:Whatever He has promised in the Word of God, He will do it. All we have to do is believe He's our answer. We have to rely totally on Him. Now, what is most people's first reaction when they hear that Jesus became the fulfillment of all of the conditions? Well, I'll tell you what the first reaction is.
Speaker 1:Most say, Oh, that sounds too easy. It can't be true. Listen, there was nothing easy about it. The next time that your faith begins to stumble because of all of it sounds so simple and so easy that you think, how can that work? I want the next few things to ring in your ears.
Speaker 1:There was nothing easy about it. So some people say, oh, that just sounds too easy. That can't work. But there was nothing easy about it. When Jesus said in Matthew five seventeen, I came not to abolish the law, but I came to fulfill it, we seldom stop to realize what all went into the fulfillment of that law.
Speaker 1:The only reason it can be so easy for us is because of how hard it was for him. You know, the most powerful one word prayer in existence is the word Jesus. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where there's not time to pray, there's not time to quote the word, not even time to think, just the one word prayer Jesus can literally take you out of the earthly realm and put you right into the heavenly realm. In Revelation five verse five, only the lion from the tribe of Judah had overcome and is worthy to open the book. Verse 12 says, worthy is the lamb who is slain to receive the power, the riches, the wisdom, the might, the honor, the glory, and the blessings.
Speaker 1:Notice that Worthy is the Lamb. He's the one that has made it worthy. So, don't say that flippantly. He has received all of that to share with us, and there was nothing at all easy about his receiving that. It was hard beyond words for what he had to do to buy that for us.
Speaker 1:Don't ever let the enemy say God's way is too simple. There was nothing simple or easy about it for him. In John three fourteen, it says, Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes or relies on Him or relies on what He did for us, what he went through in our place, that's the one who's going to have life and all that it involves. Now so many things in the Old Testament were a type and shadow of the great things that were to come. That's what the Old Testament was about.
Speaker 1:It was showing us the the beautiful things that were to come. And in Numbers 20 one:eight, when the children of Israel had sinned and turned away from the Lord, snakes, that's a type and shadow of the sin, came into the camp and they were biting the people. And many, many were sick and dying from the snake bites. Now, this was a type and shadow of the sickness and death that evolves from the death bite of sin in the world today. Now, people came to Moses for help and he began to cry out to God.
Speaker 1:And God told Moses to make a fiery serpent and put it on a on a pole, raise it up for all the people to see. And God says, whoever is bitten, if he will look up at that snake on the pole, he's gonna be made well. That snake on the pole was a type and shadow of the crucified Christ on the cross. That's what it's a picture of. Now, used to wonder, Lord, why did you have a snake on the pole?
Speaker 1:I could understand if you had put a lamb up on the pole. That's representative of Jesus, if that had been lifted up to represent Christ. But why a snake? And the Lord began showing me, if we can understand why a snake was the type and shadow of the crucified Christ, that will open our eyes now to what really took place on the cross, what actually sets us free. Now, in second Corinthians five twenty one, God made Jesus, it says, who knew no sin to become sin.
Speaker 1:Okay. Hear what that's saying. God made Jesus who knew no sin to literally become sin on our behalf, in our place, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him. God made Jesus to become sin. That snake represents the sin that was nailed to the cross.
Speaker 1:God not only gave us the type and shadow of Jesus becoming, the sin offering, but he also gave prophecies hundreds of years in advance, telling exactly what was going to happen on the cross. If you turn to Isaiah 52 verse 14, as we read this, I want you to keep in mind the type and shadow of the crucified Christ was the snake. In Isaiah fifty two thirteen and fourteen, in the amplified, he says, behold, my servant, my servant Jesus, will be high and lifted up. He was talking about on the cross. For many were astonished at you.
Speaker 1:For many the servant of God became an object of horror when they saw what had happened on the cross. Many were astonished. His face and his whole appearance were marred more than any man, and his form was marred beyond that of the sons of men. Jesus was made to be sin. He became our sin.
Speaker 1:He took all of our sin and all the consequences of our sin on his own body. Now, you've all seen people whose bodies were marred beyond recognition, maybe through accidents and so forth. It says here that his body was marred than any other man's body. Jesus literally took this on his body. It was not a figure of speech.
Speaker 1:They weren't just making a figure of speech. They were saying he literally took all of that, all of our sin, everything. He took our sin. He took the guilt for our sins. He took the rejection.
