Listen to the podcast below

Watch the live teaching below

Transcription (was completed by automated process. Please ignore any speech-to-text errors)

So just a reminder for those who are listening in on our podcast. Be sure to subscribe. You can also go to our YouTube channel and get sellers calling you. You can subscribe there if you want to see the actual videos when they’re published. Encourage you if you have interest to join these live for the time that we’re doing them live. You can just visit our other website, get radical Facebook.com, and you can click on Bible study and you’ll see the schedule, the time, and the Zoom link. And then the final thing is, I can’t underscore enough how important it is to re listen to the same message or come back if you’re listening to this by audio, to come back to the website on our podcast and actually watch the video, because there are a lot of things I’m drawing up and I remember watching a video by Bruce Wilkinson and then I was listening to his audio. Actually, I listened to his audio first and I came back and watched the video and I just got so much more out of it. When you see it live, you know, just the there’s just in fact, here’s really interesting. This is not the topic for tonight, but it’s an interesting topic. Studies have been done on communication and they wanted to find out how is communication broken down? And most of my podcast listeners are in the real estate world. So this is really important as a real estate agent. And so what they found is 51% of communication is body language.

How you manage your body, your hand articulations, your expressions, your looking funny or whatever. So that left 49% is non visual. So 51% is visual, 49% is non out of that 49 42% of it is how you say the words, how you speak, and 7% are the words that you use. So here’s what’s interesting. It’s not so communication. It’s not so much the words that you use. That’s only 7% of the communication. Everything else is how you say the words and how you express the words physically. So back to why to come back and rewatch this and especially to watch it, if you are just listening audibly is you’ll get so much more. So what we’re going to do tonight is this is actually kind of part two. Last time we spoke on how do you grow in the Spirit and we talked about the passage. This comes from both John 15 and then John 20. Jesus says to his disciples, I no longer call you servants. I now call you friends because I am confiding you and revealing all that the father has shared with me. And then in John 20, after he’s resurrected, he says, Go tell my brothers. So what we see is this progression of a servant to a friend, to a brother. And in very simplistic essence, the thing that drives you from one to the other is the level of revelation that you have. Revelation is not knowledge. Lots of people know the Bible the words much better than I do.

There are some people that can actually quote word for word the entire Bible, or at least large sections of it. I can’t, but that doesn’t mean that they have great revelation. I remember reading a book and this lady was talking about a friend of hers. He’s the world’s foremost expert on the book of Mark. He gets to handle the original ancient manuscripts, but he doesn’t know Jesus. He’s an expert, but he doesn’t have belief in Jesus. There’s no revelation there. And so it’s not just head knowledge. There’s something deeper and it says that Jesus is the word. John one says Jesus is the word. The word was in the beginning was the word. The word was with God, the word was God. And then he dwelt and became among us. And this word is is imprinted in our heart. God says, I’m going to get a new covenant. And with that New covenant, I’m going to write my words on their heart and I’m going to write my words in their mind. And so what we have actually is we have the word of God already in our heart. And so when we read the word of God, what revelation is, is when the Holy Spirit starts to take it and make it real in our life in a supernatural way that helps us to live it out in deeper and deeper truths. And that’s this is what happened in John 15 and John 20, when Jesus says, I no longer call you servants, I now call you friends.

And then later he says, Go tell my brothers. Okay, So what I want to do today is I want to touch back on these three components. I’m going to change the terminology just a little bit from servant, friend, brother to what I call the three churches in the body of Christ. And those three churches are servant st and son. And I want to show you some things between these three churches in the Body of Christ, and I call them churches. These are the my simple way of understanding and organizing the primary differences within the body of Christ in terms of how people believe and how people act. Because you’ll find that some people let’s just take missionaries, for example. Some people will go on the mission field. Get burned out in three years and come home and say, I’ll never do that again. Other people go in the missionary mission field and they live there the rest of their life with great abundance. What’s the difference or story I shared last time this missionary was off in the jungles in some tribal region and for about 15 years, and at the end of 15 years, he was he would be what I call the servant church. I’ll show this in moment. They only had like 12 or 15 converts out of a tribe of 3 to 400 people. And then the Holy Spirit came and hit him. And all of a sudden things changed. And when things changed within a year, the entire tribe of three or 400 people or believers in Jesus.

