[00:00:01] Hello and welcome to Tal Paul's preaching. This is episode 16 which was recorded on Sunday, June 9th of 2019 and it is titled Basics of Christianity. There is not a large main scripture for this sermon, but lots of single Bible verses are referenced.
[00:00:24] This sermon explores how important the Bible the word of God is to Christianity and then looks at the sin problem, the good news of the Gospel, Jesus as Savior and salvation by grace through faith.
[00:00:46] Tall Paul and my. Well, my wife's grandfather. But my grandfather, he had a saying I just loved. And he would say today would be a good day, Lord, yesterday would have been better.
[00:01:04] He was a character.
[00:01:07] He just couldn't wait to go see the Lord and He is there with him now. I'm kind of jealous.
[00:01:13] Well, let's bow our hearts in prayer.
[00:01:17] Oh Lord, you are.
[00:01:20] You're so good and we can rely on that. Lord, you love us so much.
[00:01:27] You did everything. You gave your only begotten Son for us.
[00:01:32] And Lord, we just seem to be in that season of aches and pains and hurts. And Lord, will you just heal us and be right there with us through the trials and tribulations? Lord, we just understand that we have victory in youn, Lord, that yout did all the work and we can rest in that. And so Lord, we just claim that. We just claim victory in Jesus.
[00:02:00] And Lord, will youl send you'd Holy Spirit to open our eyes and heart and what yout would have us to learn, Lord, you wrote it, it's in your Bible. And so will you just teach it? Will you just teach our hearts what you would have us to know?
[00:02:21] And this we pray in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:02:30] Well, today I'd like to talk about the basics of Christianity.
[00:02:38] I need a reminder of what this life is all about.
[00:02:43] I tend to get caught up in the cares of the world or my focus can be too much on projects around the house or work or family or sports or well, you name it. I can get lost in that.
[00:02:58] Get my focus off of God.
[00:03:01] Even with my Bible studies, I can dive into what a word means in the Greek or the Hebrew and study a certain verse or passage. And I just kind of miss the forest for the trees sometimes.
[00:03:16] So I need to stop myself and remind myself what God considers important to focus on.
[00:03:25] So where do we start? Well, how do we know there even is a God?
[00:03:31] How do we know anything about Him? What's his character? What's he like?
[00:03:36] How do we know what truth is?
[00:03:39] How do we know how to act or what to do or what not to Do? How do we know? Well, anything.
[00:03:48] This, the Bible, it contains everything we need to know and everything we ought to know.
[00:03:58] It contains the truth.
[00:04:02] It's God's instructions, God's morality, God's plan, God's truth, God's word.
[00:04:10] It's all written for us here in the Bible.
[00:04:15] Everything we believe or should believe comes from the word of God. The Bible.
[00:04:23] The Bible is the inspired word of God. Well, what does inspire mean? Well, to expire means to breathe out.
[00:04:31] To inspire means to breathe in, conspire means to breathe together and perspire. Well, that is what I do when I stand up here because I am always nervous.
[00:04:43] But inspire means to breathe in. And so God, through the Holy Spirit, he inspired or he breathed life into each and every author of the Bible.
[00:04:59] It's not a bunch of opinions that men wrote down for us to study. It's not just wise words of some sage.
[00:05:09] No, it's directly from God.
[00:05:13] The entire Bible is the inspired word of God.
[00:05:17] Not just a verse or two, not just one book or a few, not just the New Testament, but the entire Bible.
[00:05:29] And there is so much proof that the Bible we have today is the word of God. And I am sure we all believe has been examined thoroughly. And even the people that have tried to find fault with the Bible as being real, in the end they've had to relent that it is real.
[00:05:53] It's just that they then don't want it in the schools, they don't want it in the government, they don't want it in public because it exposes evil and reveals the truth.
[00:06:08] I mean, it's not what they want a religion to be.
[00:06:13] It doesn't contain get rich schemes.
