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Listen to Rick Beaudry, Pastor of Calvary Chapel Bremerton, teach the Word of God cover to cover, chapter by chapter, and verse by verse. Be edified and built up in your faith with solid Bible teaching. New episodes on Mondays in the Pacific Standard Timezone.
Verses one through five, would you please stand with me as we read God's holy word together. Follow after charity and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy. For he that speaks in an unknown tongue speaks not unto men, but unto God.
For no man understands him, howbeit in the spirit he speaks mysteries. But he that prophesies speaks unto men to edification, exhortation, and comfort. For he that speaks in an unknown tongue edifies himself, but he that prophesies edifies the church.
I would that ye all speak with tongues, but rather that ye prophesy. For greater is he that prophesies than he that speaks with tongues, except he interpret that the church may receive edifying. Father, thank you for your holy word.
Lord, we desire to walk in truth. We desire to be edified, to be exhorted, to be comforted, to be built up and strengthened in your word by the power of your holy spirit. Lord, we don't want to settle for anything.
Lord, we want your best. We want to live for righteousness. And Lord, we pray that you'd raise up a righteous standard within our country, that our nation would be called to repentance, that there would be a reprieve, that people's eyes, the scales would come off, and that we'd see, Lord, that it's the Republicans, Lord, that are the problem, that they need to stand, they need to defend, they need to indict, they need to use the Constitution and the powers that are already available to them to stop the stealing of our country.
Lord, we pray for our country. We pray for our nation. God, we pray that you'd raise up a standard against the wickedness, the deception, the ugliness, and God, that we as Christians could be a light, that we could point people to Jesus when they lose all hope in government, all hope in the economy, all hope in everything that's held us up, held us together.
And Lord, I pray that there'd be a great harvest of souls, a great number of people coming to Christ and that we'd be equipped and ready to share the glorious good news of your coming kingdom, Lord. Help us, Lord, we pray. Bless this time now in Jesus' name, amen.
Would you please be seated? Peter tells us in 1 Peter 4, verse 11, "'If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.'" The church of Corinth was very gifted, a very gifted church, and they knew it. And their giftedness, their manifestation of the spirituals, the charismata, although remarkable, was falling short of hitting the mark, falling short of communicating the love of God. After having explained the more excellent way of love in chapter 13, Paul now explains the goal of opening our mouths for God.
"'If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.'" God wants to use your mouth. The antichrist is gonna use an image of the beast, and the image of the beast is gonna speak to people. And people are gonna be compelled to bow down and worship the image of the beast and take a mark on the right hand of their forehead.
Well, God's not using angels at this point in time to get the glorious gospel out. In the tribulation period, there'd be an angel flying overhead with the glorious gospel. But presently speaking in the church age, we're his witnesses, we're his martyrs.
We're the ones he's entrusted with the unsearchable riches of Christ. And all we need do is sit at the Lord's feet, hear from him, allow him to fill us, read his word, allow him to equip us. And then the Lord gives us divine appointments to share the glorious good news of Jesus Christ.
There's so much that you know that you don't even know you know. And when you act in faith, when you walk in faith, the Lord gives you these divine appointments and the opportunity to speak his word. The church of Corinth was using their mouth to speak in tongues.
Nothing wrong with speaking in tongues, but speaking in tongues doesn't connect with other people. Speaking in tongues, if any man speaks in unknown tongue, he speaks unto God, not unto men. So it's part of your personal devotional life, your edification.
Very good to be built up and strengthened in that way in your devotional time, praying, praising, singing unto the Lord and that sort of thing. But prophecy is way better. Prophecy connects with other people.
Prophecy, speaking forth the word of God is used by the Lord to edify the body of Christ. So we make disciples, we teach God's word, and we also preach God's word to the unbeliever. So if any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.
And so we speak to edify in verses one through five. We speak to educate next week in verses six through 19. And then also next week, we speak thirdly to evangelize in verses 20 through 25.
So today we'll cover these five verses, speaking, using our mouth to edify. Verse one, follow after charity and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that you may prophesy. So continue walking in the path of love, for without love, we're nothing.
So in chapter 12, he's describing the church of Corinth and their giftedness, the charismata. In chapter 13, he sandwiches between 12 and 14 the emphasis how you're supposed to do it in love. And then in chapter 14, he comes back to the subject of the charismata and gives a clearer, greater instruction in how we're to speak to edify.
So follow after charity and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that you may prophesy. So continue walking in love and then desire spiritual gifts. Be zealous for spiritual gifts.
How many of you want spiritual gifts? How many of you wanna even know what your spiritual gift is? How many gifts does God have for you? So often when we're praying for material things, Lord, I want a house. Lord, I want a car. Lord, I wanna get married.
Lord, I want a son, a daughter. We're praying for all these different things in the material realm. But in the spiritual realm, what is it we desire? What kind of gifts do we want from God to be used of God? Because the Spirit has gifted each one of us severally as he wills.
God's gifted each and every person in this room with at least one of the gifts of the Spirit that we went through the list in chapter 12 and in Romans and also in Ephesians. This desire spiritual gifts isn't just a passive. It's to be zealous for spiritual gifts.
The prayer of Jabez. Years ago, there was a book written, The Prayer of Jabez, and in First Chronicles four, verse 10, and Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, O that thou wouldest bless me indeed. So the Joel Osteen blessed me.
What does Joel Osteen mean? Your best life now and bless you now. Is it spiritual gifts or is it material things? Is the craving more and more material things? Kathy and I were talking about somebody that we know and her comment was, and it was a pretty good comment was, he always wants more. Always wants more and more and more.
Never satisfied with what they have. And they're very wealthy now, but just never satisfied. Beware of covetousness, you know, the Bible tells us.
Godliness with contentment is great gain. And so be very careful of this, Lord bless me now. You know, bless me with all these material things.
And then Jabez says, enlarge my coast. So broaden my influence. Broaden my footprint, you know, around the world.
Broaden my influence on, you know, social media. Broaden my coast. And that thine hand might be with me and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it might not grieve me.
And God granted him that which he requested. And so for you and I, we wanna look at it in terms of the thief comes not but to steal, to kill, and to destroy. But I've come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.
It's the life of the spirit, not the Joel Osteen material things. If riches increase, set not your heart on them. The material things aren't bad unless your heart's set on.
But how much do we crave the spiritual life, the spiritual things that God would give us ears to hear, that God would give us a, you know, recall of the scriptures, that God would give us the time that we need to invest and spend in the meditation of God's word. How much time do you have each day? How much time do you spend on social media? How much time do you spend at work? How much time do you spend with entertainment? If you wanna mine the riches of Christ, it's gonna take some time. You're gonna have to set aside some time that's for him and get into the word.
Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee, the psalmist in Psalm 119. So there has to be the desire, first of all, and with that desire for spiritual things, you're not gonna need me to call you up and say, hey, you need to be in church. You're not gonna get that call.
You're not gonna be berated and made to feel bad because you're not here. That desire within your heart, that internal desire, guess what? You're gonna make it here. You're gonna have a greater desire than the drunks taking the ferry over to Seattle to see the Seahawks when it's snowing out.
They make it somehow. Why? An intense desire. It's a desire deep within their heart.
But we as Christians, spiritual things, oh, I'm gonna do bedside Baptist today. I'm just gonna lay in bed. Well, what about your gifts? We're gonna shut the church down.