And it’s really interesting. I want to show this to you in first Corinthians turn real quickly. We see this with Paul, first Corinthians two versus two through five. So. But at Corinth, they were pretty wicked people. Paul goes and plants the church there, and here’s what he says, starting in verse two. Fry decided to. No, nothing among you accept Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my message were not implausible. Words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. And the primary difference that we’ll see we talked about last time between the servant and then the saints and the son. The saints and the sons are more akin to each other than the servant church is how you interpret scripture. And so I want to talk in terms of the servant church uses man’s wisdom as they read God’s word. What does it mean? Let’s think it through. Let’s reason together. The St Church and the Son Church uses childlike faith. When they read God’s Word to interpret it, and a very simplistic understanding. What’s the difference between the two? When Jesus says, If you have faith the grain of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, if I have these, they’re all kind of blend in, but you can speak to this mountain and it’ll be taken up and thrown into the sea.

The Saint and the Son church says, Well, yeah, he’s talking pretty literally. He’s meaning a mountain. As you shift into the servant side, it’s more of, Well, he doesn’t mean a mountain. That’s preposterous. He must mean something different because our mind doesn’t have a grid for it. So what we’re looking for is the servants are going to be looking for grids as it transitions into the saints kind of a melting pot. You still have a grid in the Saint and not so sometimes you read things with wisdom. You say, Well, this must mean something different because it seems impossible to mean what it says. But the further you move into the Son church, the more you take it literally at face value at what it says. Remember I mentioned this last time. So all this is the review, right? The when I was doing some study on this, it was really interesting. When you look at how do you interpret scripture hermeneutics? You can interpret it either face value or figuratively and metaphorically. Every single one of the 300 to 345 specific prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, if not more, were all fulfilled at face value with what the prophecy said. A man of sorrows. A crane acquainted with grief. Ma Beyond human recognition, all these things were at face value. So it seems to be God is showing us that when we interpret Scripture, we need to interpret it at face value with what he says.

We may not understand it because we apply man’s wisdom, but. There’s more to it, in fact. Turn real quickly. Let me show you something else. I just want to show you wisdom. Versus. And when I use the word wisdom, I’m talking about man’s wisdom. John three When Nicodemus comes to Jesus. This is real interesting. So just to set the stage, Nicodemus is a Pharisee. That means he’s in the ruling group of the Jewish nation. He knows the Bible, or at that time the Torah, all the Old Testament, all the prophecies. And if anyone had revelation, Nicodemus would be one that would have that revelation. And so here’s what happens. He has a grid. And he can’t get past his grid. Starting with verse three. Jesus answered him. This is John three, verse three. Jesus answered him. Truly, truly. I say to you, Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. So Nicodemus, operating in what I’ll call the role of the servant, because what we’ll see is that the servant church operates very much like the Old Testament, Israel, like the Pharisees. Deep study of the word, lots of man’s wisdom in applying what it means. And so here is Nicodemus response verse four. Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother womb and be born because his grid is earthly? And this is where I want to start touching on.

I want to touch on the grid and the grid. That you’ll see as a primary difference between the servant, the st and the son Churches is how they view heaven and earth and how they interact. This is the primary thing. So you have earth and you have heaven. So the grid for the servant church is that they are separate. Okay. So the grid is that heaven and earth are separated. And this is what Nicodemus was struggling with. He said, How can a man be born again? Because he had only an earthly understanding. But almost everything Jesus taught was simply a heavenly truth, not an earthly truth. He came as a spirit to teach spirit in life. And all of that is in the heavenly realm, the spiritual realm. So when we start to interpret God’s Word from a human perspective, with a human earthly grid will always miss it. Because it’s not a book of human truth, it’s a book of spiritual truth. I remember a pastor that I know, very brilliant man. He was sharing that when he changed churches from one city to another, church in another city. And he mentioned that when he left, there is this man in the old city that he used to debate. He’s an atheist and he would always debate the atheist on the radio once a year for a number of years. And on the way out, he went to that guy and said, you know, I really wish you would believe in Jesus.

And the atheist said, Well, you’ve given me no reason to believe in him. All of this deep theological argument of man’s wisdom. But when we look at what Paul says, I don’t come. I didn’t come to you with wisdom in lofty words. I came with a power and demonstration of the Holy Spirit, and the servant church is mostly based on man’s wisdom. Once you start to move into childlike faith. Then what happens is you start to move into the aspect of I’ll call it the supernatural, the mingling of the heavenly truths into the earthly reality. So let me show you how this works in terms of viewpoint of this grid between heaven and earth. So the servant church sees heaven and earth as a complete separation. We live on earth. We toil. We work. And then we die. And we go home to heaven. They see it as totally separate. So I want you to think for a moment of a jar to jars. And one jar represents Earth. And it’s full of sugar. The other jar represents heaven. And it’s full of cold water. So when the servant church, they believe that those two jars are meant to be kept separate. You’re either in earth or you’re in heaven. And because of that, everything they see is from that perspective. But then when you move to the Saint Church, you start to see childlike faith come about. And childlike faith says, when Jesus says you must be born again, they say, Well, I don’t understand.