[00:06:17] It doesn't teach anywhere that someone's going to rise up and be in power over everyone else.
[00:06:25] In fact, it teaches us to go that extra mile. When the Roman soldier would compel them to carry something a mile, Jesus told them to go too.
[00:06:35] It teaches us to turn the other cheek when someone smites us.
[00:06:41] It teaches us to forgive people when they despitefully use you or spin you and hate you.
[00:06:49] It teaches us to honor those in power.
[00:06:52] I mean, come on.
[00:06:55] It teaches us to pray for our enemies.
[00:06:59] Even those enemies who don't believe that prayer works. We're to pray for them. Yes, the Bible is real and truthful and it is a tremendous gift from God to us.
[00:07:13] And it's available for us to freely enjoy and read or listen to or it's even out there on video.
[00:07:24] It's so amazingly available to us. And in so many different forms and translations that we're. We're without excuse.
[00:07:33] For thousands and thousands of years, people wished they had what we have right here.
[00:07:40] Very few had the written word of God and relied on others to read it. And they actually had to memorize it in the times of Jesus.
[00:07:49] In fact, the Israelites had forgotten the word of God when they were in captivity. And in Nehemiah, it explains when they came back that they discovered the Word again and it brought new life into them.
[00:08:04] See, the Native Americans operated like that. They had spoken stories and legends and their knowledge of the plants and the animals and everything was passed down from word of mouth.
[00:08:21] That's how they did it from generation to generation from spoken word. And now much of that is lost.
[00:08:29] But God's Word never fails.
[00:08:33] The heavens and the earth might pass away, but God's Word will not pass away. It is with us forever.
[00:08:41] Psalm 138:2 says, I will worship toward your holy temple and praise your name, God, for your loving kindness and for your truth, for you have magnified your word above all your name.
[00:08:59] The way I figure it, if there is a God who can't preserve his word and his truth and his message to us, if he can't get what he wants us to know, then that God isn't powerful enough to save me, to save us.
[00:09:17] But our God did keep and preserve it for us. It's not lost, it's not hidden.
[00:09:24] We have the originals, there's some minor translation issues, and there's some translations that are word for word and others thought for thought, but we still have it in Greek and Hebrew, and we can go back and retranslate it if we'd like.
[00:09:43] It was important to God to preserve it.
[00:09:47] We can know nothing about God unless He tells us.
[00:09:53] God loves us greatly. And without the Bible, we would be lost in the dark.
[00:09:58] And speaking of darkness, the first thing we need to know from the Bible is sin.
[00:10:05] Sin, the word means to miss the mark. So when they would shoot an arrow at a target, at a bull's eye, when that arrow went astray, someone would call out, sin. And that meant simply they. They missed the target.
[00:10:19] And the Bible teaches us that it started way back in the Garden of Eden. God created mankind, Adam and Eve, and gave them a choice.
[00:10:31] Adam and Eve, they were champions.
[00:10:35] Well, when you have the Olympics, each country gets together the best, and those are their Olympians, and they send them off and. And they all compete, and they represent each and every country. Well, Adam and Eve represented mankind. They were our Champions of the human race.
[00:10:56] They did not have mommy issues.
[00:10:59] They weren't abused as children.
[00:11:02] They weren't tortured by their siblings. And they didn't grow up jealous of their cousins because they were it, Adam and Eve.
[00:11:11] They could not blame anything on their environment. They grew up in paradise, in the Garden of Eden.
[00:11:18] Yet they were given a choice.
[00:11:21] Obey the word of God or disobey.
[00:11:25] And our champions failed.
[00:11:30] They fell. And they were brought down by sin.
[00:11:34] Dying, you shall surely die, the Lord God told them.
[00:11:39] And they have passed that sin and death unto every one of us.
[00:11:43] All born of Adam sin.
[00:11:47] Now God declared war on sin.
[00:11:50] God is at constant war with sin until that's finally dealt with.
[00:11:57] God is not at war with Satan. Satan was created.