We don't need to meet anymore. We'll do it online. What about your gifts? How's anybody gonna be edified and built up and strengthened as you exercise your gifts? You think snoring's a gift? Think eating in bed's a gift? Watching television's a great gift? For some of us, we think shopping's a gift.
Hey, I've got this card and I'm feeling bad. I'm gonna go to Costco and I'm gonna fill up two carts. Oh, I feel better.
They say the world's coming to an end. The ports are gonna close down, but man, I got tons of toilet paper, man. And I had to go there before church because after church, there won't be any left, you know? What priorities do you have? Do you really want to enter into all that God has for you? Do you really desire He's saying? Be zealous, not lukewarm, not complacent, but constantly seeking the mind of the Lord.
Lord, what do you have for me? Lord, broaden our coast. Lord, how can we be a blessing in Kitsap County? So Jesus said, you're gonna be a blessing. You're gonna be His witness in Jerusalem.
Your Jerusalem is Kitsap County. 200,000 people here coming in by the Navy, coming in from all over, opportunities to share the glorious good news with them. And many of you do.
When you're working at Bangor Keyport, you know, the shipyard, various places the Lord sends you, you're sharing, you're sowing seeds, watering. You're sharing the glorious good news. And you have been for many years.
And it bears fruit because God's word doesn't come back void. But you can't do that in the arm of the flesh. There has to be a giftedness.
There has to be an anointing of the Holy Spirit upon your life. And as you step out in faith, you discover, you know, hey, the Lord's anointing me, the Lord's enabling me. And how many times you've shared and nobody's been saved.
Nobody acts like they care. But still, God didn't tell us to go make converts. God told us to go and preach the gospel.
And you have the boldness and you have the courage to be rejected over and over and over and over again in Kitsap County. But you don't quit. You're glorifying the Lord.
You're using the giftedness and the time, the talent, the treasure to make sure that people here, that's all you can do. 30 years I've been here. All I can do is pour my heart out in sharing the gospel and teaching God's word, outreach, ministry, all these different things.
And it's up to the Lord. I can't make the church. I can't grow the church.
I can't keep people here. But hopefully, if I'm on fire, people will come see me burn. Hopefully, if I'm on fire and I desire the spiritual things and the choices that I make are putting the spiritual things first, hopefully people will recognize, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things to be added unto you.
The material things will come. God will take care of us. But put the spiritual things first.
Put the Lord first. And when we do that, I think we're gonna see God move and work in a greater and greater way. And let your life be without covetousness.
For you came into the world naked. Naked you're gonna go. And you're not gonna be able to take it with you.
And so, as many men coveted, they pierced themselves through with many sorrows of that I need more, I need more, I need more. Well, again, I'd like to see a voracious appetite in you for spiritual things. I'd like to see a show up at the Bible study.
I'd like to see a show up at church on a regular basis. I'd like to see you in the word of God and your Bibles being, it's wearing out because you're reading it so much. You're listening to Bible studies.
You got the Word for Today, Pastor Chuck app and you're taking your phone and you're using it to listen to Bible studies as you go through your day. I wanna see you grow. I wanna see you a year from now stronger and greater in God's word, exhibiting more and more love, the fruit of the Spirit which is love, than this year or last year.
It's incumbent upon, it's important that we're growing. Doesn't matter what stage you begin. If our job is edification to build you up, I don't wanna see you like Ruthie the other day, she was eating some cotton candy.
And that's real cute for a little two-year-old being in cotton candy. Many people can't handle the teaching of the word here and they run back to places that give them cotton candy. Cotton candy tastes good.
But cotton candy, little sermonettes for Christianettes, doesn't prepare you, doesn't build you up, doesn't edify you. You're not gonna be ready for the trials that are coming. You're probably not ready now.
That's why these churches that shut down when they reopened, they hired counselors and they charged people $75 an hour to listen to them. Why? Because they don't have a working knowledge of scripture. They don't know how to rest upon the Lord and allow the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to minister to them through the teaching of the word.
Because they don't know the word. Because all they've had is cotton candy, feel-good therapeutic messages that cannot feed their spirit. It's cute for a two-year-old, but it's ugly in somebody 40 years old.
How could you last that long in a church that doesn't teach God's word? Why would you go back to it? Why would you go back to the nursery school? You're better than that. But it comes down to desire. If you don't desire the word, if you don't desire to grow, there's no way that a coach can take and see an athlete with all that great potential and force them to sleep right, to train right, to do everything.
There has to be a desire within. You can't force people to do anything. And so that's the frustration of being a Jeremiah.
That's the frustration of the early prophets. They'd spend their whole lives trying to reach people with the truth. But the false prophets come along and give them a false sense of security.
There's no danger coming. Everything is gonna be okay. We're gonna get through this October.
There's not gonna be an economic collapse. Donald Trump's gonna be elected. J.D. Vance, everything's gonna go back together.
We're gonna get back to normal, you know? And that works for how long? Till you find out you've been lied to. Till you find out the economy's crashing right now and there's nothing any candidates can do about it. And yet, in fact, they're gonna do what they're told to do, which is present the central bank digital currency.
It's already ready to be rolled out. And it doesn't matter if it's Republican or Democrat. That is the most tyrannical thing the world will ever face.
You can't buy or sell without it. You can't talk on Facebook or do anything without your social credit score being affected. And yet, spiritually speaking, all it would take is for us to be zealous of spiritual gifts and we'd be so empowered by the Holy Spirit that they couldn't get you to comply.
But when you're weak, man, you comply so quick. They can lie and tell you their mandates and we're gonna take your job, we're gonna take your house, and you just comply. And then others of you are awake enough to realize I'm being lied to and I'm not gonna comply.
And if people don't comply, then they have to change their plan, to change the name of their plan and try and hide it in a UN agreement. Try to deceive the masses. But if people awaken because they're spiritually awakened, they can't govern without your compliance.
You say, no, I'm adhering to the Constitution. I'm not gonna give up my First Amendment rights. I'm not gonna be censored.
But if you're just a jellyfish subsisting on cotton candy, you have no strength. There's nothing within you spiritually that would warrant you being courageous enough to say no. You're just gonna go with the flow, just go along with everything.
So there's gotta be a desire there, something stoking the flame within your heart and life that you desire the things of the Spirit. And Luke 11, nine, he says, ask and it shall be given you, Jesus. Ask, seek, and ye shall find.
Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. If a son, if one of your sons were to ask for bread, you fathers, would you give him a stone? If your son would come and ask for a fish, would you give him a serpent? If he asked for an egg, would you give him a scorpion? And then he says, if you then be an evil, yeah, you and I are evil. My problem is not that I don't love myself.
My problem is I'm obsessed with myself. I'm an evil person. I'm born and shapen in iniquity.
My whole life long I have to deal with this old, edemic, selfish nature. If you then be an evil, know how to give good gifts to your kids, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those of you that ask? Keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Be desirous of spiritual gifts.
Be desirous of the life of the Spirit. How valuable is the life of the Spirit? When we're in Sedona, Sedona has an occultic spirit, these vortexes and seances and new age and people are clamoring there to find the power and to be healed and all that sort of thing. It's erroneous, it's false.
And yet people are desiring something more. They're desiring something in the spiritual realm. What don't they see among us as Christians? Why don't they see you and I empowered by the Holy Spirit? Live in the life of the Spirit.