Help me understand that more. As opposed to, Well, that can’t be. And so then he starts to say, You have to be born of the flesh, blood and water and born of the spirit. And only things of the spirit can inherit things of the spirit. So we start to have our brain stretched and we start to understand there’s a deeper truth that you have to pursue that you can never accomplish through man’s wisdom. Because man’s wisdom is always of the earthly nature. So then what you have with the saint is you have a a mingling of heaven and earth with you have the co mingling of heaven and earth. What happens is so you as a saint, it’s like you pour the sugar into the cold water and now what you have is you have a bunch of sugar particles. You’re going to you’re going to take a spoon and you’re going to stir it around. And when you put sugar in cold water and stirring it, stir it, you’ll see all the sugar granules spin around in there. Right. And it’s held in in suspension. They’re not separate. They’re still separate, but they’re within the same jar. This is where we go back to Ephesians one, that all of our blessings are in the heavenly places, those things that Jesus has promised. He said the thief came to steal, kill and destroy. I came that you might have life and have it abundantly. And where is the blessings of our abundant life? They’re stored in heaven. So yeah.

Yeah, I just had a revelation. It’s like that line between is like the veil.

That’s right. It’s like the line for. For the servant church.

The. Yeah, they’re on the other side of the veil.

They’re on the other. That’s right. And just to explain for the audio listeners is when I’ve got the two jars drawn up for the servant church, I’ve got a line separating the two. So if you imagine you have a table with two jars, one jar of sugar, one jar of cold water, and you put a veil, some sort of a divider so that they can’t see each other as a servant church. We don’t know what’s on the other side of the veil. Only the high priest could go into the Lord’s presence. That’s heaven. And so the whole idea in the Old Testament is only the high priest could ever commune with God directly. Everything else were shadows and figures and just kind of rituals. And so we live our life in the sugar jar only once we die. Then we go across the other side of the veil. And now we’re in the cold water in the heaven. But what? The Saint Church. The same church because they believe in childlike faith. And when Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is in your midst, when Jesus says Seek first the Kingdom of God and all of these blessings will be added unto you. Matthew 633 Then the same church starts to believe that believe it by childlike faith that God said it. It’s got to be true. And so what they realize is, okay, all the blessings are in the heavenly places, but we can and I’ll use the term pray them down.

That’s kind of our vernacular. I’m going to pray down my blessings. In other words, as I live life, I’m going to live it by faith, by stirring up both the sugar and the cold water. And so I’m going to have a a convergence of the heavenly truths into my earthly realities. And based on how I walk by faith, determines if I get the heavenly truths becoming my earthly reality. This is why when Peter’s walking on the water by faith, he’s getting an heavenly truth, changing the earthly reality. A miracle happens. And then as soon as he doubts and he loses that faith, it’s like you stop stirring this cold water where sugar and now all the sugar particles drop to the bottom. They no longer are interacting with the water. And so when we stop believing by faith and acting by faith, then what happens is all of our spiritual blessings just kind of settle down, figuratively speaking. So we have the servant church. Operating in man’s wisdom with a separation of veil between the earthly realm and the heavenly realm. When they pray, the servant church, Lord, please help me do this. And if God does it, then it must be God’s will. If God doesn’t do it, it must not be God’s will, because He’s always going to do whatever his will is.

So we pray. Which is really just a petition. But there’s no faith in prayer because faith does not exist in the purely serving church. Now, keep in mind, this thing is a whole gradient, from servant to saint to sun. If you think about dark to bright light, you know, if you light a little candle, the darkness is gone. But it’s not the same level of brightness as having a light bulb turn on in the room. But that light bulb, like where we are in this den, is plenty of light, but it’s not near as bright as outside. If the sun is shining and there’s always a greater gradient of light because outside, when the sun is shining, you’ve got to wear sunglasses. There are other lights where you have to put on deep like a welder’s goggle because it’s so much more piercingly bright. And so where I’m going on this is I use the terminology of Servant Saint Sun to just try to help separate visually what’s going on. But the reality is no one is a pure servant unless I don’t even believe in Jesus. No one’s a perfect son unless they’re actually Jesus. And we’re always somewhere in the middle based on how we believe God’s Word. It making sense so far. Okay, so what then happens is the Saints believe that there’s this intermingling between heaven and earth, and that intermingling has to do with our faith to engage heaven, to bring Earth, bring heavenly truths into Earth.

