Jim Styles - Living as a Member of God's Family - Class 4 - You Cannot Serve God and Mammon

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:01

   Good morning everyone. So if you can’t hear me right now, you might want to relocate. I have been told that some of the speakers aren’t working and I can’t shout. I don’t have that kind of voice. So anyways, if you don’t want to listen today, you could always just like look up up on Chris Adelphian bibletalks.com and you can listen to it there.

2. 0:20

   You can speed it up, slow it down, whatever you like. It’s that’s the great thing about technology, isn’t it? It’s like now some people tell me I speak too fast. Sue used to laugh at me ’cause I would play tapes and I would speed them up when you could actually adjust the speed.

3. 0:33

   I like to speed up the classes and listen to them a little bit faster. But anyways, everybody except John Martin, I could never keep up with him. So that was always a great lesson. Anyways, so our goal today is to have a look at the idea of not serving God and mammon. I’ll do that probably for maybe half the class right there. But the rest of that I think I’d like to spend some time on God’s election cause.

4. 0:55

   A number of you have talked to me about it and I’d like to at least give you a a summary of Cliff Notes version of that class. If you want more, you could look that up in christopherbibletalks.com and you could find like an entire class on that. So our goal today was to have a look at the idea we can’t serve God and mam. And I think this one, especially for the younger people that are here, this one is the challenge of your life right now about serving God and mammon.

5. 1:20

   Because those of us that are older and have gone through life, we we pretty well have established life patterns. And we’re we don’t have all these ideas like what we would like to to be and what we’d like to buy and what we’d like to have. Like for Sue and I, we we bought a house we’ll probably you know we’ve retired in that house.

6. 1:37

   We’ll die in that house and it’s probably that’s it let’s say put us kids put us in a nursing home or something. But that’s probably what I’ll end up with. Although it’s possible we may trade homes with one of our kids because he has A1 level house. We have a two level house and we may get to the point where we can’t walk up those stairs.

7. 1:53

   But when you’re younger, right now, this is a challenging time for you, for the younger people that are here. You’re making decisions about your career pathways, who you’re going to marry, where you’re going to live, what kind of house you’re going to have, your car, all these different things. And if we’re not careful, what can happen is that we get these ideas about, oh, I’d like to have that, and I’d like to have that. And it’ll be great if I have one of those. And sometimes younger people actually want to get a house that’s bigger than their parents ever had because maybe you got squished into a bedroom with your brother or sister and, you know, kind of let that happen again, although you probably wouldn’t mind your spouse.

8. 2:28

   That would be OK. But what happens then is that if we’re not careful, we make decisions about our career pathways based on all these things that we want to accumulate all the stuff of this world. And before you know it, you can fill up your life with working and working and working to have all these toys and all this stuff and you have no time for God.

9. 2:49

   And I would say probably for all of you that are here in the front area, this is probably one of the challenging things you will run into in your life. And I just, I warn you about that because I can still remember when Sue and I bought our first house, a realtor looked at us and he said what are you doing buying such a small house and a cheap house?

10. 3:05

    He said we could use Sue’s wages too. She could work too. And then we could get more than they. They try to push you into bigger and better things. And we looked at him and said, no, we’d like her to stay home with the kids. And they they just couldn’t understand that kind of philosophy, philosophy of life. But it makes a big difference and the freedom and the time that you have for the truth and for serving God. So as Matthew said, as Jesus said in Matthew 6 and verse 24, it’s a pretty black and white statement. You really can’t serve 2 masters. You just can’t do that.

11. 3:38

    It’s like you can’t go out there and get all the the drinks and the coffee and the all those buns that we ate this morning and all that good stuff out there. You can’t spend your time out there and and fill up out there and still get back here on time. You’re either serve the presiding brother and get back here on time or you serve our belly and we go fill up anyway. That’s just funny.

12. 4:05

    It’s Christadelphians all around the world. Wherever you go we’re always late getting back to classes with with breaks. We just we like to socialize. That is the way we are. Doesn’t bother me at all. So, but he says very clearly, you cannot serve God and mammon, ’cause you already either hate the one and love the other one, or else you’ll be loyal to the one and despise the other.

13. 4:25

    But you can’t do both. That’s a pretty, you know, black and white statement. You won’t be able to satisfy all the stuff of this world that you want to have the God of this world. You can’t do that and also serve God there. There just isn’t time. You don’t have time in your life to do that, You know, It’s it’s far better to make your decisions now about what you want to do spiritually and put those up at the top of the list and then let the other stuff fall into place and God will take care of that. He He really will for you.

14. 4:56

    You may not have the biggest house, You may not have all the best toys, caravans and boats and all this kind of stuff that people invest in today and fancy cars, But God promises he’ll take care of us and you’ll have time for serving him. And that’s what we want to look at this morning.

15. 5:12

    So you wonder, like, what in the world is mammon? Those of you that have researched this, you might have found out that some people think it originated with an Arabic word, mammon, which was really riches or money, or from a Hebrew word that meant that which was to be trusted. But you can see either way, the problem is we, we trust in the riches of this world. And you can see how they’re connected, that we end up thinking that these riches that we go out to get and all this stuff that we accumulate, we think it’s going to make us happy.

16. 5:41

    That’s that’s what we think. We think, oh, I just, I just be so much happier. And we sort of deceive ourselves into thinking that, oh, I could serve God so much better if I had this bigger house and I had this more expensive car and I had all these all these toys out there.

17. 5:54

    And if we read Ecclesiastes and believe Solomon, we’d realize he already ran the test. He did it. He had all the money imaginable. He tried everything he could, all the things you might think about that were going to make you happy. And he tried them all and he ended up concluding. It’s all vanity.