Are we that lukewarm? Are we that passive? Are we that irrelevant that people would clamor towards sorcery and witchcraft and all the occult of the new age? How could we gain their attention? How would they be drawn to Christ? And so he says, desire spiritual gifts, but rather that you may prophesy. So speaking forth for another, prophecy, speaking forth for another. God's speaking to us by the Holy Spirit through a person.
You guys are prophets, you're prophetesses. You may not have the office of a prophet. You may not even have the office of an evangelist.
But Paul told Timothy, do the work of an evangelist. I don't consider myself to be an evangelist, to have the office, the gifting of an evangelist. But from the very beginning, I've been sharing Christ with people.
So too you. You share Christ. Some of you are so bold, it's a gift of evangelism.
Others of you, you have a different way of sharing, but you do share. And you're planting seeds. Another comes along in waters, and God brings the increased.
And collectively, corporately, as a community, people are hearing the gospel. They're hearing about Jesus. And then as a crisis comes into their life, they're looking to you, the Christian at work, the Christian that they've met, because they've observed your life.
They've watched your life over 40 years. They've watched your life over the last 10 years, or whatever. They're watching your marriage.
They're watching the struggles that you go through with your kids. And they're saying, how do they keep it together? How can they be so loving in the face of such cruelty? And the answer comes back, it's Jesus. Now they're jealous.
Now they're thirsty. Now they're wanting to, because you've been the salt, you've been the life. Now they're wanting to ask questions about your Jesus.
And that's because you've been desirous of spiritual gifts, because you're asking the Lord, and now he's gonna use you as a prophet. He's gonna use you to speak forth his word to these people. God works through people.
He's not gonna send them an angel who's gonna come and speak audibly to them. Very seldom do you see or hear any of that happening. Could happen.
Entertain strangers, for some have entertained, some have entertained angels unaware, as you meet strange people. Some of them are angels. As two angels walked into the camp of Abraham and Sarah in the form of men, these angels walking down in Sangamora, and Hebrews, the writers say in Hebrews 13, that be not negligent to entertain strangers, if some have entertained angels unaware.
So the Lord may use an angel to come speak to you. I've never met an angel and speak to me about something. Could be.
Unaware, I'm not sure. But God certainly has used a number of human beings to speak God's word, God's word coming through them, speaking as the oracles of God that have ministered to me, built me up, strengthened me, helped me, gave me clarity of what God wants for my life, because of the word of God coming through a person. So it can be a foretelling of the future, prophecy.
The YouTube prophets, as they're telling you the future, everything that's gonna happen, they seem so dogmatic, they seem so clear. So, and be careful when you hear them say, thus saith the Lord in the first person. Because when it doesn't happen, they need to be hauled out in stone to death as a false prophet.
They need to at least be identified as a false prophet. God isn't grading on the curve that, hey, Gene Dixon got four out of 20 right. No, to be a true prophet, you gotta be 100%.
100% correct in your foretelling the future. Or the other aspect of this prophecy is a foretelling, speaking forth the word of God, God using his word, and as you speak forth this word, the Holy Spirit's ministering to you, and the Holy Spirit's speaking to your heart in a number of different ways, and then you go away from there scratching your head, how did Pastor Rick know that? Pastor Rick didn't know that. That's the work of the Holy Spirit through his word.
His word is alive, and because his word is alive, his word, under the anointing of his spirit, can speak to each of us right where you're at. You don't need to meet with the Pope. I mean, I'm available, but, I mean, let me kiss my ring, you want me to sign your Bible, you want me to wear a robe, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
There's one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. You can go direct. You can go direct, directly to God.
Go direct. Why would you wanna be put on hold waiting for me? Because I don't answer the phone. If you're in a crisis, you can get ahold of me and we'll pray with you and stuff, but I'm gonna point you to Jesus.
My job is to point you to Jesus, and keep pointing you to Jesus so that you learn to go to the source right from the Lord's mouth, and the Lord speaks to you, and you're consistent with the word of God. You test everything that comes out of my mouth. You prove all things, hold fast to that which is good.
You test the spirit, and then you're Berean. You search the scriptures to see whether those things be so. If I'm inconsistent with the word of God, then you have a responsibility to correct me as I do you, because we wanna be led by all truth.
We don't wanna make up false doctrine, follow our own way, and trends and such. We wanna stay with the word of God. We wanna be able to prove that which we're saying, and that's why in the type of teaching that I try to provide, it's called expositional teaching, and an expositional teaching is you have to exegete the text.
Eisegesis is imposing upon the text my ideas, and I'm looking for a proof text so I can tell you my vision, or my program, my five points, and I'm imposing upon the text my ideas. That's eisegesis, and the text that it's, you wind up being out of context. You're not taking the context of what's being said, so we are instructed to do, by the Lord, is to teach the word of God exegetically.
Allow the word of God to speak. The word of God's powerful. Just let the word of God speak.
Stand back and let the lion out of the cage. Lion's strong enough to do what it's gotta do. I don't need to sit there and boast about how strong that lion is in the cage.
Just get out of the way. Let the lion out of the cage. The sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, let the word of God rip.
Let it rip. No filter. No fear of man.
No fear that somebody's gonna be angry because we talk about hell, or sin, or whatever it may be. That people are watering down the word of God. Watering down the gospel.
Afraid that people might reject me. To be tolerant. That's a whole lot of lion, and a whole lot of lion is leaving things out.
Not wanting to bring the full counsel of God. And so we speak forth. Speaking forth the word of God.
Prophecy is the greatest. Why? Because the edification is the goal. To connect.
He that speaks in an unknown tongue speaks unto God, not unto man. I'm not connecting with you. If I exercise my gift of tongues right now, it's gonna be nothing to you.
It'd be like me trying to play a violin. I'm not gonna hit any of the notes. It's not gonna connect with you.
It's just gonna be a buzz. It's gonna be just a mess. But if I speak one syllable, one word of the Lord, and it connects with you, maybe the word love, and it connects.
Now you're edified. Now you're built up. Now you're gonna be strengthened.
It's actually God just spoke to you. Hey, pastor, I think the Lord spoke to me through you. I hope so.
Hey, pastor, I think the Lord convicted me today. Well, it's about time. What, do you go to churches you don't feel conviction? You go to churches where the word of God's taught and you're not convicted? And you're an adulterer? You better be convicted.
You better hear repentance. You better hear the cry of God saying he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn, turn ye, for why will you die in your sins, O house of Israel? If you're not, what is it you're hearing? Why are you even there? If God's not speaking to you, why are you there? Verse two, for he that speaks an unknown tongue speaks not unto men, but unto God. For no man understands him, howbeit in the Spirit he speaks mysteries.
So tongues are directed toward God. So if I am exercising my prayer language, my gift of tongue, it's in private, typically. It can be in public, we'll see later, as long as I have a two, one or two, course by one or two person, one at each time with an interpreter.
And if the interpreter says, oh, my children, that's a wrong interpretation. Because now you're interpreting tongues and directing it toward the people. It's not directed.
He that speaks an unknown tongue speaks not unto men, but unto God. So instead, if the person, maybe I'm speaking in French, and I don't know French, but that's my prayer language. Somebody in here speaks French, and they recognize what I'm saying, and they're hearing me praising and worshiping the Lord.
Oh, Lord, I magnify you. You are so good to me, Lord. I just praise and worship you.