So they’re still somewhat separate. Right represented by the sugar is just in suspension with the water, but they interact together. But then if you take it the next step and look at the sun, the sun is a matured version of the saint, still childlike faith, but they believe something different. They believe that you take this jar, you pour the sugar in it, and then you stick it on the stove and you turn it into a boiling water. And then when it comes out, it’s now a solution. So for sons, it’s a solution. The difference between a suspension and a solution is a suspension. You have the two elements sugar and cold water, but they don’t become one. They operate together. But a solution is a new creation. Like Paul says, it’s now a new chemical creation that is a simple sirup and you can’t separate it. They have now been literally united together and the molecules are a different molecule. It’s not sugar and it’s not water. It’s a sugar water, a simple sirup. To grow in the spirit is to grow from the servant through the st, into son and into mature son. The only way you grow is to hunger to learn more. Because what you realize is you don’t know at all.

What happens in the servants side is if I want to understand Scripture, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to read that passage and then I’m going to go research commentaries that other theologians have written about it. And it’s going to be like this big stirring pot, trying to understand what everyone believes and try to narrow it down, what the truth is. And then once I have the truth, I create what I call a doctrine. And when I have enough doctrines out there, I’ve got a doctrine on this topic, a doctrine on this topic, a doctrine on this topic, a doctrine on this. Then what happens is these doctrines become the foundation of all that, I believe. And you never go against the doctrine because the doctrine has now been proven. This is God’s truth. What happens then is you have no no hunger to learn more because you believe that this is the totality of the primary truth. But if you think about this board that I have right now, let’s say that this board represents spiritual truth. He put a little tiny dot one spot. That little tiny dot represents more space of the spiritual truth than any man has. There’s so much that we don’t understand. And so that’s where you mention the servants have their man’s wisdom. They have so much invested in it that becomes their life.

They become camped out with the doctrine.

Well, now now let me suggest there are some people who are who stop at servant hood because they’re are unteachable. Right. And there are others who stop at sainthood because they’re unteachable from their. We are right. So the key is this is what I talked about last time and we’re going to review it a little bit today is when we pray, we want to lay all of our revelation down at the Lord’s feet in a figurative, metaphorical setting and say, Lord, I really don’t understand this. I know that I understand some, but I know that what I understand isn’t even your truth. It’s only my limited ability. So I lay it all down at your feet and I say, Lord, please help me understand. Show me more. And as long as you’re hungry to keep laying it down and he keeps giving it back to you in greater measure as you so you get more back than you. So it all again and you get it back. Every seed reproduces after its own kind and you keep sowing as your spiritual seed, your revelation, and putting it back into his hands and say, Lord, I hunger to know more. And then he returns back even more. But at whatever point you say, I got it. And I’m not going to show it any more because it can’t be anything more. Okay, then. That’s right. True. So now with this, I want to take the next step. What does this do in your life? I’m going to keep the veil on the servant side, because I think that was a fantastic observation.

So how does this impact your life? So on the servant side, what happens is your life becomes the life of the. You live your life as an Old Testament life. What I mean by that is if you look at the Pharisees as the epitome of understanding the Old Testament law and how they live their life, their life was always one of struggle against sin. Everything was about sin. Everything was about making sure you do exactly what God said to do. There is a law involved, tithing of mint and dill and everything else. And and there is a very structured society. You also find that they because there is a separation. They believe that there’s nothing they can do to impact or influence earthly reality. So they pray and petition the Lord who is the only one who can impact earthly reality. So the prayers are just try to get God from the heaven to then impact their life in the earth. Prayers, her petition. And because they don’t know God’s will, because God is in heaven, right, then the prayers will usually end if it be your will. And we recognize that whatever. In fact, I even heard of a very well known preacher on this one. And he was saying, How do you know God’s will? You look backwards and whatever happened that day was God’s will. Because God is sovereign and everything that happens happens according to his will.

The idea of as a servant is if I think in terms of two things, it’s going to be a struggle against sin. Because it is always rearing its ugly head in my life. And there is going to be the adage of work like it’s all up to you. Pray like it’s all up to you. God. Y’all ever heard that work? Like it’s all up to you and pray like it’s all up to God. Why is that? Because in the Old Testament life, it’s all about toiling. Is about struggling through this life to get through this life until you can go home to heaven and finally have peace. In the Believer Church and the New Covenant Church. Then we wait to go to heaven because that’s where all of our blessings are. But it’s still toiling and struggling. And I remember there is a pastor that’s in the servant church, and I said, How are you doing? He said, I am in his hand or something like that. And it just kind of like like this deep sigh of turmoil. He said, How are you doing, man? I’m I’m blessed. And how are you doing? I’m in his hand. And I remember another friend that managed a Christian church that was in the servant side, everything Old Testament type of life. And for him it was constant. There was never any real joy in his life. If you think back in the Pharisees time, there is never really any joy because everything was focused on sin and the law was so you would know your sin.