18. 6:11

    It’s like striving after the wind. And and you, you either believe them or you go through life and experience it yourself. That’s a choice you have to make. But God wrote it in Ecclesiastes for us. He recorded it so we could learn from somebody who made mistakes and hopefully not have to do those same mistakes and live through life and do it all over again. But let’s face it, it it happens to a lot of us. We just go back through Ecclesiastes, we relive it at our own life.

19. 6:40

    We never accumulate what Solomon had. No way. We’re nowhere near what he got. And we, but we still think that all that stuff is really going to bring us happiness. And it doesn’t. It, it doesn’t bring happiness. People that travel around the world see that very clearly. If you travel around to Africa, you travel around to India and you Pakistan, and you see that his brothers and sisters and the way they live, they don’t have all the toys that we have here. And yet many of them are very satisfied in life. They’re happy with the truth.

20. 7:08

    They’re thankful for what God has done. They are content because they’re not striving after wind. So you look at Mammon today and all the different versions of Mammon today, I think I may have lost you entirely. I’m not sure there is that if that happened, but it sounds to me like are the speakers still on back there?

21. 7:25

    Maybe a little bit. But we may have lost the speakers. So if I can’t project out there, I’m sorry. These rooms just really aren’t designed for projecting voice. But you know, the things that people strive after today we we think these things are going to bring us happiness that’s that’s our that’s our fallacy.

22. 7:42

    It’s the deception of the flesh. We deceive ourselves. But in reality, if if you talk to people and you ask them what would really bring them the most happiness, it isn’t all that stuff. I remember talking to teachers when I was I was been teaching for about 38 years in public schools back in Michigan, and I would ask the people that were retiring, you know what? When you look back at your life, what would you change now if you could what?

23. 8:07

    What have you learned from teaching? Cause many of them have taught for 30, some years, 40 years, whatever. And now they’re going to retire. The sad thing was, and watching them, I saw that when people retired from school, a lot of them died within a couple years. That was really interesting about teachers, and we don’t last long. They always said that about math teachers. We don’t really die.

24. 8:29

    We just reduce to lowest terms. But I I when I asked them about what they would have changed about their life, the vast majority of them said they would have spent more time with their families. That’s a interesting concept to me. That’s what they learned after all those years. They gave their whole life to their career and died probably soon afterwards, and wished that they had made the choice to spend more time with their families. And I think for some of us, it might have been that we would have spent more time in in being involved in our collegias and our and godly activities.

25. 9:05

    It’s it’s not something that you folks as young people want to live to regret. You have to make those choices now of putting the priorities right. And we don’t want to try to serve God and mammon. So I just want to look at a couple of characters that tried and you can see the results of these things.

26. 9:22

    You know these stories quite well. Remember Naaman when he got cured of his leprosy in Second Kings Chapter 5? Remember how Naaman tried to get Elijah to take a gift? You know you want to give him a gift. And Elijah says no, no, no, I’m not going to take the gift. You know, in verse 16 of chapter five, he says what he said to the Naaman.

27. 9:39

    As the Lord lives before whom I stand, I will receive nothing. And he urged him to take it, but he refused. He wasn’t going to take a gift for this because Elijah realized he hadn’t done that. He hadn’t cured Naaman’s leprosy. God had done that. It’s not something he wanted to take money for then.

28. 9:56

    And yet he just says go in peace. So he departed from him a short distance. But then what ends up happening is Gehazi’s watching all this. And Gehazi’s eyes are opening up about the gifts. And he’s thinking about, oh wow, what can we get this guy? He’s got connections to a lot of money and good things, a lot of the toys of this world, the garments of this world.

29. 10:17

    So Gehazi, he runs after him and he’s going to get something from him. All right. And then he goes and tells he he tells Naaman in verse 22, He says, oh, all’s well, my master has sent me. Here come the lies. See this is the deception of the flesh. We end up thinking that we’re going to be able to pull this off and somehow do it within the the realm of the righteousness of God.

30. 10:39

    And we can’t serve 2 masters. So he makes up a line my master sent me saying. Indeed just now two young men are the sons of the prophets have come to me from the mountains of Ephraim. Please give me a talent of silver and two changes of garments And Gahe’s eyes was thinking, wow, we’re going to cash in on this one, right?

31. 10:58

    But you know, he comes back and he and he talks to Elijah and Elijah knows what he’s done. Just like the angels, they know where our treasure is. They know what we’re doing. They know our goals and our objectives in life. They know what we really want. What do we really want? We can’t serve God and mammon, and he lies to him.

32. 11:18

    He says, Well, your your servant didn’t go anywhere when Elijah questions him. And Elijah knows and and he says in verse 27. Therefore the leprosy of Naman will cling to you and your descendants forever. And he went out of his presence, leprous as white as snow. It it’s it’s just a huge mistake to think that we can pull this off, that we can somehow deceive ourselves and go after all the stuff of this world and at the same time think we can serve our God. Because as Jesus said in Matthew 6, he said that you know your treasure, what you really want in life, that treasure that you’re hoping for, that treasure will really tell you where where your heart is AT.

33. 11:56

    And God reads the heart. He knows what we really want. He knows when we’re young. What are you? What are you really interested in? Are you interested in a a life and the truth where you can have free time to get to CYC, to work in Sunday school, to serve in your ecclesia and be involved in all these things?

34. 12:12

    Or are you really wanting all the toys of this world? You want the big house, You want the fancy car, the fast car, the whatever it. It’s just God knows And where your treasure is, Jesus said there will your heart be also. So the question we ask ourselves this week while we’re sitting here is, is meditate on the idea.