[00:12:02] It's not a battle. God could, in a blink of an eye, eliminate Satan.
[00:12:08] It's not, oh, we're curious, is evil or good going to prevail?
[00:12:14] It's not like that at all.
[00:12:16] And God is not at war with us.
[00:12:19] God does not hate anyone.
[00:12:22] We choose which side we are on in the war against sin.
[00:12:27] Are we for sin or are we for God?
[00:12:31] That's our choice.
[00:12:32] We can choose not to do God's will and side with sin. And we do so for many reasons. We have many excuses on why we do it.
[00:12:41] But that is when we oppose God because we are for sin or pro sin and we become an enemy of what God is trying to defeat.
[00:12:54] We've all sinned. We've all missed the mark. And Jesus told us the greatest Commandment. In Matthew 22:37, Jesus said, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
[00:13:12] How many minutes a day do I actually accomplish that?
[00:13:18] I missed the mark.
[00:13:20] And to show us our sin, the Bible gives us God's law.
[00:13:26] It's to show us our hopelessness that we can't do it on our own.
[00:13:32] And we need that God to save us. A savior. The law is a mirror. And you hold up that mirror, the light of the mirror, and you look and you say, oh my gosh, look how giant my head has gotten because of pride.
[00:13:46] Or you go, oh my goodness, that foul language. Where did that come from? I didn't even know it was there. Oh wretched man that I am.
[00:13:55] We are hopeless on our own and are slaves to sin and fight against God in his war on sin. That's bad news.
[00:14:03] But it doesn't get much better because our sin nature, our flesh never gets better.
[00:14:11] It doesn't improve. And it's Worthless to build upon.
[00:14:15] There is nothing good in me.
[00:14:19] That's the whole point of being born again, born new.
[00:14:23] We identify with crucifixion that our sinful aspect, our sin nature, our flesh needs to die and to be crucified and buried.
[00:14:35] And a new nature is born from God above through his spirit.
[00:14:41] And then, and only then, are we free not to sin.
[00:14:45] But I'm getting ahead of myself.
[00:14:47] In short, God hates sin because sin and lies destroy his people.
[00:14:52] It hurts us, it kills us.
[00:14:56] So how do we get rid of sin?
[00:14:59] Do I have to do something physical? Do I have to climb the highest mountain or swim the deepest ocean or sit cross legged and chant boogie woogie or whatever they chant? I do not know what they chant.
[00:15:14] No.
[00:15:16] Do I need my good to outweigh my bad? Is it some sort of balance?
[00:15:21] No. I could never get my good better than my bad.
[00:15:26] Do I need to give everything I have to the poor or become a monk or. Or do I need to memorize the entire Bible? Is that what is going to do it?
[00:15:37] Do I need to become Jewish or go to the right church and do all the right rituals?
[00:15:43] Is it even baptism by water that saves me? Well, I can tell you, because I know myself that if salvation from sin required anything on my part, if I had to do it on my own, if I had to keep the law, I would not be able to do whatever it entailed because I'd screw it up, I would lose it, I'd misplace it, I would fail, fail at it on my own. I couldn't be holy and righteous for half an hour, let alone for an entire month or year or however long it takes. And that length of time just happens to be an entire life to do it right.
[00:16:29] And with my sin, God just doesn't look the other way, you know, that's not the way it works. God doesn't pretend it doesn't happen.
[00:16:40] That's not righteousness and that's not holy.
[00:16:44] Romans 6:23 says, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
[00:16:56] What we earn, what payment is due, what we get, what we have to receive because of our one single sin, just one sinful thought is death.
[00:17:09] God's law demands death for each and every sin.
[00:17:14] What I need, obviously, is someone to help.
[00:17:19] And apart from God, we can do nothing.
[00:17:24] I need a savior, Someone to save me from my sin and the death that is owed.
[00:17:30] Oh, thank God for a loving God.
[00:17:33] God's got a plan for my Sin.
[00:17:38] God knew our frail limitations long before he created us. And God came up with a plan.