Speaker 1:He took the consequences of our sin. He took every bit of it on his own body. Sickness and disease are a result of sin being in the world, And that's a picture of it. Sickness and disease are a byproduct of sin. Now, I'm not saying that every time we're sick, it's a direct result of sin in our life.
Speaker 1:That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that before the fall in the garden, there was no sickness and there was no disease. And then, when sickness and disease entered the world, that came as a result of sin. And all of this had to be paid for. There was a legal penalty that had to be paid, and the Bible says that the wages of sin is death.
Speaker 1:The death penalty had to be paid. Now, the Bible also says Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, literally became sin. He became that snake on the pole. He came to take sin on his own body in order to make a way for us because there was no other way. There was no other way.
Speaker 1:And I've said this a lot lately, but it needs to be repeated. Jesus Christ didn't do all of this in his divinity. So many people think, well, he was God. No, he didn't do this in his divinity. Philippians tells us that he emptied himself of all of his divinity.
Speaker 1:Jesus did all this for us in His humanity. When we think about that, it makes a it's totally different. In order for it to pay the legal debt, it had to be paid by a man who had not sinned. Now, the prophecy in Isaiah 53 was not a foretelling of Christ's whole life. It was just a prophecy about the crucifixion.
Speaker 1:It was such an accurate account. It sounds like a play by play description written after the fact that somebody watched him die on the cross and wrote about it. But no, this was written five hundred years before it actually happened. Now, I'm going to read some of these verses to you from the Amplified Bible. Jesus, with all the human emotions, with all the same feelings that you and I have, He knew the Scriptures well and He knew what was facing Him.
Speaker 1:He knew everything through Isaiah 53. He knew that all that was written about him and, of course, there was the temptation to dread it. I can imagine when he read what was fixing to happen to him. I can imagine what it must have done because he was fully man. That makes the love that God has for us even more precious.
Speaker 1:Have you ever dreaded something so badly that you literally couldn't stand the thought of it? I've seen children in, doctor's offices dreading a shot to the extent that they're screaming bloody murder before they've even been touched, you know. But for anything happened, the pain was there. And so you've known people who dreaded death, they dreaded losing a loved one, and it caused them to be almost immobile. I want you to think about Jesus in human form with every human emotion that you and I have.
Speaker 1:In all ways, like as we are, yet without sin, the Bible says, He was facing the known fact that he was going to take on the sin of the entire world on his own body, and he was going to bear that pain. We can't even our mind can't even take that in, of taking on the sin of the entire world and bearing the pain. We can't even imagine what that would be like. And he was going to take all the consequences of the sin, every sickness and every disease he took on his own body, and he was going to bear then all the mental and physical agony, all the emotional agony. He took every single consequence of sin, including death, and he bore it for the whole entire human race.
Speaker 1:Now, meditating on all of that helps us to better understand what took place in the Garden Of Gethsemane. In Matthew twenty six thirty six and Luke twenty two thirty nine, Jesus took Peter, James, and John aside to pray with him, and he began, it says, to be grieved and distressed. And he said, my soul is deeply grieved, he said, to the point of death. Now, we kind of just read over that, but we need to stop and realize he's telling us what he was going through, and it was unbelievable what he was going through. I don't think that we can conceive in our most vivid imagination what was going on on the inside of Jesus as he was facing what he knew was before him, what he knew he had to take.
Speaker 1:His sweat drops were sweat drops of blood. I've never known anyone that sweat drops of blood. That was because he was dreading it so badly because he knew what he was fixing to have to bear for us. For three years, he had been dealing with every sin and every consequence of sin. He'd been dealing with it.
Speaker 1:He knew the diseases. He knew the demonic oppression that was in the world. He knew what sin had done. And he knew he had to take all of that that sin had done. He had to take it on himself.
Speaker 1:We need to remind ourselves often what Jesus was going through. The next time you're tempted to say God's way is too easy, you know, it can't really work, Fall on your face and repent. There is nothing easy about God's way. He just simply knew that we couldn't do it for ourselves, so he did it for us. That's what you call love.
Speaker 1:Doing that taking that kind of pain on your on himself for us. If he went through all of this for you and me, then we can rely on him. He wouldn't do that for us if he didn't love us that much. And if he loves us that much to take that kind of pain, then we can rely on him for anything. I love that song, He paid a debt he didn't owe.