35. 12:31

    Like where is our treasure chest? What’s in it? What are we really hoping for? That that’s a that’s a real question that we have to have. And then for our children, for those of you raising children, you have to decide what are you going to tell your children about what really makes you happy.

36. 12:48

    Because they’re watching what you do you know and they’re watching how you live and they’re finding out, well do mom and dad really care about getting the meeting? Do they really care about being involved in the ecclesia? Are they out there working, working, working, working so that we can have all the stuff of this world our kids are watching. They know where our treasure really is and you can’t tell your children to have God as your treasure. When we’re we’re living a lie to them and and our within our own families we have to show them that what we really love, what we really want are the godly things we want the things that that that they feed our spiritual life and that God will take care of us on so many of these other things. We don’t have to have the best of everything. We can just live with smaller things and less stuff and have more time for God.

37. 13:36

    That that was a huge lesson to learn as we’re young and I really do believe it. It affects our children. They’re watching. They’re watching what we do, and they’re making decisions based on not so much what we say, but what are you really doing at home? Where where are you really going? It comes time from Bible class. Do you really care about going to Bible class or do you just figure I’m too tired tonight?

38. 13:57

    I don’t want to go. It doesn’t really help me. They’re they’re watching all those things and they’re trying to figure it out and it’s it’s an important thing for us. So look at the case with with Ahab, you know, King Ahab, we know that he was full of a lot of problems and a lot of mistakes. But I think the story of Nabat’s vineyard just reveals again this whole idea that you can’t serve 2 masters. And in his case, he’s, you know, he’s looking at this vineyard out there and Ahab spokes.

39. 14:26

    He speaks to Nabat in First Kings 21 at verse two. And he says give me your vineyard, that I might have it for a vegetable garden. You know that that’s what he wanted. He’s the king, right? He can add anything he wants. And he figures he can just go after this. And this is going to make him happy, right? Sure.

40. 14:44

    That’s not going to make him happy. Once he gets there, he just wants something else. See, there’s no end to this. We we can’t. We as younger people, we got to set parameters up. I only need this much. And then be careful that we don’t just keep when we get to that point.

41. 14:57

    We want more and we want more and we want more. That’s what happens in this world today. That’s the whole strategy behind marketing today. You you look at all the toys, the the phones that we have and TV’s and all these things that the the cars that we drive. You know, it used to be that you could buy a washing machine and it would last for 20 years. Everybody knows that works on them today. They don’t last that long anymore. Everything’s designed now so that you got to get another one and you got to get another one.

42. 15:24

    You get the upgrades and they advertise, oh, wow, Now we can do this. So we can do that. And the kids walk into school and they see, oh, somebody’s got, somebody’s got an iPhone. And then they find out, oh, you got, you got the new one none. They line up overnight to get in the store, to get the new one. And and it’s like we don’t want to get caught up in that. Brothers and sisters, we don’t need the best. We really don’t.

43. 15:47

    And don’t let that drive our life. Because if you’re not careful, it takes over and that’s what it’ll do. So look at what what Ahab does. You know and and well, Naboth does. In verse three, he gives them the godly answer. No. The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my father’s to you.

44. 16:03

    I’m not going to do that. This is the way God set up the land. These are the godly principles I live on. I can’t give you my vineyard. It passes down through the family and then Ahab goes over to his house, all depressed and sullen. See what happens when we get our our ideas out there.

45. 16:20

    I need this to be happy now. I need this to be happy. We go away discouraged when we don’t have it. We’re sullen, we’re depressed. We we got all worried about the fact that I don’t have all this stuff yet and if we never had wanted it in the 1st place, we would have been a lot happier people. No godliness with contentment.

46. 16:39

    It’s it’s amazing how it changes the way you live when you learn to be content with what you have. But you can’t serve 2 masters as as he found out as well. And covetousness. Covetousness is a big one. Never noticed that in the New Testament. Covetousness Paul calls it. It’s it’s like idolatry.

47. 16:58

    It’s it’s like idol worship and the way it controls our life when we want what somebody else has. And yet God has given us something. And we’re looking around at what do you have and what do you have? And, you know, you watch the kids do this all the time. You, you hand out ice cream cones to the grandchildren and they’re looking at, well, how much ice cream did Papa put on that cone?

48. 17:19

    And they’re looking at. And it’s like, I want one like that. And it’s like it starts early on. It’s this comparison idea and thinking that we got to have what everybody else has. And yet it’s something that we have been asked to fight. It’s part of the thinking of the flesh. And so Jesus would say in Mark seven, you know when he’s talking to the people there And he enters a house in verse 17 away from the crowd and the disciples asked him concerning the parable that he had told them.

49. 17:44

    And he says, well, look it it’s don’t you perceive that whatever enters a man from the outside cannot defile him. It’s not about what comes in from the outside. It’s not about the things that we eat. It’s not about the stuff that that come in from the outside, but it’s the stuff that’s within.

50. 18:00

    It’s in here. Our heart. What our what? Our what our brains want. That’s what defiles us. It’s the devil in US thinking that somehow we’re going to be happier. We’re going to be better people. And you look around. I can imagine like Job’s three friends. I I can really imagine it from them looking at Job and thinking well, look at God. Look, look.

51. 18:19

    No wonder if he serves you. Look what you gave him. You put a hedger on him. You take care of him and his family. If I had what Job had I’d be so much better. I’d be serving you. I’d. If he just gave me what he had, instead of being content with what we have, so Jesus says so clearly, it’s what comes out of a man that defiles the man.

52. 18:40

    For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed Evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, right Wickedness, deceit, lewdness and an evil eye, Blasphemy, pride, foolishness, all these things come from in here we are the problem. And what God’s trying to do is teach us that, look, if you serve him, if you put God first in your life, he will take care of the rest. And it’s just something we, we really do have to be careful of. So consciousness, what it really does. And you see this in children, we sort of laugh at it all the time, right?