And so you keep focusing on sin and there’s no joy in that. So that’s the life of the servant, because they believe heaven and earth are separated and everything they do here is has an earthly nature. But then as you move into the saint side, then things start to change. In the same side, they start to live a New Testament life. And what’s the New Testament life? Joy and joy and peace. It’s the life that says we have been freed from the law. We’re no longer under law. We’re under grace. We’re no longer have to follow a set of rules. The Lord loves me. I can actually talk to the Lord and communicate with him. I can if. If, if I need provision in my life, I’m going to work diligently. But more than anything else, I’m going to work by faith. So there’s an element of work and faith. If I can spell this while I talk work and faith and their life and more production starts to happen. In fact, let me go back up. I miss one thing under the servant, because this is important, because you work like it’s all up to you and you pray like it’s all up to God. Two things happen. Number one, you have a high burnout because there’s only so much work you can do. And since you have no ability to influence the outcome, you just keep other than your own efforts.

You have a high burnout, and in terms of eternal impact, you have a very low, eternal impact. I want to read you something. I found this great little booklet. It’s called The Lord’s Work Done in the Lord’s Way. This is written by the guy named Yohanan, who started a ministry called Gospel for Asia. They have thousands and thousands of missionaries, apparently. And he was writing this whole idea of how the Lord got on to them and say, you know, stop doing my work your way. Do it my way. And there is this lady, part of the Welsh revival named Jessie Pen Lewis, and she wrote a book called Molded by the Cross. And he brings out this one expert. And I just want to show you this excerpt. So this is a lady who has been sold out to the Lord and evangelist bringing about this Welsh revival, doing all kinds of things that in man’s eyes is great work. And this is what she wrote. Then came the climax, when one morning I awoke and saw before me a hand holding up in terrible light, a handful of filthy rags, while a gentle voice said, This is the outcome of all of your past service for God. Wouldn’t that be horrible for you to have that vision? This is what you’re all of your past service for, Lord. But, Lord, I’ve been surrendered and consecrated to you all these years. It was consecrated work. And the Lord replies, Yes, my child, but all of your service have been consecrated flesh.

The outcome of your own energy, your own plans for winning souls, your own devotion. All for me, I grant you, but yourself, all the same. So last time we talked about that parable of the sower and the seed and the production, some 30 fold, some 60 fold, some 100 fold. And I was making the comment that the servant church is more the 30 fold side, because what happens is because of their belief in how they interpret scripture, what the separation of heaven and earth, all the work is up to them, which means all of their effort is a flesh. And flesh cannot make eternal impact. This is why my friend, this pastor who’s been debating this atheist for all these years, couldn’t figure out why the atheist wouldn’t believe in Jesus because it was all a fleshly effort of the intellectual pursuit of man’s wisdom. Had nothing to do with what Paul said. Which I don’t speak in lofty words in wisdom, but in the power and demonstration of the Word of God. So that’s the servant, the saint. What happens then? Because the saint lives the New Testament life, believing they’re saints, not sinners, believing God works with them, and that they have faith to bring from heaven their blessings into earthly reality. Then they work diligently, but not super hard. It’s not work like it’s up to you. It’s work with sufficient effort and then have faith for God to produce the results. It’s almost.

Like Worth and faith are yoked.

Together. That’s right. With the Saints. Yeah, with. With the Saints. The work and faith are yoke together. And there’s an old saying, not an old saying, but a saying that we have in evangelism. You know, your job is just the messenger. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to bring the conviction. Right? If they come to Christ graded, they don’t come to Christ. It’s not your fault. There are some things you can do to tweak to be more effective, but ultimately it’s the Holy Spirit. And so what you see then with the Saint Church, like if you look at the missionaries, you see a very low burnout. Why? Because it’s not their effort. There is a joy in life they don’t live in against struggle with sin. In fact, they have very they have some struggle, but not a high struggle, because that’s not who they are. And then they live with this work faith element, working diligently enough, but not 24 seven. Right. And so there is a higher I’m going to call this more eternal impact. The servant church has lo eternal. The St church has more eternal impact. Think about the story that missionary that after 15 years only 12 or 15 converts. Then he moves into the st world supernaturally by the Lord doing it. And within a year all 304 hundred of the tribe tribal members were all believers in Jesus. That’s the difference.

Because now what’s happening is you have more eternal impact because the impact has been done by the spirit, not by the flesh. But then you take it one step further and you look at the Son Church. The Son Church, keep in mind, believes that there is a total solution of heaven and earth. They believe, in fact, as Jesus said, look, look. 1721. This is Jesus talking. Luke 1721, he says. Nor will people say, Here it is or there it is, because. The Kingdom of God is in your midst. In other words, what Jesus is saying, there is not a separation. That heaven is somewhere way over there. Earth is here. He says. The kingdom of God is in you. It’s in your midst. It’s in the midst of you. You carry the kingdom of God. Think about this. Where is the tabernacle? Sarah. Now we’re talking about this is our body. The Lord dwells in the tabernacle. The Lord dwells in our body. And where is the Kingdom of God is where the Lord is. It’s in us. And so what happens is the sons then live not an Old Testament life. Not a New Testament life. They live a Jesus life. Think about Jesus. There was never a separation between heaven and earth, between heavenly truths and earthly reality. He changed earthly, earthly reality simply by declaring it okay. And so then when you look at work and faith production, this is tending the garden.