Speaker 1:I owed a debt I couldn't pay. I needed someone to take my sin away. And that's exactly what God was doing here. He let Christ pay the debt that he didn't owe, and he did that for us. A debt that we couldn't pay.
Speaker 1:There was no way. He is the mediator of His will, and we are the recipient of that will. The will is laid up for us, and we think of wills in the natural, but Jesus had a will for us. We're the recipient of that will. And when a will is read, the heirs to the inheritance, they didn't earn what was left to them.
Speaker 1:You know, there's men sometimes that have thousands of dollars, and they write up a will to leave all that money to children. And sometimes those children have not done one thing to deserve it. And that's exactly where it is with Jesus. It was basically He had a will leaving us everything that we could possibly need, and we didn't deserve it. The one who died and left that will was the one who worked for it.
Speaker 1:The heirs just received the inheritance. We're the heirs. In Galatians three verse 13, it says that Jesus hung on a tree and became a curse for us so that we can be redeemed from the curse. We just quote that all the time, but do we ever stop and realize that he became that curse? I mean, that wasn't easy to become a curse.
Speaker 1:He became a curse for us so that we could be redeemed from the curse because otherwise, that curse was ours. It would have been on us. That's the inheritance that He left for us. There was not one thing we could do to redeem ourselves. All we can do is rely on what He did for us.
Speaker 1:That's all that can be done. We can't do anything for ourselves. Jesus provided our redemption, but Jesus doesn't appropriate that redemption for us. We do that. We have to appropriate it.
Speaker 1:He did it for us, but it won't do us one bit of good until we reach out and receive it for ourselves by relying on Him. We have to appropriate what He's done. He makes it available and then He says, Be it unto you according to your faith. He said, I'm offering it, but He's not gonna make us take it. He said, It's yours if you want it.
Speaker 1:Be it unto you according to your faith to receive it. Now, this is not for the world. This is for the children who love him and obey him. And God said, receive him. Receive that part of the atonement.
Speaker 1:He took the due and the merited punishment for all of our sins. He fulfilled the condition. He is our jubilee. And in Matthew eight seventeen, He took all the sicknesses and all the diseases, but we have to appropriate It's not ours until we reach out and receive it. He doesn't force any of the blessings on us.
Speaker 1:He doesn't force any of these wonderful things on us. He's offering it, but we have to receive it. We must rely on Him just as an infant babe relies on its mother. It's not a promise. It's a covenant.
Speaker 1:If it was a promise, we would get it without having to do anything, like some of the other promises of Jesus returning and that kind of thing. But this is not a promise. It's a covenant, and we have to reach out and receive it in total dependence. Jesus said, I came to destroy the works of the devil. He came to destroy the works of the devil in our life, but we have to rely on him and reach out and receive it.
Speaker 1:It doesn't do us one bit of good. Just because he did it doesn't make it ours. Now, I've given this illustration before, but it says it so well. There was a woman in the old country who wanted to come to America and she wanted to come so badly. She finally worked and she saved until she had enough money to get the boat ticket for her and her young son.
Speaker 1:She knew that she didn't have enough money to get on the boat and also a meal ticket at the same time. So she stored up enough crackers and cheese to sustain her and her young son for the thirty eight day journey across the ocean. At mealtime, they would hurry to their room because they couldn't bear to see all the wonderful and bountiful food that was being put out for all the other passengers. Well, the last day of the trip, the captain saw the young boy peering into the dining room, and he realized that he had never seen him eating. So, was puzzled and he asked why.
Speaker 1:And the boy says, Well, we only had the money to cover the trip. We didn't have enough money for the meal ticket too. And the captain was distraught because it was the last day of the trip. And he said everything was included in that ticket. The ticket you bought to go to America included everything, even your meals.
Speaker 1:We've deprived ourselves so much from lack of knowledge. Everything is included in our ticket. Everything we'll ever need, everything is all been included in the ticket that Christ paid for himself. Hosea four:six says two things. It says, my people are destroyed.
Speaker 1:Number one, from lack of knowledge, not knowing what all has been laid up for us. And then it says, also from rejecting the knowledge. Some people know about it and they just don't receive it. They reject it. Either one of those will keep us from what Christ has provided.