53. 19:15

    But that’s what happens in my household, is that one one gets a Lally, the other one gets a big old ice cream. And the guy with the Lally sitting there, like, wow, I think I’d like one of those. And I want it to be just as big as that, or bigger. And that’s how people think.

54. 19:29

    But what it does to us is it eats away. It eats away us. So we wish we had that. We think about somebody else having this, and then we become we become selfish and unthankful, people unhappy. It takes away your happiness in life if you’re always thinking about having something else instead of being thankful for what we have right now. It does make a big difference and it drives us to work far too much in this life.

55. 19:55

    Take on jobs, take on overtime, travel all over the place and have all this money that we that we can get from a job. And instead of staying home, working with our family with our collegias and taking less because it will provide for us to really take care of the things of God.

56. 20:13

    These are challenging decisions that we have to individually make and you have to do what what works for you. But I would encourage all of you to, like, just think about, you know, what’s happening to your time to work in the Ecclesia and if it’s working for you and you have plenty of time to show up all the classes and work and preach the truth and all these things that we’d like to do, that’s great.

57. 20:34

    But if you find your job pulling you away all the time, you’re never around to help the family, to raise the children. You’re gone. You’re travelling, which this world is a big thing today, Get on airplanes, fly all over the place, travel and and be gone before you know it. They hand out the carrot and they say if you do it, you know you we will give you bonuses and we will give you all this stuff.

58. 20:56

    And then who’s who’s home with? With our children? We’re the dads that are taking care of the kids or the moms. Before you know it, everybody’s gone and the kids are raised by somebody else. And that’s not what God was after in our lives. He wanted us to raise our children. He wanted us to have time for our families. You look back at some of the Bible stories that we know. You’ve studied the time period of Ezra and Nehemiah. Remember when they started building the temple in the time? Well, Ezra wasn’t actually mentioned yet. He was still up in Babylon.

59. 21:25

    But in the early chapters of Ezra, the people came back from Babylon. They started working under Joshua’s rubble. They started building the temple and they worked on it. They got it going and they were working for a number of years they did pretty good, but as time went on over 15 years, the amount of work on the temple started to die off and people weren’t as interested.

60. 21:43

    It’s really interesting to me that in Ezra Chapter 3, it says, or maybe at the end of Chapter 2, it says that when they got the foundation laid, do you remember what happened with the people when they, when they set out to have like a time of celebration to like, wow, we got the foundation done.

61. 22:00

    Yes. And they got together and what happened? There was a lot of yelling. The the younger people were happy, they were thrilled, they were excited. And the older ones looked at it and said, wow, it’s not as good as the one we had. Did you never notice that we we have to be careful, older brothers and sisters. We can squash the work of the young people. It may not be the same as what we did in our day and age. They don’t have the resources maybe that we had some of the things that we had but we have to support what’s going on. It was the work of God and and So what what happened over that time is that people get got this. They got so discouraged by what was going on in the community. People all quit working.

62. 22:44

    Before you know it, God sends in the Persian army at the end of Ezra 4 and he says you’re going to stop. And they, the military came in and made them quit until they realized that, wow, we should get back to work. But Hagai challenges them during this period of, you know, when he comes along, as God raises up Hagai and Zechariah to stir up the people, he challenges them and says, look, is it a time for you to dwell in your panelled houses?

63. 23:09

    And the temple lies in ruins. And we know that what happened then is that when the people quit working on God’s temple, when they weren’t working on God’s house anymore, they went home and worked on their own. That that’s what we do as people when we get discouraged. You don’t want to work in the ecclesia, had enough trouble, We go home and we just take care of ourselves, our own lives. We work more, we get more money, we get all this stuff. You know, if you’re a farmer, they build, they they plant more stuff and their farms increase.

64. 23:37

    And so he says, look, consider your ways. I I like the way some of the versions they they translate that consider how you have fared. How are things going in your life? You know, you’re you’re doing all this stuff, thinking you’re going to amass all these things. But, you know, how’s it working?

65. 23:53

    You know, you’ve sown much, but you bring in little. You know, you eat, but you don’t have enough. You drink, but you’re not filled with drink. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes. Sort of a way of describing inflation, right? Well, you simply think you’re getting more money, but actually you’re really not.

66. 24:14

    But that’s God was working in their lives ruining the things that they thought they were going to accomplish and get all this stuff. And he just makes it all. He blows it all away trying to convince them to get back to work on his house. And it’s fascinating when you watch in Zechariah chapter 4, when Zechariah comes along talking about this and the night visions that he sees in chapter four, that the word of the Lord came to him this in this one night. And you see in verse nine that God assured him the angel’s talking to him and he says, look Zechariah that are Zorbable. He says, look at the hands of Zerubbable have laid the foundation of this temple.

67. 24:51

    His hands shall also finish it so that Zechariah could cut him out the next day. And he said, I saw this vision and and the vision showed me that look at Zerubbable, you, you, Zerubbel, you’re going to be there when the temple’s finished. We’re going to get it done. And you are going to operate as the governor because he would have been the the king at this time in the line of Christ, It would have been Zerubbable. And then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.

68. 25:14

    But look at that next section there for who has despised the day of small things? And I think it’s a warning to us. Brothers and sisters, especially as older ones, don’t despise what the young people are doing, don’t despise their enthusiasm for the truth. We have young people today that are great with music and do things that I could never do. And they they can use technology in ways that I could never do it.

69. 25:38

    And they understand so many things that we don’t understand. We got to tap into those resources and and encourage them and and say, this is great that you can do these things for us because this is maybe a day that’s different than when we grew up. And you might consider it to be a day of small things, but the angels didn’t look at it that way. Do you notice that?