Go back to Adam. When Adam was made as the first Son of God, the first Adam. He was placed in the garden to tender. He wasn’t there to work it. In other words, God planted the garden. It was already producing every fruit in its season all year long. That’s what we see with the heavenly production. And he was there to tend the garden, not to work it. And what that means is there is no burnout as a son. And in terms of eternal impact, there is maximum eternal impact because it has in the pure aspect of the sun. It has nothing to do with flesh. It all has to do with the Lord’s Spirit doing it. We see shadows of this. So if you think in terms of earthly, you have a king and you have his children. They don’t work. They have property, cities, they have servants who do all their work, but they don’t work for any of their provision. You see, in the Old Testament, God came claiming the tribe of Levi as his own and he says, You will have no inheritance in the land. I’m sinning Israel because I am your inheritance. And because of that, especially on the priest side, on the priest side, they were not allowed to sweat. In doing their work, we’re going to talk on this another time.

And all of their provision was brought to them from the people because that was the Lord’s inheritance. And so what we see is they tended the work the Lord had, but they didn’t do the work in their flesh, essentially. So that gets me up to. Where I wanted to start for today. On a few things. So we’re going to run a little late, but not hopefully not too late, but it’s just been interesting so far. So this the whole purpose of this is just to kind of put in a framework of visual. Where are we going? Why are we doing it? How is it different? And what’s the primary? When someone says, you know, I’m going to ascend to heaven? Go ask the Lord. Really? Well, that’s a son, because they believe that they can. The servant says, Well, I can’t go ask the Lord anything until I get to heaven. I got to die first. So death becomes their salvation because that’s how they get saved from this earth. So you have this whole this this range of of how one believes based on childlike faith. Everything is scriptural, but it’s how you believe. So with that, I want to touch on the last couple of things so this doesn’t turn into three sessions. As we talk about how do you grow in the spirit? I’m just going to do a real quick cursory overview of this next topic.

I want to talk about difficulties because difficulties are focused on growing in the spirit and the three types of difficulties that you really have. One is a difficulty of discipline. One is a difficulty of persecution. And the third one is a difficulty of trials. The challenge is. In the in the physical realm. They all have they all fill about the same because they’re all painful. The question is, what’s going on? Why is it and what does it mean and how does it help you in growing? So they all feel the same, but they all have different. So discipline. This usually comes in the form of what I call torments and torments are when you’ve given a tormenting spirit, a legal right to touch you. And that is because of what I’ll call unrepentant sin. This is why it is disciplined, because you only get disciplined for sin, but you don’t get disciplined for sin that you’ve repented of. You get disciplined for sin that you haven’t repented of. And the sin, this unrepentant sin, is either yours or it’s generational. God’s tells us that he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished means that discipline. And he says, I’m going to visit the iniquities of the father on the third and fourth generations. So we see that this discipline can come down the line and what happens is the torments.

And I did an entire training on this. So for those who have interest, it’s called spiritual warfare. You can either find it on the podcast. But what I would really encourage, if this holds interest, go to my website, get Radical faith dot com and click on Bible study topics and you’ll see the actual videos there. But torments will show up in one of three ways. It’s either mental anguish like anxiety, depression, things of that sort, a physical pain. You know, I’m hurting here, I’m hurting there or some sort of a physical your lame or your paralyzed or anything like that. But it’s all usually focused against you in some capacity. Persecution is different. Persecution is when you’re being attacked for one reason, and that is because you proclaim Christ somewhere in your being. You are focused on the Lord. Persecution is essentially when you have the spirit of anti Christ attacking you because you have the Spirit of Christ and He’s trying to thwart you from doing the work the Lord has called you to do. So persecution is to thwart your destiny. When you enter persecution, that’s good. You want more persecution, right? Because it means that the enemy does not like what you’re doing. And they’re doing everything they can to stop you. Trials are a little bit different. These are trials that the the Lord send to you and they are to grow you.