[00:17:45] His ultimate love, that Jesus himself tells us in John 15:13. It says, Greater love has no man than this. That a man would lay down his life for his friends.
[00:18:02] It's amazing to realize that God doesn't love any person more than another.
[00:18:07] You know, I think God loves my wife more than me, but that's.
[00:18:11] That's not true.
[00:18:13] God loves his son Jesus just as much as he loves you. Because God's love doesn't change. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink or dissipate. It can't get better.
[00:18:26] God loves us at 100% for eternity.
[00:18:32] And God doesn't let his feelings get in the way of his actions. And love is an action.
[00:18:39] We act based upon how we feel. Sometimes I don't feel like eating, or I don't feel like going there, or I don't feel like seeing them, or most often I feel like going to bed.
[00:18:55] God, however, is much better. In Romans 5:8, it says, God exemplifies his love towards us in that while we were yet sin sinners, Christ died for us.
[00:19:10] Jesus is that Savior.
[00:19:13] Jesus is just the person we need to save us from our sins. He is our Redeemer.
[00:19:21] Now, I've been talking about some heavy stuff like sin and death, and I hope this joke will help change the mood as we focus on much better things.
[00:19:33] A pastor's wife was preparing pancakes for her two sons.
[00:19:38] At the table, the boys began to argue over who was going to get the first pancake.
[00:19:46] Their mother saw the opportunity to teach her sons a moral lesson. And so she instructed them. She said, if Jesus were sitting here, he would say, I can wait. Let my brother have the first pancake.
[00:20:03] Upon hearing it, her oldest son turned to the younger son and he said, you be Jesus.
[00:20:15] You be the Jesus that lets me have the first pancake. Well, I'm sure that she gave the first pancake to the the younger son.
[00:20:27] God's plan for redemption was that He Himself would pay the price for our sins.
[00:20:35] He knew we were incapable. He knew we needed Him. He created us.
[00:20:40] And despite his feelings, Jesus, willingly out of love for us, went to the cross and paid that price.
[00:20:49] Jesus is our redeemer, our kinsman, Redeemer. And that means that Jesus had to become man to save mankind.
[00:20:58] An angel or a lamb or a goat or an ox. Whatever they sacrificed wasn't enough to fulfill the law.
[00:21:08] Jesus also had to be completely sinless.
[00:21:12] That perfect Lamb of God without blemish And Jesus never had an evil thought.
[00:21:18] Jesus also had to be willing.
[00:21:22] Jesus had a choice and chose always to do God's will. I think that is the greatest miracle that Jesus did. Of all the miracles that he did, was that he did God's will, no matter what, all the time.
[00:21:38] And God's will is that we, all of us, would be saved.
[00:21:45] That's God's heart.
[00:21:47] That's good news. That's great news, really.
[00:21:51] And that's what people call the gospel. Gospel means good news.
[00:21:55] In 1st Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul declares exactly what the gospel that saves us is. And the first thing that the Apostle Paul teaches us is that first, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
[00:22:11] The second, and that he was buried and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.
[00:22:20] I'm sure you caught what the apostle Paul said. Notice that it was all according to the Scriptures.
[00:22:27] The entire Bible is about Jesus.
[00:22:31] And it demonstrated and showed us all what Jesus would do.
[00:22:37] From the Passover in Egypt to the serpent on the pole that Moses lifted up that showed Jesus crucifixion.
[00:22:46] It was a story. And it was like exactly what Christ was going to do for us. He was going to die according to the scriptures.
[00:22:56] And from the seed of the woman bruising Satan's head in the garden, and Jonah spending three nights and three days in the belly of that great fish.
[00:23:09] That showed us that Jesus himself was going to rise on the third day, the resurrection.
[00:23:17] You see, in Christianity, resurrection is something completely different from all the other religions.
[00:23:27] It's what sets it apart.
[00:23:29] That our hero, our Savior, Jesus would die is different from everything that we're about. We always want our heroes to go through life and accomplish everything without a scratch.