That's a proper interpretation. Because it's directed toward God. But who's that edify? It might edify the unbeliever that's here, that one person that understands the French.
But if I know that the people that are sitting here are English-speaking people, it's better for me to speak one word that you understand than a whole host of words that nobody understands. And so the emphasis here is upon edification, upon building us up through the teaching of God's word. In Acts chapter two, verse three at Pentecost, there appeared unto them cloven tongues like a fire.
Cloven tongues means different ones, separated, not just one tongue. There appeared unto them cloven tongues like as a fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
And they said in verse 11, we do hear them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God. 16 different dialects at Pentecost, 16 different languages being spoken, and the people said we're hearing the wonderful works of God as directed toward God. So here, so the cessationists, those that don't think the gifts are operational today, they make a grave mistake in thinking that the speaking of tongues is so that you can go to Russia or China and share the gospel.
That's wrong. It's not unto men. It's unto God.
If you wanna go to China and share the gospel, start studying Mandarin. Study. William Carey translated the Bible in 40 different dialects so that people have the Bible in their own native tongue.
That's what the linguists do. That's what those Bible translators do. And today is the celebration of the death of William Tyndale, who died, who was suffocated and executed in England for translating the Bible into English.
And then within four years, the Bible was translated in several different languages, and that's the beginning of the Reformation, the word of God getting into the hands of people and their common tongue. What good to do you if you go to a Catholic church and you're a common person and you speak Koine Greek as your native tongue, and they're gonna do the mass in Latin? I went to a Catholic church when we were in Sedona, and I took the holy water and I did this and this and all that, and I curtsied at the chair and sat down like a good Catholic boy, and nothing happened to me. Didn't do a thing for me.
I have no idea what all that is. And I made my first communion. I told some guys to say, hey, why don't you say three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers, you know? What's that mean? That's religion.
That's all it is, is religion. I made my first communion, but I didn't know Jesus. Nobody introduced me to Jesus.
I still know the prayers. They're still in there somewhere. But it didn't draw me close to Christ.
In fact, it would give me a heretical view of who Jesus is, that what, I gotta go through his mother? Where do I see that in the Bible? Where in the Bible do I have to go through Mary? The idolatry within the Catholicism we can freely receive, and so we wanna make sure that we get the word of God into the common language of the people. So Erasmus and Tyndale and others took the Koine Greek and began to translate it as it began to come into the native tongue of the Europeans. Revival broke out.
The Dark Ages were over. The Dark Ages were a result in 313 of Constantine nationalizing the church on the east part of the Roman Catholicism. And many unbelievers and people came into the church because there were positions of power as a result of merging the government with the church.
And one of the things they did to control the people was kept them from reading the Bible. So you had to be a professional. You had to be a priest in order to share things, to speak things, and the common people didn't have the word of God.
They had to rely upon the priests, and the priests came up with all sorts of dogma, dogma like false heretical doctrines like you can pray your family out of purgatory. Where on earth is purgatory? There is no purgatory. It's appointed unto all men once to die and then the judgment.
There's no holding compartment that you can go to a priest and give him money and then he'll pray on your behalf and pray your family out of purgatory. Or maybe you want indulgences. Maybe you want to cheat on your wife.
So you go to the priest and you say, hey, how much will it cost me to do this nasty? And he gives you a dollar amount and now you go out and do the nasty. And somehow he's in so good with God it's not a sin. You just bought an indulgence.
Sounds like Washington DC, doesn't it? But when the people start to get the word of God in their own language and they start to read the word of God and God's speaking to them, revival breaks out. Revival through the teaching of God's word. Why do you think the devil wants to dummy down churches today and keep the word of God from the hearts and minds of people? Control, a demonic control.
So the wonderful things of God in 16 different dialects. And then later on in Acts chapter 10 of the house of Cornelius, when the Holy Spirit was poured out upon these Gentile believers, they heard them speak with tongues and magnify God. So again, directed toward God.
So God uses prophecy to speak to men, not tongues. Notice verse three. But he that prophesies speaks unto men to edification.
What's that word edification? It's a construction term. It speaks of building up. God wants you to be built up.
God wants you to be strengthened through biblical content. Paul said in Acts 20 that he was not negligent to give unto them the full counsel of God over a three year period of time in the city of Ephesus. Their blood was not on him as he's taking from Ezekiel 3 and 33 that it's incumbent upon us as pastors.
He said, take heed to the elders, the pastors, over the sheep whom the Holy Ghost has purchased with his own blood, whom the Lord has purchased with his own blood. So their blood bought sheep. And if you tie that in with what Peter heard from the Lord, Peter, do you love me? Feed my sheep.
Paul's saying, I fed them. I gave them the full counsel. I didn't just give them cotton candy.
I gave them as babes. I gave them the milk of the word. But I expected them to grow and come to a place of solid food.
And then I gave them the baby food. And then I gave them some veggies and some fruit and gave them some meat. In the Hebrews, in chapter five, you know, the writer chides the people that you should be teachers by this time.
But you're still babes. In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul chided them. The church of Corinth, they were still babes.
How did he know? Because they were so carnal. Fleshly Christians. They were fighting over, I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos, I'm of Cephas.
They were factious. They're in different groups. They weren't loving.
And Paul looked at their spiritual condition and said, you're just babes. You're not growing. We grow through the study of God's word.
That's how we grow. And we don't grow just hearing God's word. We grow through application of God's word.
The foolish man builds his house on sand. The wise man's a doer of God's word, not a hearer only. James talks about how the word of God's a mirror.
And as you see within God's word, and you see yourself in relationship where God's word at, don't be a forgetful hearer. Don't walk away from there forgetting what the Holy Spirit just spoke to you. The Holy Spirit's saying, put that phone down.
Put the porn down. Quit calling that woman. Quit calling that man.
Quit texting that person. Quit flirting with that person. Stop it right now.
It's only gonna get worse. You're headed to a train wreck. And the Holy Spirit's alerting you through the teaching of the word.
Through psychology, the pastor may try to alleviate the guilt of your present affair. It's not your fault. He didn't show you enough attention.
And they go through all these psychological reasons, justifications to try and assuage your guilt instead of simply saying, adulterers will not enter the kingdom of God. Ooh, that's pretty harsh. I'm gonna take my tie check somewhere else where they don't convict me like that.
Where we can play around at church. It's disgusting, isn't it? I wouldn't feel safe in a church like that. I wouldn't feel safe that my wife and my children were in a safe environment.
I need the hedge, I need the protection of God's word that can identify truth and error, right and wrong. God uses prophecy to speak to men. This word edification to build up, to strengthen through biblical content.
In Acts 20, verse 32, I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up. He's commending these Ephesian elders, the pastors. The word of God's able to build you up.
You wanna know how to become stronger spiritually? Be in God's word. Find a Bible teaching church and you'll be strengthened. The church growth guys, they know that the majority of people don't want the word of God.
They know that the majority of people are looking for teachers having itching ears that will scratch them where they itch, that'll tell them what they wanna hear. So the pastors are moved in a direction of wanting to please people rather than God. And they wind up teaching them doctrines of demons and fables, fairy tales.
We're in a crisis in America and people wanna hide from the crisis underneath the fairy tales being taught in churches. Instead of facing the reality of where we're at and coming to a place of repentance and crying out to God. We're gonna play church.