So with that, I want to show you just a couple of passages on these. So let’s look real quickly on on discipline. I want to talk. How do you respond? So, John, ten, ten. This is where Jesus says the thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy. But I came that they might have life and have it abundantly. In order to have abundant life. The more you grow in the spirit, the more your life becomes abundant. There I remember the time when people would say, How are you doing? I’m doing I’m doing okay. Then I’m doing pretty good. And then it got so then it got to be where I am blessed. I don’t know any other way to say it. And you can see the progression of my response. How are you doing? As you match map the progression of my growing in the spirit. As you grow in the spirit, you do less unrepentant sin. You actually start to sin less. And with that, you have no torments. So the response when you recognize and the key is if you have difficulty in your life, you have to identify where is it coming from? Because based on where it’s coming from, determines what your response should be and how to manage on it. If if you’re coming from unrepentant sin, then the key is repent quickly and reframe.

But if you look at persecution, this is really interesting. So the response I’ll put over here is repent. That’s how you respond to grow in the spirit. But if you look at persecution, I want you to see this. This is Matthew five versus 11 and 12. And I want to do a whole Teachings series on eternal rewards. And these are some key passages there, but I want you to see this as really interesting. So this is Jesus speaking. We’re going to look at Matthew five and Luke six. They’re basically the same content, but in two different gospels. So Matthew five, 11 and 12 says, Blessed are you, blessed are you. When others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account, rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. And then look again. I want to show you this same thing in Luke six. So Luke six versus 22 and 23 takes a little bit different stint on it. Luke six starting verse 22 says, Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the son of man, rejoice in that day and leap for joy. For. Behold, your reward is great in heaven.

So you get the impression of of the most exuberant thing you can do if I’m being persecuted. Hallelujah. And this word that says great is your reward in heaven. The Greek word, translated as great is the word for the greatest, most stupendous, most magnificent. It is the extreme of all the words in Greek that talk about something being great and powerful. And Jesus says, If you are persecuted for my name sake, then leap for joy, because that’s the most amazing thing that can ever happen to you. But how does persecution come across? Come out? What does it look like? We know what the persecuted church looks like. You know, they take all your belongings, they put you in jail, they break your bones. They kill you simply because you’re a Christian. But. That’s not always the way it looks. Like over here in America. How does it look? Because we’re not persecuted necessarily for our faith, for standing up to being a Christian. Unless you’re in the high school system, like maybe a high school football coach who wants to pray and demonstrate his faith on the field and he gets fired, that’s persecution. But a lot of times it’s a lot more much more subtle. What happened with me is I had two friends, just a number of friends, but just two that I’ll share. Both of them sued me.

Both of them work for me. Both of them were dear friends of mine and I was asking the Lord what’s going on? Because I was perfectly righteous. And the entire situation. And the Lord was saying this persecution. Even though they’re both born again believers. It was persecution for the sake of the name. Why? Because they were in torment, because of unrepentant sin. And the actions that they were doing were being directed by, I call them the Spirit of anti Christ who’s using them to attack me, the Spirit of Christ. So if you were to look in the Spirit realm, you would see this this spiritual battle between the anti Christ and the Christ spirit like this trying to thwart me. From doing my destiny. Here’s what’s interesting to. My destiny. What the Lord has called me to do is to teach His word to His people through my business community. Both of those people tried very hard to get me to sell my business. And then just become an employee. Totally. It would have totally destroyed my destiny. And so you start to see that this persecution is simply what other people do against you. That’s trying to thwart the call that you have on your life. And when that happens, late for joy. What’s your response? Is to rejoice, because that shows you that you are on track. Right? And then the final one is trials.

Look at this. Trials come up and they feel like discipline a lot of times because discipline sometimes feel like you don’t like everything you’ve got is being taken away from you. But trials can also be that way. So look, real quickly, this is James one versus two through five. James One versus two, three, five. And it says, Count it all, Joy. There we go again. Count of joy. Count it all, Joy. My brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and let steadfastness or endurance have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach, and will be given to them. So. What’s your response if you enter a trial? First off, let’s talk about trials for just a brief moment. These are things that the Lord. Send you through. They don’t happen to you. He creates the trail specifically for you and sends you through it. The greatest trials that we see, that the clearest ones in the Bible, the earlier ones, are taking Israel through the wilderness as he introduces him to them. And every step of the way, there’s another trial. There’s no water. There is no food. This made mighty army is right coming against us and we have nowhere to go.

God puts them in all these trials to do one thing test their faith. And that’s why this says count at all, Joy, when you meet these trials that you may know that the testing of your faith. These trials are to test your faith. Testing your faith is part of growing in the spirit because it’s your faith that takes you from servant to saint to son. Because you interpret by childlike faith. You believe God. You trust God. You act by faith. You obey by faith. It says that Abraham believed God and it was counted in as reckoned him as righteousness. And so the trials are designed to grow you up. So what’s your response when you come into a trial? It’s actually two things. Number one is to recognize that is a trial. Lord. And here’s how you can know It’s a trial, Lord. Did I do anything wrong? Is there any sin in my life, any generational sen, any unrepentant sin, anything like that? If an answer is no, and if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go watch my training on spiritual warfare. If the answer is no on all of that, then you can say, Am I being attacked by people? And is the attack thwarting me or trying to thwart me from my calling? If the answer is no, then is there a trial? Probably it’s yes.