[00:23:42] Even Jesus disciples were shocked and amazed that he died.
[00:23:49] Even though he told them he was going to die, they were still shot.
[00:23:55] You see, salvation belongs to our God.
[00:24:00] God did it his way.
[00:24:03] Jesus didn't just show us the way. Jesus is the way.
[00:24:07] In John 14:6, Jesus explained to his disciple, I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes unto the Father except by me.
[00:24:22] Jesus said, all glory and honor and praise belongs to our God, because God did the work and paid the price. And so God sets the rules.
[00:24:34] Now our part comes in what we have to do. And God asks us to humbly, by faith, believe and accept God's offer of salvation through Jesus the Messiah.
[00:24:51] That's it.
[00:24:53] Why humbly?
[00:24:55] Because we first must recognize our sin and the need for God's help.
[00:25:00] God's help is God's grace.
[00:25:04] We're saved by the life of Jesus, reconciled through that grace, realizing God loves us so much to save us.
[00:25:14] It's his kindness that leads us to repentance.
[00:25:19] Now, grace, an acronym for grace.
[00:25:24] God's riches at Christ's expense.
[00:25:27] God's Riches at Christ's Expense is a good way to explain grace. We don't deserve it.
[00:25:34] We can come to the Father and have unity only in Christ.
[00:25:40] That's how we have peace with God.
[00:25:43] No longer on the side of sin, now we have a relationship with God through Jesus. We know him personally and love is what maintains that relationship.
[00:25:58] See, Christianity isn't a religion of rules to reach God. Christianity is a relationship with God himself.
[00:26:08] So humbly by Faith believe.
[00:26:13] Romans 10:17 says so. Then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
[00:26:23] Faith is believing God's word.
[00:26:27] It's not blind faith. There's no such thing.
[00:26:31] You see, we don't sit in a chair without the faith that it will hold us up. I mean, we would be foolish to sit in a chair with three legs. It looks like it is ready to break and topple over.
[00:26:44] See, we have to believe with the knowledge that we have our experience with past chairs with two legs or whatever that that chair will hold us up and not dump us to the ground.
[00:26:59] Faith is when we sit because faith is an action. That's when we act, that's showing our faith.
[00:27:07] We can't have faith in God's grace if we don't believe and know that God is good, that he loves us.
[00:27:16] It takes that knowledge of God's word, the Bible, to have that faith in God, to know God's character and how loving he is.
[00:27:27] It's not that we have to work for our salvation. No grace with works is useless or dead, as the Bible says.
[00:27:36] We can't add anything to grace.
[00:27:40] It's not Jesus died for our sins and we have to go to church every Sunday. It's not Jesus died and we have to walk on our tiptoes our entire life. There is nothing we can add to what God did.
[00:27:56] However, our faith without works, our faith without action, that's useless, that's dead. As James teaches us, faith is an action.
[00:28:09] We must believe God is good and that God has done all to save us.
[00:28:14] Ephesians 2:8 9 says, for by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works.
[00:28:29] Lest any man should boast.
[00:28:33] See, if it was anything I did, I could claim, oh, I deserve it. I earned it and I would boast about it. No, we can't earn it and we don't deserve it. It's by God's love and grace.
[00:28:48] So humbly, by faith, believe and accept.
[00:28:51] And part of acceptance is that repentance, we must repent and decide to no longer sin.
[00:28:59] Repentance is to turn completely around and go the other direction.
[00:29:05] An example of that is Saul the Apostle. Paul was Saul before he became Paul.
[00:29:12] And he was just determined and he persecuted those Christians with all he had. He was just 100% going in that direction. And when he repented, God picked him up and turned him around. And when he dropped, he might have gone even harder. For the gospel of God, he turned his life around. And now instead of persecuting Christians, he was one of the top Christians.
[00:29:42] It is a great example of repentance and repentance I wish, but it's not.