Speaker 1:But by the same token, every promise of God is included in our ticket when we accept Jesus. And he's pleading with us to take it all. The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy and sometimes we're listening to that and what we see the enemy doing. We're listening to that more than we're realizing that Jesus has said, I've paid it all. And that thief comes to steal, kill and destroy to keep us in fear, to keep us in a works righteousness mentality.
Speaker 1:So many Christians are in a works righteousness mentality, and that's totally wrong. It's not God. The Greek word salvation does mean a ticket to heaven, but it also means health and healing and deliverance and protection. Everything that we could possibly need in this life. Every need you will ever have is already taken care of in Christ Jesus.
Speaker 1:And the only reason that it's hard to grasp is because we've only been taught that salvation is a ticket to heaven. So many Christians, that's all they think. When I ask Jesus in my heart, I've got a ticket to heaven. But we need to turn it around. What if for the last thousand years it had been taught that salvation meant that Jesus would take care of every need in this life, health and protection, all that, but it had never been taught that we could live eternally with him.
Speaker 1:We didn't know that that was a part of salvation. That would be a truth, that the health and the healing belonged to us, but it's just a partial truth. We would have gone through this life enjoying all the wonderful benefits of abundant living here, but fearing and dreading the world to come. And finally, one day, a man began to study and have it revealed by the Holy Spirit that that word salvation also included a ticket to heaven. Now, if we'd never heard that before, our mind would have a hard time believing that.
Speaker 1:Can you see if you turned it around, it would be just as hard to receive our ticket to heaven if you'd never been taught that. Faith comes by hearing and coming into trust. Every single need is received by faith, choosing to just rely on him. Our ticket includes not just a ticket to heaven, but it includes everything we'll ever possibly need in this life. When we began to see all of this, it's going to make us love him and serve him and and give him first place all the more better than we've ever done it.
Speaker 1:All the days of our life, we're going to want to be in a love walk with him. Now, with the thousands that would be falling at your side and the 10,000 falling at your right hand, and many of them are falling financially, some are falling physically, emotionally, marriages are crumbling. Many of these people that are having all that fall around their ankles are Christians. It would be easy to think, Oh my God, it's not working. And when we look at these Christians and see these things that don't seem to be working in our life, we need to realize it's not because it's not available.
Speaker 1:I'm saying to you, don't look to the right or to the left because it does work. It's God's word. So don't let your faith in his word be dependent upon what you see happen in somebody else's life. You can't know what go what's going on in somebody else's heart. You can't know that.
Speaker 1:I said earlier that most of what we call promises are covenants. They're conditional promises. So, don't let that frighten you. You fulfill what God tells you to do and then rely on what Jesus did for everything else. He is your fulfillment of the law.
Speaker 1:You can have anything, any good thing. God's already made it available through Jesus. He is your fulfillment of the law. He is your fulfillment of all the conditions. Hear me on that because he's already done it, but we have to appropriate it.
Speaker 1:And the secret for fulfilling the promise is simply relying on Jesus. We we take paragraphs and paragraphs to try to explain something. And he just makes a little phrase to explain the wonderful things he's done for us. And his way of explaining that everything is ours, anything we need. And he explained it by saying just rely on Jesus because it's all in him.
Speaker 1:Father, we thank you so much that you've already done it all. You've already provided everything we'll ever need. You've provided it all. They didn't have it all in the Old Testament. But Father, under the new covenant, we have a new and a better covenant.
Speaker 1:And the reason you're saying it's new and better is because it covers everything now. It covers everything because Jesus went to the cross, and he took all the the punishment for all of our sins, for the sins of everyone in the world. He took the sins. And if we just receive what He did, then we can walk in victory. Father, I realize so many times that Christians are not walking in health because they don't know to put the promise to work and and and just say, your word provides health for me.
Speaker 1:Your your word provides all my needs being met. Your word provides all that. But we have to learn how to receive it. We have to come to a place where we get on our face before you and we say, Lord, you've already provided it. And all I have to do is rely on Jesus, what he's already taken, what he's already done for me.
Speaker 1:And if we'll do that, every single need, everything we need or want, it's already taken care of. So, father, in Jesus' name, we just wanna get on our face before you and we want we wanna say, Lord, we love you and we praise you and we thank you that you've not left anything out. Anything we need has not been left out. You've already provided it for us. We just need to get on our face and receive it.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Father. We love you and we praise you. In Jesus' name, amen.