I was just thinking too, about how you always have a test to get promoted.

Yes. And and that’s that’s what I’m saying. So part of growing in faith, growing in the spirit is to grow in faith, and that is always by trials. So the first step is you recognize that it’s a trial and then you focus on passing the test. Right? Because here’s what’s interesting. If you don’t pass the test, it’s going to send you the same trial again, you know, different tune, but same dance. And so you want to pass the test. And then as you go through this, here’s what’s interesting. With discipline, you want none of it. You want to be good with persecution, you want more of it. Because the more you get, the greater your rewards. And with trials. You want more trials? Lord, please send me more trials that I can grow. Because they’re all done. And loving nurture to help you grow. In him and faith and who you are to make you perfect and complete. Conforming to the image of Christ. And if you look at the process from. Servant to saint to son. It’s a process of faith intertwining with revelation. Revelation is the spiritual truth, understanding of the written word of God, and it only comes by faith. So as you move from servant to saint to son, is this growth of intertwining your faith and revelation. And as you proceed in that direction, you are conforming more and more to the image of Christ operating as Christ operated. That’s why the Son Church, the way they live, is as Jesus lives.

It’s a Jesus life as opposed to a New Testament life. So wrapping up real quickly. What we talked last time. And I just want to reiterate it here. I want to add more context into all of this, how it all works. But you go back to the actions to grow in spirit. How do you grow in the spirit? Number one, there’s still the study of God’s word, allowing him to make it a part of you. Number two is what I call face time. The most significant thing. We share this last time. This is what my son Beatty Jr. Shared with me is the most significant thing he has ever done. Relatively speaking and growing in the spirit and face time is where you are on your knees before the Lord. Face down in that position of humility. And it is a it is an activity of inactivity. The activity is being inactive. You’re not concentrating on anything. You’re not trying to praise him. You’re not going through a list of petitions. Lord, please do this. Please help me with this. And you’re just there because what happens is, as you are in this position with your face down in this face time, your spirit is now in some capacity released. And I’m using words that are not accurate, but they kind of give the picture that I see in my mind’s eye is your spirit is released into the heavenly places where it is now communing with the Lord.

It’s in. You are in spirit. Greater in the Lord’s presence. And the more you are in the Lord’s presence. You know, when when Moses was in the Lord’s presence came down from the from the mountain, his face was shining. When Jesus was in the presence of the Lord and the Mount of Transfiguration, his whole body transfigured. When you’re in the presence of the Lord, you become transfigured. And the more you transfigure this was. We spoke on the body, soul and spirit, and I was sharing in the body, soul and spirit that your spirit is penetrating into your soul. Your soul penetrates into your body. And so this is your spirit for those listening. Your spirit is like an ice cream cone. Turn to the right where the pointy end of the cone is, then shoved into another ice cream cone with a scoop. And that represents your soul. And the pointy end of that is shoved into another scoop of ice cream which represents your body. And the spirit has preeminence over the soul. The soul has preeminence over the body. So when you’re in this face time position and your spirit is up here communing with the Lord, then what’s happening is your spirit is growing. You’re growing in the spirit, and that flows down into your soul, which flows down into your body. It’s a cascading effect. You don’t recognize any of this because your soul, your your what you see here, taste, feel is all focused through your physical body and not through your spirit.

So whatever’s happening in your spirit, it’s like it can’t even see or feel or experience. But it’s real. It comes down through when you’re in this face time and it impacts your entire being and you grow more in the spirit, you become conformed into the image of Christ Spirit first, then soul, then body. The third and last thing to grow in the spirit is fasting. Fasting is a turbocharger to this entire process. Because what fasting does, this is what we spoke about last time. Fasting severs the energy source from your body to the flesh, which is the I’ll call it the spiritual component of your body, and it’s in your flesh that send wells and the sin and your flesh wants to tug your soul away from the spirit. And so when you fast and you starve your body of food, it weakens the flesh. And when the flesh has weakened in a figurative split, since your soul moves more into the spirit realm. So if you want to be walking in the spirit, doing things that are spirit in nature, gift things, prophecy, even to speaking with the Lord. Fasting is a supercharger on it. But when you add. Facing the study of God’s word with face time, with fasting. It’s just amazing. That’s how you grow in the spirit. Action items. Start FaceTiming the Lord and fast.

P144