[00:29:50] It's not a one time deal, but it's a continual process and many consider this scripture, 1 John 1:9, as the Christian's bar of soap, they call it. This is how we deal with sin.
[00:30:06] 1 John 19 says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
[00:30:18] Praise God.
[00:30:19] God is so good.
[00:30:22] Salvation isn't really about getting us to heaven.
[00:30:26] Salvation is about God coming into us.
[00:30:30] Born again.
[00:30:32] We have a new nature. No longer slaves to sin. We are free to serve God and to not die that second death.
[00:30:41] See, death means separation. Death is separation.
[00:30:45] And that first death is when the soul leaves the body.
[00:30:50] When the body goes and turns to dust and ashes, the soul doesn't go with it. The soul goes on.
[00:30:56] The second death is when the soul is separated from God.
[00:31:01] We do not want that.
[00:31:03] The saying goes, if you are born once, you die twice.
[00:31:09] If you are only born once by the flesh, live on this life, then you are going to die that second death. But if you are born twice, you only die once.
[00:31:20] When you are born from anew by the Spirit of God. We don't suffer the death of our soul being separated from God.
[00:31:30] We were never supposed to go through life alone.
[00:31:35] We were built for God to dwell within us.
[00:31:38] When we are born anew or born again, we receive the Holy Spirit. The third Person of the Trinity of God is given to us as an earnest payment or a down payment, if you will.
[00:31:52] And God's not going to back out of that deal because we get to keep the Holy Spirit no matter what.
[00:32:00] So the Holy Spirit is absolutely incredible.
[00:32:04] Jesus even told us that the Holy Spirit is better than he is.
[00:32:08] Because it was expedient that Jesus would leave us. Because the Holy Spirit would then come.
[00:32:15] Why?
[00:32:16] Because the Holy Spirit is everywhere we go.
[00:32:21] Jesus was only in one place at one time.
[00:32:25] He was physical and localized. If Jesus was here, and Jesus is here. But if he were here physically, and when I left, Jesus went with me, you all would be left alone.
[00:32:37] But the Holy Spirit is spiritual and is everywhere.
[00:32:43] The Holy Spirit is in each and every one of us who believe.
[00:32:47] And that's awesome.
[00:32:50] Never going to leave us, never forsake us.
[00:32:54] Let us leave here comforted and comforted by that.
[00:32:59] The Holy Spirit is the comforter.
[00:33:02] And if we humbly, by faith believe and accept God's offer of salvation through Jesus the Messiah, that we each are born from God above and have the Holy Spirit to be with us forever and always. We are saved from sin and have that new nature born new.
[00:33:25] Let us then, by the power of God, walk in the spirit with Jesus.
[00:33:31] Praise God.
[00:33:33] He did it. He saved us.
[00:33:36] And that is what life is all about.
[00:33:41] Thank you, God. Lord, we bow before you. You are worthy. You have done it. You have saved us through your power, through you giving everything you had, you have opened that door for us to freely walk through.
[00:34:00] Lord, we want to be with you. We want that Holy Spirit in our heart.
[00:34:06] We want to feel your presence always, Lord. And help us to walk in the Spirit and have that comfort that we belong to you. We are now sons and daughters of your kingdom.
[00:34:21] And when we die and leave here, that we will always and forever be with you.
[00:34:27] Praise God. You are so worthy, Lord. And accept our offerings, Lord, as we offer what little we have, Lord, to you. Lord, will you just use it for your will and for your glory? Lord, may you be glorified in our offering.
[00:34:49] In Jesus name we pray.
[00:34:52] Amen.
[00:34:57] Thank you for listening to this message.
[00:35:00] We hope you enjoyed it.
[00:35:02] Our prayer is that the message, in some way or another, helped in your walk with God and that your relationship with God was strengthened and grew more intimate.
[00:35:15] If you would like to contact us with questions or comments, you can email us at the following.
[00:35:22] That's
[email protected] or me at R E D L E T t e r s.com thank you.