70. 25:59

    Look at what it says there about the angels for these seven. Those are the seven eyes that were looking on the capstone back earlier in the the seven eyes from Chapter 3, waiting for the capstone. The angels were looking at that stone, waiting for the day when it would go up. These seven angels, they rejoiced to see the plumline and the hand of the eyes of the Lord was skinned to and fro throughout the whole earth. Now here we are sometimes, you know, despising something that’s going on.

71. 26:28

    It’s not as good as what we did. And we discourage people. And the angels are on the sidelines. They’re like, yes, we’ve been working with these people. We’ve been trying to get this project going, and it’s going now, and they’re excited about it and we’re tearing it down. You ever thought of that before that that can actually happen?

72. 26:46

    And that’s what was going on back here in the time of Zechariah. The angels couldn’t wait to get this temple done as as small as it was and as unglorified as it was compared to the one earlier with Solomon. They saw that this was the best these people could do at that time with the resources the angels had given them, and they realized it was really never about the Temple in the first place. But it was about people learning, people growing together, finding how to function together in the community.

73. 27:15

    And they saw this as a mechanism to train people into godliness, and angels totally understand that. So be careful that our covetousness doesn’t really turn into idolatry. It’s one of those things that we got to be careful of ourselves. So I want to spend the last 20 minutes or so. I’m looking at God’s election.

74. 27:34

    I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of it. A number of you have asked me about this. It’s one of those topics that it was, this is not the way I grew up. And I it’s, I really think it’s something that came to US one time when we were reading Romans 9 with our kids and we used to use the Children’s International Bible. And we read through this and it was like, I got one of those wow moments.

75. 27:53

    It’s like I’ve never understood this before and it and it and, you know, I remember still working one day on a lecture, realizing that when I was talking about the gospel going out and the coming of Christ and Christ setting up the Kingdom, I finally realized, oh, that’s what Paul was talking about because that you start looking at, well, what’s going to happen when Christ returns. I think the apostle Paul knew this, the best of all the writers of the Bible, because he had experienced it in his own life.

76. 28:20

    He wrote Romans. This is Paul. He studied at the feet of Gamaliel. He worked in, worked in his Bible, study his Bible marking his Bible re. He knew his Bible inside out. He was on the wrong side. The wrong side. It wasn’t about, you know, sincerity. It wasn’t that he he wasn’t sincere enough.

77. 28:42

    You know, it’s it’s that God hadn’t opened his eyes. He actually got blinded, and then his eyes were open to finally see it. But Paul realized he would. He would have spent his whole life on the wrong side of everything if Christ hadn’t stopped him on the road to Damascus. And he realized more than anyone that it was all about God revealing it to him, opening his eyes to see it. And he understood that a lot of other people never get that opportunity.

78. 29:13

    They don’t all get their eyes open and I think you’ll see that as he writes through Romans, Romans Chapter 9. Although I could clear from the beginning, some people have misread this in the past and talked to me later on and and I thought I was talking about who gets accepted at the judgement seat. That’s not what Romans 9 is about. Romans 9 is who gets invited to the family of God, not who’s actually accepted.

79. 29:34

    And yet this is about the invitation. Who does God invite into his king, into his family today? Who does he invite? Out of the 8 1/2 billion people on our planet today, who’s getting invited? Who’s actually given the call? It’s more about opportunity, and I do think it’s really difficult. When we’ve been raised as a Christadelphian and we’ve grown up in a culture, we sort of had this cultural viewpoint of how God’s election worked. But I would challenge you to say to really look at it today and see whether your cultural explanation fits with Romans Chapter 9, and mine did not.

80. 30:09

    I have to admit that it didn’t fit with what I read in Romans Chapter 9. And that God, you know, he brings things into our lives to help us sometimes get outside the box, which is what I needed. So here’s the deal. We got 8 1/2 billion people on the planet. I think most of us can’t even really understand what that number is. 8 1/2 billion people. That’s a lot of people.

81. 30:29

    You know, the the population of the earth was only about 1 billion at early 1800s and now it’s grown to 8 1/2 billion. You know, so does everybody get an opportunity to to come into the, the, the into God’s family? Does God invite everybody out there to come into the family? Is that really how this works?

82. 30:47

    Does everybody get the same opportunity? And I grew up realizing, well, there’s people that I know who have never read a Bible in their life, never heard about a Bible. I met a lot of Muslims and they they weren’t that that way. There’s a lot of people that we found out in China or in North Korea, never had Bibles don’t know anything about Jesus Christ. They don’t even know who he is and realized that no, not everybody gets the same invitation that I got. It’s really not the same.

83. 31:15

    So what’s actually going on with this idea of God’s feeling? To understand Romans Chapter 9, we first of all have to realize we’ve got to. Hopefully we read Romans 1-2 and three before we get to Chapter 9. But in Romans 1-2 and three, Paul lays out so clearly that God put the gospel out there. He showed the Gentiles his his creation, and they turned it down.

84. 31:36

    They went into their godless ways, and so God gave them up. That’s the way Romans one ends. He gave up on the Gentiles. He called the few here and there. He got rehabs and he got roosts, and he got different ones that came in. But, but most of the Gentiles, for some of the time of Abraham, God only worked with Abraham’s family. He didn’t invite everybody.

85. 31:58

    He worked with Abraham’s family. So that Paul would say that look at the Gentiles, they failed. In chapter 2 of Romans, the Jews, you failed. And he gets to chapter 3 and he says, look at all of you have fallen short of the glory of God. Everybody has. So then he starts looking at the fact, well, do you deserve to have a chance? You deserve an opportunity.