We're gonna treat church as a playground. Sermonettes for Christianettes. In Ephesians four, verse 11, and he gave some apostles, the 12 apostles, and he gave some prophets, Agabus and others, and prophetesses like Philip's four virgin daughters.
And he gave some evangelists, Philip the evangelist. Everywhere he'd go, he'd share the gospel. And he gave some pastors and teachers.
A pastor teacher, pastor is a Latin word, the tending of sheep. Peter, do you love me? Feed my sheep, the role of a pastor. When Paul uses the word elder, same thing, just a different word.
But it's the oversight of the sheep, the feeding of the sheep. Or you can use the presbytos as another word which is a plurality of elders. But the emphasis is upon the spiritual nurturing of the sheep, the health of the sheep spiritually, collectively watching over his sheep.
So you feed him, you guard him, you protect him. You lay your life down for him if need be. So he gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, teachers.
Why, why did he give these men and women to the church? He says in verse 12 of Ephesians four, for the perfecting of the saints. What's that word perfecting mean? Are you gonna reach a place of perfection? Yes, when you see Jesus face to face. But meanwhile, you are growing, you're maturing.
You're being changed from glory to glory in the image of Christ. I got saved at 20 years old. I didn't know nothing, zero, nada.
I got saved at a concert. First time I ever heard the gospel, right there. So I began to attend Bible studies at the church there, Calvary Costa Mesa, and my pastor began to teach the word.
And I bought a Bible. Can you believe that? I bought a Bible and I brought it with me to church. And I bought a pen because I saw other people doing it.
I began to mark in my Bible. And I have a notebook and mark in the notebook. And then the church got me into a corresponding Bible study that night I got saved.
So I would get these things in the mail, fill them out, send them back and I'd get it again. So now they're taking me through, which is the grounding me, getting grounded in the scriptures, given the essentials of what it means to be saved, what the gospel is. And then that appetite increases as I'm learning and the Lord's speaking to me and I'm bringing my wife there and she and I collectively are hearing from the Lord.
The Lord Jesus is the head over our home. Now, she may be listening to Oprah. She may be watching soap operas during the day.
And I may be watching something, doing something that, you know, football and seeing all the commercials and all that. And so if you're not careful, that worldview will still try to permeate, but we want a biblical worldview. So if we invest in the word of God, the word of God begins to expose the fallacy of Oprah and all the other guys and that whole thing there.
And now we're on the same page. Husband and wife want the same thing. They wanna get to know Jesus.
We're falling more in love with Jesus and he's teaching us through his word. And we're getting victory over the world, the flesh and the devil, because we're growing, being changed, being transformed from glory to glory. So for the perfecting of the saints, why would you perfect the saints? For the work of the ministry.
The pastor and the pastor's wife are not to do all the work of the ministry. We're not the only ones supposed to be sharing the gospel with people and doing everything that needs to be done in a body of believers. You and I collectively, when we discover our gifts, all of us have gifts.
We now exercise those gifts in the body and outside the body for the glory of the Lord, for the edifying of the body of Christ first and foremost, but also from a standpoint of evangelism under the world, for the work of the ministry. So all of us have different gifts for the work of the ministry, the service. You wanna be great in God's kingdom, learn to be the servant of all.
Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. There's ways for you and I to serve the Lord. I exhorted Ronnie and Fred and Kim to exercise their ministry of prayer when I was at their home, because I know that they like to pray.
And so we lifted up Mark and Shelly Dinsmore and their plight, what they're going through. And the objective is get the saints praying, get the people praying, undergird them. The next time I heard from Mark and Shelly, they were doing a little bit better because the Holy Spirit ministers to us through your prayers.
Encouragement that comes, God intervenes, God helps. Don't underestimate a ministry of prayer. Some of you are unknown by your friends and family, but you're not unknown by God.
He sees you, he hears your prayers. Your prayers come up before him as incense, a sweet smelling savor. He looks forward to hearing from you.
He looks forward to talking with you. He looks forward to listening as you talk. And he speaks unto you as you have ears to hear.
It's not a monologue, a dialogue develops where you hear from the Lord and you speak unto the Lord. You intercede on behalf of people. For the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, all designed to build up the body of Christ.
God doesn't want his sheep to be emaciated, wimpy, unfed, starving. He wants his sheep to be the most loved and the best fed in any community. And how do you do that? The pastor has to pour himself into the feeding of the sheep.
Pastor has to first of all be a student, be a disciple himself, has to first be a learner. And that which you learn, then you pass on to others. So to you, you have to first learn before you can minister to your children, before you can minister to your wife, your husband, your family members.
Kathy and I began to watch all of our family members get saved. All of our family members start to go to church with us and sit underneath Pastor Chuck and be taught God's word. My father-in-law at one point at the dinner table says, well, they have a chance to go to purgatory.
And I couldn't let that slide, could I? I'm a brand new believer. I said, there is no purgatory. So how can I prove that to someone? Well, I happened to study, I happened to know that in Luke chapter 16, Jesus spoke a parable of a rich man and Lazarus.
And there's a great gulf between the two. And the rich man died and he was carried over into Hades, into Sheol, into a place of torment. And Lazarus, he too died and was carried by the angels in Hades, in Sheol, which is a Greek and a Hebrew word for hell, but also described as paradise, as Abraham's bosom, the place where Jesus said, this day you'll be with me in paradise.
This was a place, a holding compartment for all those who died. One side was a place of comfort, the other side, a place of torment. Now, the false teaching of the Catholics is these people in that place of torment can be prayed out of purgatory.
There is no purgatory. And so the rich man looks across and says to father Abraham, send Lazarus over. He's still bossing around, a poor guy.
What is it with these rich guys? Send Lazarus over to dip his finger into the water and to touch my tongue because I'm in grievous torment. And Abraham says, no, there's a gulf between you and us. You can't come over here and we can't go over there.
Well, send somebody back to go tell my five brothers. And Abraham says, the Lord says, they have Moses and the prophets, which means they have the Old Testament. They have Moses and the prophets.
If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they hear the one go back from the dead. Sorry, Bill, I love you, but there is no purgatory. It's appointed unto all men, Hebrews nine.
All men wants to die and then the judgment. Each person has till the point in time they're dead to decide. No second chances after death.
And so these are truths that we bring out to people who are in the dogma of false doctrine, maybe Mormons, maybe Catholics, whatever. But you and I have been sent out as we learn of the deity of Christ in John one, Colossians one, Hebrews one, Revelation one. We're able to present Jesus as God to those that knock on the door and say, in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was a God.
First time I heard that, red flag goes up. No, no, that's not in my Bible. That A's not in there.
They inserted that. Well, the Holy Spirit caused that red flag to go up because I'd studied the word of God. The gospel of John's the first place you start.
And I didn't handle, you know, the entire encounter, you know, as well as I might be able to encounter it now. But when that woman took me down some rabbit trails, you know what it compelled me to do? I went home and got into the word. And I began to search for answers that that would never happen to me again.
That I'd be able to give an answer of the hope that lies within me with meekness and with fear. And so when you get tripped up by somebody, don't take it as a defeat. You just get into the word and you search like a Berean and make sure you're ready next time.
Be equipped with the word of God. And so for the edifying of the body of Christ. So notice in this list in Ephesians four, the Lord didn't give any kings to build you up spiritually.
You're looking for a Christian king? You want the Christian king to sign your Bible? You wanna put his face on a coin and call him Cyrus? He didn't list the psychiatrist here or a psychologist here. Some of you may have been helped by psychology, by psychiatrists. God says you have everything you need for life and godliness.