86. 32:21

    It’s sort of like, you know, you’re going through Job and you only Job wants this opportunity to talk to God. He wants to justify himself. You know, would would you go to God at at the resurrection and judgment And we we tell Jesus that it wasn’t really fair. You didn’t call my neighbor.

87. 32:34

    I really like that person. You didn’t call my neighbor. I wish you would have. Is that what we’re going to do? You know, we look across the world, look at all. We saw what’s going on in Pakistan right now. That wasn’t happening back 50 years ago, but it is now God’s calling people in Pakistan that never got called before.

88. 32:53

    That was really fascinating to me. But this is what changing the calling in our lifetime. We’re not using UK so much America. He’s not using the the countries, maybe even Australia. The truth is just sort of stabilized there or the numbers are going down, but they’re growing in Africa and India and Pakistan and all these other places.

89. 33:14

    He’s calling people in other areas today. So the key is to realize though from the start, nobody deserves the opportunity. And if you think you do that this is not going to make sense to you. But the humanistic spirit gets in there and we think that we all deserve a chance. And that’s not what Paul says in Romans Chapter 9. He says, no, you don’t all deserve a chance. The whole world is is God.

90. 33:41

    It it wanders away from God. You’re going to see as we get into Leviathan and Behemoth tomorrow and Job that that was the challenge that Jack left us with. He said he’s going to cover tomorrow. Is that look at can you control that? Can you get to my Kingdom on your own? No, you can’t. You won’t be a member of my family just by striving after it on yourself.

91. 34:02

    You can’t even control pride. You can’t control these things. You need me to change your life. And when God does that and he says, look at it’s all up to me. He gets the right and the authority and his righteousness to decide, all right, I’m going to do that for you and for you and for you and for you.

92. 34:22

    And he picks people that he wants to invite into his family, and he doesn’t invite the whole world. And we read passages like God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. And yes, he wished the world would have responded. But you look to the history of the Bible. They never did.

93. 34:40

    God loved the world. And so he picks people and he opens the eyes of their understanding, as Paul says in In Ephesians One. He opens their eyes. He says that the Jews that the veil lies over their eyes and they cannot see until he removes the veil, which he will do without God’s invention intervention.

94. 34:59

    Nobody would make it. None of us would make it. The the Marvel brothers and sisters and young people isn’t that he leaves so many outs. The miracle of God is that he’s able to save anybody. That’s the miracle. Without the active work of angels in your lives and and working in you and giving you the Bible to read and sending angels to work with you and on the community at large to help us and spouses that do and children Without that none of us would make understanding of Romans one and two and three before you. Chapter 9.

95. 35:31

    It’s very difficult to save people, as you’re going to see with with God’s challenge to Job. You can’t even control pride. How do you think you’re ever going to save yourself? And your righteousness could be more than God’s. It just isn’t going to happen. So God never intended for everybody to have the same opportunities. From maybe the time of Adam and Eve on up, you know, you get to the time of the flood and start over. Maybe then he was working with all of Noah’s family, but most of the time God was only working with select groups. And you see that so clear with Abraham, it’s like we’re not going to work with everybody anymore. We’re going to pick Abraham.

96. 36:06

    And he says with Abraham, you I’m going to have a family. I know you’re going to train your children and we’ll work with that family. And then when it comes time to Jesus dying, when he dies, now Paul has to give an explanation to the Jews who had for 1500 years there, 2000 years.

97. 36:23

    They they were the ones. They were the family God was inviting into his Kingdom. And now Paul has to be able to explain to Jews, God’s not working with you so much anymore. He’s turned to the Gentiles. And the Jews are like, that’s not fair. I mean, that’s what they thought. This isn’t right. How can you do that?

98. 36:44

    We’re the people of God. We’re the ones. We’re the ones you should be working with us, not those Gentiles. Paul has to explain it’s not about what you want, and it’s not about how hard you work. It’s about God’s mercy. Nobody deserves it. Nobody can do it on their own. It’s to have mercy on.

99. 37:07

    And because it’s he’s doing all the work, it’s really it’s his team he’s financing, He does all the work for this. He can pick and choose who he wants. It’s his choice. If he decides to leave people out, that’s his choice. It’s God’s family. So out of those 8 1/2 billion on the planet right now, today, most of them have been left out. And and don’t be fooled by the fact that when I was raised, we were all told in Matthew 13, well, they’re not good soil now. That’s it.

100. 37:34

     They’re not soil. That’s what we were told. That’s why they don’t accept the truth. They’re not good soil. But one day when I was given this lecture, it just dawned on me through this lecture, I’m looking at these 8 1/2 billion people and thinking, Oh my goodness, when Jesus comes back, what’s he going to do with those 8 1/2 billion people? I mean, if you take, if you take the averages of the Jews and the land, 2/3 are going to be cut off. What if?

101. 37:57

     What if That’s just a a a representation of how difficult it is to save anybody and maybe 2/3 of the world is going to die. So take away 2/3 of the 8 1/2 billion people. What are you left with? Do you realize over 2 billion people today who are alive are going to respond to the gospel? 2 billion?

102. 38:17

     That’s huge. There’s no way we can reach those people today. But God will open the eyes of their understanding. Jesus Christ is going to be revealed to them. These very same people that I would have called bad soil, they’re going to all of a sudden become really good soil. Those are the people we’re going to work with in the Kingdom age. They’re not bad.

103. 38:38

     They just haven’t been invited yet. And if Christ had come back 200 years ago, if the same thing would have happened with those people, a huge number of them would have been converted in the Kingdom when all will know me from the least unto the greatest. And yet they didn’t have that opportunity.