You don't need a rudimentary schooling or understanding from Freud of human behavior, which changes every few years. Which has gone further to the direction of pills rather than therapy. Therapeutic as in trying to assuage your guilt or find a reason for your unhappiness or displeasure or whatever it might be.
And the focus is inward. You don't wanna be looking inward. Where art thou cast down all my soul? Why art thou that's quieted within me? In Psalm 42.
Don't be looking within. You're gonna find junk. You're gonna find a reason to be depressed.
The psalmist says hope thou in God. Get your eyes off yourself back onto God. Worship him.
And all of a sudden you'd be lifted above. You'd be lifted out of. And you learn as a habit of life to think on, to meditate on whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things of a good report.
Think on these things. Don't get mired in the negatives. Mired in the things that the enemy's lying to you about.
No economist. He doesn't listen to economists here. It's not the economy stupid with God.
The marketers, the pastors that go to marketing school to learn how to brand you, to brand the church and market and make merchandise of you. It's always about the money, isn't it? There's never enough money. Marketing.
Or the philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, the wisdom of men. Not listed there. He's got apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers.
That's who the Lord gave as gifts to the church. And a pastor doesn't need to become an expert on the economy or an expert on philosophy or an expert on psychology. Study the word of God.
The word of God has everything that people need for life and Godliness, Peter tells us. The word of God is not inadequate. Man has not learned anything new that would cause the Bible to be inadequate.
There's nothing new under the sun. Your human nature is the same as Adam and Eve's. Nothing's changed.
We are sinners in need of a savior. The problem is me. The problem is my sinful nature and I need Jesus to transform and to change me.
And so be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is a good and acceptable and perfect will of God. How do you transform? Be in God's word. And God by his spirit will cause a metamorphosis, a transformation that the transgender people can't even imagine, can't even reach, can't get there.
It's a God thing. God will take me from being body and soul and change me into body, soul, and spirit. The life of the spirit's superior to the life of the flesh, superior to the material realm because everything in the material is gonna pass away.
If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things are passed away. All things are becoming new.
What are you hearing at church? Are you hearing biblical content? Are you being built up? That's how you evaluate a sermon. That's how you evaluate a church. How much biblical content is there? What Bible did I learn today? Did he start out with a verse and then go into a bunch of stories? Is he Peter Pan prancing all over the thing trying to get me to laugh and cry and you know, motivating, manipulating my emotions? Does it just feel good? And I go away empty having eaten some cotton candy, a few moments of goose pimples? Or is it, you know, the music used? We're gonna use the music for 45 minutes to move emotions, make everybody feel good.
But no word of God, no transformation, no change taking place. If you wanna learn eschatology, if you wanna learn prophecy, you can't learn it there. 27% of the Bible prophecy, but they don't teach prophecy.
If you wanna go through the Old Testament, they don't go through the Old Testament. Well, what do they do? They pick and hunt and choose for their topical marketing. It's all marketing and people love it so.
I heard a story about Billy Graham driving home as he's older. He's driving home in a limousine and as he's driving along, heading home, he said to the driver, he said, you know, I've never driven one of these limos. Would you mind if I were to drive it? And the driver of the limo says sure and pulls over and lets Billy get in there and Billy's driving the limo and pretty soon he goes by a speed trap and these lights, red and blue and lights are all in the back there and Billy pulls over and the cop, the police officer's a brand new traffic cop and he comes up and he sees it's Billy Graham and he's like, well, sir, let me go back to the car and I gotta check on something.
And he goes back to the car and he says, you know, I'm new at this, but you said if there's somebody really important that maybe we should show them some preference, you know? And so his sergeant says to him, well, who is it? Is it the governor? And he says, no, it's not the governor. Well, who is it? Is it the president? No, it's not the president. Well, who is it? I think it's Jesus with Billy Graham driving it.
Jesus is in the limo and Billy Graham's driving it. God's no respecter of persons. But one thing about Billy, one of the phrases that I love over and over and over again, the Bible says, the Bible says, don't you love that? Don't you love that your authority comes from the word of God? Not Royd said or Freud said or Karl Marx said, the philosophers of the age, the Bible says, Jesus said, I love that.
I love that kind of preaching and teaching, staying with the word of God. In Colossians 2, verse six, as you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted. So you get rooted in the word when you're a brand new believer, your roots gotta go down.
Rooted and built up in him. And established, you see the construction words being used here? Rooted, you gotta get in a foundation, get grounded in the word. And then you're building up and then you're established.
There's gotta be some, as I said, a foundation to be established in the word, to be established in him. Because faith is required, but you're gonna have difficulty establishing the faith as you have been taught, abounding there and with thanksgiving. Now he says, beware, watch this.
Beware, lest any man spoil you. Hey, you're gonna spoil your dinner. It's just cotton candy.
Tastes good though. Steady diet of that and you're gonna get sick and die. You're gonna die spiritually.
You're gonna be weak spiritually. Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy. Philosophy has been around a long time.
It's a lover of wisdom, philo love, wisdom. The apostle Paul was on Mars Hill in Athens and the city was wholly given over to idolatry. And Paul tried to quote some of the Epicurean philosophers to try and use as a hook to reach these guys there and it wasn't working.
They said, who is this babbler? As he took the statue that they had unto the unknown God, he tried to preach and introduce them to the true and living God and they rejected him. The city was totally given over to the Greek and Roman and the philosophies of the day. And vain deceit, empty deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiment, I love this word in the King James, the rudiments of the world.
What's that mean? It speaks of nursery level. It speaks of entry level understanding of human beings, of the mind, the will, the emotion. The endeavor of Freud and Royd and all of them to understand human behavior and to try and have preemptive understanding of before somebody commits a crime and give them this pill, give them that pill.
It's all failure, complete failure. It's rudimentary, this kind of understanding, this kind of teaching. Nursery school and not after Christ.
Why not go to the source? Why not go to the creator and ask the creator to speak to me, help me? Why am I depressed? Why am I discouraged? Lord, help me. And as you get into the word, you see that Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from him, that he was despised and rejected of men. You begin to acquaint the suffering that you're going through with the suffering that he went through and how it's translated, how it's transitioned into joy, into rejoicing, going away rejoicing that you're counted worthy to suffer for his namesake.
You're not obsessed with self anymore, looking for answers for men and women and picking the phone up. You pick the phone up to heaven, you get into God's word and the Lord begins to speak to you. And God's not surprised at our failures.
God's not surprised at our weaknesses. But somehow we are. Somehow we impose upon ourselves some level of performance that's gonna finally alleviate all the suffering, all the pain that we've gone through.
I don't wanna sit here and delve into all the different areas of victimization that have come into my life. I'm moving forward. The old things have passed away, all things are becoming new.
I don't wanna think about or meditate about that sort of adversity or things that we experience as children or young adults or even 10 years ago. I'm excited about today and what the Lord might have for me today and I wanna grow. I want the Lord to help me get through it.
And so, but he that prophesies speaks unto men to edification and then he says an exhortation. So a balanced sermon's gonna have three components. We're at the second one.
You've got edification, now you got exhortation. What's the exhortation? It's like a coach motivating people to do. Now you know what the truth is.
How are we gonna get you to apply it? How are we gonna get you to do it? That's exhortation. To stir us up, to motivate. Sometimes guys are just like idiots and they go to marital counseling with Pastor Romain and they've got an anger problem and a raging anger problem in the home and the wife and them are there in marital counseling talking to the pastor.
And it's not psychology, it's the word of God. And I heard a story where he'll take the guy and he'll walk him down to the nursery. He'll go behind the counter and he'll go over and grab a diaper and he'll give it to the man, this big strong guy that thinks he's so tough, yelling at his wife, raging.
And he says, the only people that get away with raging and throwing temper tantrums are those who wear these. And their face, you know, they get so angry, don't you? But that's an exhortation. That's a confrontation.
That's letting you know you're immature. This is unacceptable. Gonna have to stop doing this.
Gonna have to turn to the Lord. And that's a great motivator. In Matthew 11, 17, we have piped unto you and you have not danced.
We've played music, Jesus is saying to his generation, but you won't dance. You're unmotivated. We have mourned unto you and you have not lamented.
A funeral dirge, but you're not moved. You're indifferent. What he has to bring is not valued.
And we see the picture of that with the Laodicean church, where Jesus comes, I know your works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would you were cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
Because thou sayest, I'm rich and increased with goods and in need of nothing, and yet you know not, you're blind, you know not that you're wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. So you're unmotivated, you're complacent. Jesus seeks to exhort them.
He seeks to motivate them and get them out of that lethargy, out of that lukewarmness by warning them. Jesus is unappreciated. The cross is irrelevant.
It's all about what? It's all about money. It's all it's about. It's the economy, stupid.
Bill Clinton's immorality, didn't matter. It's about the money. Fix the economy and they'll vote you in, they'll keep you in.
That's what they want. They're rich and increased with goods and need of nothing. They kick Jesus out of the church.
And yet Jesus says, you're lukewarm, you make me sick. No man can serve two masters. He'll either hate the one or love the other.
Despise the one and draw near to the other. You can't serve God and mammon. You can't serve God and money.
What's your price? The devil wants your price. The devil wants to know how much it's gonna take to neutralize you, to make you ineffective in these last days. What's it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what would a man give in exchange for his life? What's your price? Bow down and worship me, the devil said to Jesus, and I'll give you all these kingdoms of the world.
And Jesus said, it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Be gone, Satan. Verse three, but he that prophesies speaks unto men to edification, exhortation, and comfort.
So every sermon here at Calvary Bremerton should be balanced. There should be enough edification to build you up. When you bring your family, hey, my family's gonna be built up spiritually.
We're gonna have something to sink our teeth into that's gonna be spiritual nourishment. And then the next one is motivation, exhortation. And there's gonna be something there that it isn't just a rote reading of a sermon or without any ethos or pathos or passion.
There's a zeal there, an exhortation to do this, the love of Christ constraining me. And the third part is, after we beat you up a little bit and identified the sin and you're convicted and you're hurting, now we wanna bring comfort. We don't wanna show you the pit of hell.
We wanna show you the cross. Now that you have a clear view of who you are, no more lying, no more justifying, no more rationalizing, no more blaming your wife or your husband, blaming God, you see who you are in relationship to Jesus. Now it's the cross.
He died for those sins. He died for you and he's taken your sins. He's cast from the east to the west, remembers them no more.
He says to the woman caught in adultery, where are thine accusers? Nowhere, Lord, neither do I condemn thee. I will not let thee go and sin no more. That's comfort.
He didn't come for the righteous but for sinners. He came for you and I and every message should have the comfort of the finished work of Jesus upon the cross. And so we comfort others, we're to be cheered up, always reminded of God's unfailing love, his grace, his mercy, a balanced sermon, edification, exhortation and comfort.
So build up, stir up and cheer up. Ecclesiastes 1210, the preacher sought to find out acceptable words and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. We want words of truth.
We don't want halfway words or pseudo-isms or half-truths, we want the whole truth. In Isaiah 50 verse four, the Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. He waketh morning by morning.
He waketh my ear to hear as the learned. And so we need to be very careful of talking too quickly. Be slow to speak and quick to hear.
Sometimes we just need to keep our mouth shut as people pour out the agony, the pain they're going through. Listen and then wait upon the Lord for the Lord to give you a word, a word of comfort. And you don't trivialize.
You don't trivialize, you don't just throw it away. Well, the Lord won't give you more than you can handle. No, what's happening here is you can't handle it.
You're overwhelmed with what they're going through and it's making you very, very uncomfortable. So now you wanna trivialize it to take that burden rather than weeping with those that weep. You just wanna try and make it go away by saying, hey, rejoice, sing a song.
Maybe I don't feel like singing a song. Maybe it's time to cry. Maybe it's time to ache.
My wife just died. I don't need to hear your little platitudes. Of course I know all the good verses.
Now the reality has struck me square in the face and I'm having a hard time coping. Job said to his comforters, you're forgers of lies. You're physicians of no value.
You don't bring comfort, you don't bring healing. All you bring is condemnation. All you do is condemn me.
All you do is try to find fault. All you do is try to blame me for these adverse circumstances that God's allowed in my life. You don't see behind the curtain.
You don't see how the devil was bragging on me. I don't even see it. But he is.
And I can't even comprehend because God's ways aren't my ways. They're past finding out. It's incomprehensible what he's allowed.
I go from paradise, from the richest man, have you considered my servant Job, a man perfect and upright in all of his ways, a man that fears God and eschews evil. And Satan says, remove the hedge, remove the hedge. Take away everything he has and he'll curse you to your face.
Take away his health and he'll curse you to your face. And all this Job sinned not with his lips. Naked came out of the world, naked I'm gonna go.
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name, Lord. Lord, Job worshiped.
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. He knows the way that I take and when he's tried me, I'm gonna come forth as gold. That's perspective.
But there's a verse in chapter three, verse 23 that really bums me out. Prior to all this chaos, there was a hedge around my family, around my children, my life. Tons of blessings are coming in because I know how to pray and because I'm tithing and because I'm serving at the church.
You see, you got a formula. That formula means I got the formula at how to be in the Bless Me Club. But now something, an anomaly, something happens, just a little cancer cell or something changes.
And now all of a sudden, that hedge that was protecting me in Job 3.23 is I'm hedged into this trial. I can't get out. That which used to protect me now is keeping me in.
God's put me in a trap. He's put me in this crucible. And man, I gotta endure it.
How long is this gonna last? Six months, a year, two years? How long are we going this way? I want normal. Bring me back to normal. I don't like this.
Is there something I can do? Is there something I can confess? Is there something? I can't find it, Lord. If you're a mark iniquities, who can stand? I've confessed everything I can think of because some people kept telling me there was sin in the camp. There must be secret sin.
God wouldn't change his mind. He wouldn't change his mind about Job, would he? And then we see at the end of the book, Job comes to the place of abhorring himself and repenting in dust and ashes. Even Job, a man perfectly upright in all of his ways, fearing God and eschewing evil, is a sinner.
And the Lord's ways are righteous. Holy and true are your judgments, O Lord. The closer you get to the Lord, the more sinfulness you see in your own life.
I have heard many such things. Miserable comforters are you all. The condemnation that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were bringing to Job.
Even his wife said, why don't you curse God and die? And he says, oh, you speak as a foolish woman speaks. Shall we not receive good at the hand of the Lord and not evil? Is that your value system? Is that your maturity? Do you understand there's seasons in life where everything seems to go well and then there's other seasons in life where all hell breaks loose? And it doesn't mean that God loves you any less. It means that he wants you to glorify him in the suffering.