104. 38:56

     And they died not knowing, never been invited, and they’re gone. But when Christ comes back, oh wow, that’s what really clarified it to me, is that it’s not about so much our preaching today, although we do have to preach, and God blesses our efforts. And it’s wonderful. I was fascinated by the growth of the truth in Pakistan.

105. 39:14

     It’s great, but God’s trying to show us that it’s all about who he invites. You can invite everybody you want here in Australia, and you may not get many at all, not many at all. But boy, over there, he’s inviting a lot of people into his Kingdom, you know, and it’ll all change when Jesus Christ returns billions.

106. 39:34

     Just think about that for a minute. Billions of people today who we would just say won’t accept the truth. We write them off. We don’t think God can work with them. Oh no. He’s going to open the eyes of their understanding, remove the veil that they can’t see and wow, they’re going to become the people we work with in the Kingdom age. See, you know, you look back, this is all over the New Testament if we just look carefully and we start to read the Bible a little bit differently. But you look at why did Jesus speak in parables? Why did he do that?

107. 40:03

     He said he spoke in parables and he told his disciples, he said look to you, it has been given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven to you. It has been given, not you. You studied, you researched, you worked, you did all this work and so now you’re going to be invited to the Kingdom.

108. 40:22

     No to you it has been given to understand the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven. God has opened your eyes, He’s allowed you to see it. But I speak to all these people in parables in verse 13, because seeing they do not see, in hearing, they do not understand. They do not hear nor do they understand. He didn’t want all of them to understand and see and hear. Their eyes were not being opened yet. The Jews, the veil.

109. 40:51

     He was not inviting those people. And you see the results of that. He didn’t want all those Jews understand. He started opening the eyes of Gentiles and they began to see, see, that’s so hard for us to understand, brother and sister. I fought that for years until realizing Romans 9 was the key, that that’s that’s where he finally lays all this out. See, as as parents, what we want to do is we want to we want to say that, you know, if I do all these things with my children, I can guarantee that they will get baptized and be in the Kingdom. That’s what we want to believe.

110. 41:24

     But see, that’s humanism that’s coming from humans up, not from God down. What God wants us to understand is no matter what we do, no matter how hard we work and how much we want our children to, to be there. It’s about God who extends mercy. And that’s Romans Chapter 9. You’ll see this all over and over again. That’s what God wants us to know. It’s about His mercy.

111. 41:49

     So instead of, you know, it’s good to work hard, it’s good to get our children all these places. I I don’t want you to misunderstand. We did that with our kids. We went to everything. Sue and I were involved in Cyc and Sunday school. We taught the midweek kids class. We we did all those things for our children, but at the same time you’re praying and pleading with God to include them in his election. It is his choice and he and he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to, but he usually does because he loves us.

112. 42:19

     So you look back in the past, look at what God has done from Adam on. He tried working with everybody, but then he wiped them out in the flood. He wiped all those people out and just picked Noah and said I’ll work with you and your family, that’s it. We’ll go from there. And then with Abraham, he got to the same point and instead of wiping them out with a flood, he just picked Abraham and said, I’ll just work with you.

113. 42:38

     I’m going to invite your descendants into the family. And then from there, he chose Isaac and some of his descendants and so on all the way down the line. And finally, in the New Testament, Paul takes the gospel out to the Gentiles. The the marvelous thing is, when you’re sitting here today, appreciate that God has called you. You’ve been invited to the Kingdom. That’s why you’re here.

114. 43:01

     You’ve been invited into the family of God. You’ve been given something that the rest of the people here in Australia don’t have. Appreciate it and let it grow in you. Like, that’s good. That mustard seed. Let it grow. So in Romans 9, Paul gives the best exposition you could ever ask for about God’s election. That’s what he calls it, God’s election, because he’s trying to explain to the Jews why the Gospel’s going out to the Gentiles.

115. 43:27

     And you Jews, you’re you’re you’re not really the big family anymore. The Gentiles are taking over. And what he does is he illustrates this idea that it’s God’s choice of The Who he brings into his family. And it’s he does that to make sure we don’t boast in ourselves. He doesn’t want any of us to glory. In the fact that Sue and I could look back, somebody might say at at a restaurant one day, they’d say, wow, your kids are really well behaved and they’re amazed at that. And you start, you learn over time, That’s not us. That’s what God has done in our children. It isn’t us.

116. 43:59

     It’s the fact that the Bible, through the word of God, has taken over their lives and taught them how to behave. And it’s it’s something that God has done for us. He’s allowed us to understand and read his word. That’s what God has done. So you just watch in a few minutes here, we’ll look at why. Why did Abraham, Why did God allow Abraham to have two sons? Why did he do this by Hagar and Sarah? And then, you know, later on in The Next Generation, you have ISIS got twins by Rebecca See.

117. 44:26

     And reading through Genesis for years. I got to admit, I I never really saw this until I read Romans 9. So Paul says, look it, I could have prayed for my community. I could have gone for them. But, you know, Paul realizes that they were a curse from Christ, his brethren, his countrymen. But he loved them.

118. 44:42

     He wanted his Jewish countrymen to be saved, Look at all the things that they had. But he realized God had turned away from the Jews and was turning to the Gentiles. So he brings out the fact that in Romans 9 and verse six, it’s not like the word of God has taken no effect.

119. 44:57

     In other words, God’s God’s plan hasn’t failed. It’s not like God failed. Somehow He’s moved on to a different group of people. And he points out that look at folks, you Jews that that think you were the people, that they’re not all Israel who are of Israel, nor are all the are they all children because they’re the seed of Abraham.

120. 45:15

     They thought because they were the seed of Abraham, they were the chosen people. But he says look at the promised said in Isaac, your seed will be blessed, that is, those who are the children of the flesh. They are not the children of God, but the children of the promised are counted as the sea.