That you're privileged to be narrowed unto him. He's your only option. He's your only source of strength.
You can't rely on the money anymore. You can't rely on the health. You can't rely on the relationships.
Only him. He's a jealous God. And he's separated you unto himself for you to get through a day.
You're not the casual Christian. There's intense warfare against you and your family. And the only way you get through it is shutting off all the devices.
Being in his word, being on your knees, and being in prayer, and drawing close to him. And he's there to comfort you. He sends the Holy Spirit to comfort you and to let you know, hey, there's nothing wrong with you.
This is my plan, my purpose for you. You don't understand it now, but trust me. Walk by faith, not by sight.
Paul prayed three times that this messenger of Satan that was buffeting him would be removed, and God told him, no, no, no. My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength's perfected in weakness. Verse four, he that speaks in an unknown tongue edifies himself, but he that prophesies edifies the church.
And so your spirit is built up. In your private devotional time, you benefit from praising God. There came a time where David went over to the area of the Philistines.
He was with his 600 mighty men in 1 Samuel chapter 30. And he left his wife and children and all the mighty men, their children there at Ziklag, a city there at Ziklag. And while David was with his men, his mighty men, going after the Philistines, they came back to Ziklag, and unbeknownst to them, the Amalekites came through and took everybody and burned the city to the ground.
And David's mighty men wept till they could not weep anymore. Big boys cry. Jesus wept.
They were so broken, so discouraged that they began to plot to stone David. David, you're a bad leader. We want to kill you.
We're so angry at you, gotta blame somebody. And where do you go? Where do you go when that's you? It says that David went privately and got alone with his God. He got alone with the Lord.
And when you're alone with the Lord in your prayer closet, that's where you can exercise your gift of tongues, your prayer language, because words are inadequate. You've already prayed every word you can. You're trying to figure out everything you can with your words to appeal to God, that somehow if I say it just right, then he'll do it.
And now you've exhausted all of it. Now it's worship. Now it's I'm gonna worship him.
And I'm gonna worship him, and I don't even know the words to worship him, so I'm gonna pray in my prayer language. I'm gonna sing in my prayer language, and I don't know how it works, but it edifies me. It builds me up.
I'm strengthened as I focus upon him and take my eyes off of myself. David strengthened himself in his God, and the Lord gave him insight to go after the families, to go after the Amalekites. And he found an Egyptian along the road and gave him some food.
The guy hadn't eaten in three days, and gave him some figs and some of Carl's honeycomb. And pretty soon the guy's back with the raisins. He's back to life.
Three days, no food, no water. And he says, what happened? Do you know anything about this? And he says, yeah, the Amalekites, we went and we did Ziklag and burned it and everything. And my master left me here when I got sick, and that's what the devil do.
You get sick, he just throws you aside. And he says, well, where are they? And he let him know where they were. And 200 of David's mighty men were too tired.
And so David and his mighty men, 400 of them crossed the Brook Besor, and they went after the Amalekites, and they got everything back. And they came back, and they were gonna divide up the spoil. And those 400 said, those 200, those wimps that stayed back that weren't warriors that couldn't do it, they're not gonna get anything except their wives and their children back, but they don't get any of the spoil.
And David said, no, those that stay with the stuff and those that go into the field, they're gonna share alike. Some of us stay with the stuff. We manage the home.
We raise the kids. We pray. We pay the bills.
We work. And others go into the ministry. Others go into the mission field.
Others go and leave it all, but they're not alone, are they? We're supported. We're encouraged. And we share alike when we get to heaven at the beam of seat and judgment.
The Lord's gonna reward us all collectively, corporately, because we all participated in speaking the oracles of God. And then if we went ahead in verse 14, if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful. Romans 8, 26, the spirit also helps our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Words are inadequate. And he that searches the hearts knows what is in the mind of the spirit because he makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. So I have help.
I have Jesus who ever lives to make intercession for me. My great high priest is in heaven praying on my behalf. And I have the Holy Spirit who's searching my heart and mind and articulating what needs to be prayed, praying on my behalf.
I have the Holy Spirit praying for me. I have Jesus praying for me. And I have you praying for me.
I'm in a good place as you exercise your gifts. For be, but he that prophesies edifies the church. Tongues build me up, prophecy builds up the church up.
He says, verse five, I would that ye all speak with tongues. So Paul's not against tongues. He's for tongues.
There's no cessation of tongues. You may not have the gift of tongues, but it doesn't mean you're not baptized in the Holy Spirit. The evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit is what? Love.
The fruit of the Spirit is love. We don't all have the same gifts, but you do have the gift of tongues. Don't let it lie dormant.
Use it. It's a gift that God has given you to edify and build you up. But desire prophecy.
Desire the Lord and pray that the Lord would make you one that would speak forth his word. So I would that ye all speak with tongues, but rather that ye prophesy. For greater is he that prophesies than he that speak with tongues, except he interpret that the church may receive edifying.
You see the emphasis upon edifying? Building up the body. Verse 12, seek that which may excel to the edifying in the church. Verse 26, let all things be done unto edifying.
So prophecy needs no interpretation. It communicates unto edification. It hits the mark intended of God as men become God's mouthpiece.
If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God. As the word of God goes forth, the Holy Spirit's bearing witness with your spirit. The Holy Spirit's communicating with you.
There doesn't need to be somebody over here to interpret that. The Holy Spirit's speaking directly to you through the teaching of God's word. You too, as you speak forth God's word, if any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.
As God's speaking through you to a world that's perishing. A world that needs to hear how much Jesus loves them. Be God's mouthpiece.
Let's pray. Father, thank you again for the simplicity of your word, Lord. Thank you for your love.
Thank you for the examples. Thank you, Lord, that we have everything we need for life and godliness. And Lord, in many cases, we desire so much of the world and we diminish, we cheapen the life of the spirit.
We only call upon you, Lord, when we're in trouble. We only call upon you for salvation rather than going to hell. It's like a fire insurance.
But Lord, you desire so much more. You have so much more. So Lord, we pray that you'd stoke the flame within our hearts.
That you'd stoke the desire. That Lord, we'd seek you with all of our heart, all of our mind, all of our soul, all of our strength, that we wouldn't be indifferent or complacent concerning the life of the spirit. Lord, we pray that nothing of this world would compete for that uppermost place within our heart.
Lord, help us to cultivate. Help us to nurture our relationship with you. Give us ears to hear.
Give us a heart, Lord, to deny self and allow you to live through us. Anoint us, Lord. You're empowering.
Pour out the Holy Spirit upon us. Be being filled with the Holy Spirit. That Lord, we'd walk not in the flesh but in the power of the spirit in these last days.
Lord, our desire is that we bear much fruit for your kingdom and for your glory. That we not take that which you've invested in our lives and bury it, Lord, but that we'd reinvest in the lives of others. That we'd speak as the oracles of God.
You speaking through us, Lord. Lord, we're reminded that you can speak through a donkey. We're reminded that you can speak through the rocks if the people were to refrain from worshiping you crying out, Hosanna.
The rocks would cry out. And Lord, we're humbled in knowing the primary way that you desire to communicate with humanity is through human beings. Yielded to you, filled with your Holy Spirit as you speak through us, Lord.
Help us, Lord, we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.