121. 45:31

     So, so far he’s got them to at least accept that not all Abraham’s children are God’s children. So you look back at Abraham, he had what, three different wives? He had all these different kids. But in the end, God only picked one Isaac, and said that’s the one I’m going to work with.

122. 45:47

     I’m going to invite Isaac and his family, some of his descendants, not, not the rest. And that’s what he did. So you’ve got God’s election is Paul’s working out one man, one woman, and Hagar. And now we got a child through Hagar and a child through Sarah. Now, Paul knew that the Jews would say, well, the reason God didn’t work with Ishmael is because he was the son of a slave woman.

123. 46:09

     They knew that, Paul knew that. But at least that’s where the start was. But did you realize that that God doesn’t even call Ishmael Abraham’s son when he says to Abraham, you know that would hurt Abraham. Take your son, your only son Isaac, and offer him as a burnt offering. This is the Abraham who had raised Ishmael for 14 years, circumcised him, taught him the truth, All these things he’d done for Ishmael.

124. 46:33

     And he’s 14 years old. And now God says, I’m going to work with Isaac, not with Ishmael. And in the end, you’ve got to send Hagar and Ishmael away. You’re going to divorce Hagar, disown Ishmael. They’re not going to be part of the family because it’s not what we want rather than sisters or how hard we work, but it’s of God who shows mercy. So that’s his start.

125. 46:55

     But he realizes that the Jews would have made-up this huge excuse about why they didn’t call Ishmael. He realized they were both circumcised. They were both in the covenant or whatever you want to call that. But God chose to only work with one He’s going to work with Isaac’s descendants. So what happens next though, is that in verse 9, the word of the promise at this time I will come and say we’ll have a son.

126. 47:18

     So now we have Isaac who’s come along, and Isaac is going to be the child of the promise. So what happens then in Chapter 9 at verse 10, if Paul goes on and says, did you catch that reading through Genesis? Not only this, but when Rebecca in the next generation conceived by one man the same dad, and she’s having twins born at the exact same time, look at verse 11. Now this is challenging for us.

127. 47:47

     This is Paul challenging us for the children, not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil that the purpose of God according to election might stand. In other words, who God wants to invite, not who we want, Not of works, but of him who calls. It’s all about God’s calling. It was said to her, the older will serve the younger.

128. 48:12

     And as it’s written, Jacob I have loved and Esau I have hated. Now I know you can be sitting there thinking, well, God knows the future. You know how Jacob would be and Esau would be. And we make up all these excuses about why God chose Jacob. But when you’re reading through Genesis, is Jacob really a great guy from the beginning? All right.

129. 48:30

     And think about it. He had a lot of things God had to work out of him, and we don’t know what, what what Esau would have been like if God hadn’t worked in his life. These are two people that Paul had said earlier in Romans. None of them deserve to be there. They’re not really good at all in terms of like good people, their soil, their lumps of clay that God could work with or not work with. And he chose to work with Jacob and not with Esau. That was God’s choice.

130. 49:02

     Paul, you can’t read into this God’s, for Paul says nothing about God’s foreknowledge. He says look at it. God chose to invite Jacob and not Esau. It was God’s choice. He has the prerogative, the right, it’s the righteousness of God to choose. So this time we got one mom, one dad, twins born at the same time. And God says I’m going to work with Jacob. And you see what he does is he did this because brethren and sisters, he wanted the Jews to know forever. He wanted them to realize it was not about what they wanted. You aren’t better people than all those Gentiles out there. It was never about that.

131. 49:39

     It’s that I chose to work with you. I’m extending mercy to you that I didn’t extend. To Esau and his descendants. It’s all about what God did for you, not about how hard you worked or what you wanted. And that’s what he’s the Potter. As Paul develops later on in the chapter, So what if God decided to just work with South America and that’s all. And from that, that’s when Christ comes back. He just wants to save South America. Can he do that?

132. 50:07

     Is that fair? See, if we’re struggling with that idea, We don’t understand God’s election. God can choose to work with whoever he chooses. It’s his prerogative. He’s the Potter, and if he doesn’t work with with you, nobody will make it. Nobody. And so he has the right to pick who he chooses to work with. So what this does, for me at least, is it teaches me that over time I’ve learned to pray a lot more, that God will work with our children, with all of you, with your children. We we pray that God will choose them for his election. But that’s what God has done.

133. 50:41

     And Paul reveals in Romans 9 is that out of all the people alive, there are some who are soft clay, but there’s a whole bunch of them that never get invited. They could have been, but they were never invited. Maybe they will be in the Kingdom. Finally, out of those thought opens the eyes of some of those people. And he calls, Paul goes on and says all of those people, some of those are justified or they’re chosen because they responded by their free will.

134. 51:06

     And finally, in the end, some of those are going to be glorified. And you know, that’s the the problem. What Paul knew is that he knew those Jews were going to say that’s not fair. Some of our Bible versions actually say that in verse 14. But he also says, I know what you’re going to think, you’re going to all step there and say that’s not fair. And he keeps reminding them that God’s the Potter, None of you would make it without the influence of God in your life. And it’s a lot of work to save people. And if God has picked this one and this one and this one, he has the right to pick who he wants to invite into his family and who he would like to save.

135. 51:39

     So, you know, balance out brothers and sisters from all of this. Yes, we want to get our children. We want to get them out to we have teachers Sunday school. We want to get them to Cyc. We want to get them out to all these things. But at the same time, balance that with God.

136. 51:53

     Please do what I can’t do. Open their eyes, change them, Get involved in their life, Send angels to work in their lives and recognize all along the way that when it’s successful, it wasn’t because of what I did, but it was because of God who shows mercy.