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Bibleline Bibleline, they are God’s word on Bibleline, everywhere, every time. Here God’s truth on Bibleline. Welcome to Bibleline with Dr. Ralph Yankee Arnold, pastor of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida. Clearly declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ through the radio and the internet. Your regular prayers and monthly support make it possible for Bibleline to continue on the air. You can reach us toll free at 1-800-576-3771. Online donations may be made through the Bible-lined website at calvaryoftampa.org. We pray that you will enjoy our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ and that today’s message will be a blessing to you and your family.

Grace God’s motivating power. And so grace is the means by which God displays his motivating power. When we understand the motivating power of God’s divine nature, we will better understand the source of proper Christian motivation. Because if we’re to be like the Lord, then we should find out what motivates God. Don’t that make sense? Why does God do what He does? God knew before He ever made the man and the woman and put them in the garden that they were going to fall, because he said that he had already prepared a sacrifice before the foundation of the world, which was Christ.

So it’s not like God was shocked, but it’s all part of a gigantic plan. When we understand the motivating power of Satan’s wicked nature, and Satan has an old wicked nature, then we’ll better understand our own sinful nature. the Bible tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and who can know it. Well, God has explained to us many of the characteristics of our sinful nature and tells us that we do what we do because of that sinful nature.

But if we see who has that sinful nature and why he does what he does, which is the devil himself, then we’ll understand why we’re acting like the devil sometime. What is the motivating power of God? Love is the all-encompassing of all of God’s divine attributes. God wants you and I to know what he’s like. Well, we could never really understand the mighty power of God if God did not reveal it to us in some way. So love is the basic of why God does what he does.

It says, but God commended. That word there in Romans chapter 5 and verse 8, commended means to display or manifest means to reveal. So God has manifested his love toward us. In that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So if God’s going to display his love, he had to do it in some way. And Christ dying for us was God’s way of showing us that he loves us. In this verse it says in 1st John chapter 4 verses 9 and 10, in this was manifested the love of God toward us because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world.

Now get this, how did God manifest his love? If God did not have a way to do this, then we would not know that God is love. God has to have a way to show who He is, to demonstrate what He’s like. We often say, who is God, where is God, and what is God like? So God has to have a means by which He can display His attributes because His attributes tell you who He is. you would not know that God is a God of love if God didn’t show you what he meant by that.

Or God is the God of kindness of God didn’t show you what he meant by that. And so he says that God manifested his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners. He died for us, but because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world. Now notice each time it was the sending of God’s Son into the world to die for us. That was the manifestation of the love of God poured us. Grace is the means by which God’s love is displayed.

We often say that grace is unmerited favor. We didn’t deserve it. We don’t merit it. You could also say it just means without charge. That God wants to display His love and He has to have a way to do it. Now, if He did it and we had to earn the right to see what God is like, then we would never know what God is like, because we cannot earn that right. No man can. So God said He will display that for us freely.

Means without charge. Get this verse. And this is in the book of Ephesians in chapter 2 verse 7 through 8, or 2 9. That in the ages to come, that means in the time, in the future, down the road. He might, and the word is show. That means to display, to manifest, to reveal. In the ages to come, the exceeding riches of His grace. How rich is God? How much does God love? Just how kind is God. When it says in John 3 16, for God so loved the world.

Didn’t you say just God loved the world? God so loved the world. So God says that He has a plan by which He is going to manifest that in the ages to come, the riches of His grace in His kindness. Now you and I would not know that God is kind if there was no one upon whom to bestow His kindness. God has to have somebody to display his kindness upon for us to know God is good. We can say God is good all day long, but how do you know God is good?

For by grace are you saved through faith, that not of yourself. It is the gift of God. Because if salvation was by the works of man, God could not display his love. He couldn’t display his kindness. He couldn’t display his compassion because man earned it. And And God was simply paying a debt. Well, that wouldn’t show some of the inner essence of God. Who is God? What is God? And he says, not of works lest any man should boast because then man would get the honor.

Man would get the credit. Man would get the glory. And that’s not what God’s after. God wants all the honor, all the praise, all the glory. Salvation by the works of man can never show the kindness of God. So God cannot have salvation by works because in man has earned that which God wanted to bestow as a gift Then it could not have been a gift Grace is the means by which God displays his love Grace is the mean by which God displays his kindness Now if you was to say I love God What would be your reasons?

How do you demonstrate that you really love577 God? Or how did Godmediate demonstrate to us that he loves us? You and I if we really believe that God really loves us, it’s so easy for love to respond to love We love him why? Because he first loved us So if you get to the place where you begin to question the love of God you’ll stop loving and and graces the meaning by which God displays His forgiveness. How would you know that God forgives if you didn’t have something that has been done against God that needs to be forgiven?

So you see, there has to be an object, something by which God can demonstrate what He’s like. Otherwise, nobody would really ever understand God. The Bible says that the angels studied and peered into but could not understand why God did what He did. The angels don’t understand it. And even the Old Testament saints, it says that they studied, trying to understand what God meant when the Holy Spirit, which was in them, did signify beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow because they didn’t understand everything.

You and I are privileged to have a complete word of God and so we can read it and study it and understand and believe that we are forgiven because God is a God of forgiveness. And then after you’ve trusted Christ as your Savior, many of God’s children forget that God forgives and as they live their life and they fail in their Christian life instead of confessing the sin to the Lord and accepting God’s forgiveness and going ahead, they lay in the mud for the rest of their life.

They never correct the problem. Grace is the main by which God displays His mercy. How would you know that God is a God of mercy? Unless you owed something and could not pay it. And then they’d be forgiven for that. That’s mercy because you didn’t get what you deserve. You and I deserve to go to hell because of what we’ve done. But not to get that. That’s mercy. Now Grace is getting something that I don’t deserve. Mercy is not getting what I do deserve, and grace is the mean by which God displays His power.

Because, see, love reveals the power of God, and kindness reveals the power of God, and forgiveness, and mercy, and compassion all reveal the power of God. If you and I want the power of God in our life, it all depends on how powerful the love of God is. the love of God is in your life. How powerful is the kindness in your life? And the forgiveness that you have toward others in your life. Because if you don’t have those qualities, you have no power.

It’s not like I’m going to pray that God will give me power from on high. It’s not some supernatural power that comes over you and makes you supernatural and you can do the work of God. Now, it’s whenever you begin to demonstrate forgiveness and love and compassion and those qualities that reveal who God is and what God is like, you’re to reveal those in your own personal life. And that’s how you reveal the power of God in your life.

Any Christian who is not loving, who is not kind, who is not merciful, and who is not forgiving, is not very strong in the Lord. The power of God in your life is revealed by the display, the making known, the revealing, the manifestation of what God has done in your own life and how you see God because you’re revealing Him. The power in a man’s life is revealed by the power of his love, his kindness, forgiveness, and mercy toward others.

And if you don’t have it, you don’t have no power of God in your life. And so many Christians live their life totally powerless, but it’s all by choice. and they do not understand how it all works together. Grace is the means by which God displays His judgment. In other words, none of these things cost us anything. They’re all free. God is willing to demonstrate all of this for us without charge, no price. And how does grace display His judgment?

because it displays his love that he has toward righteousness and his justice, because his judgment reveals his love for righteousness. You see, if God loves righteousness, God has to hate that which is not righteous. And if God loves justice, then God hates injustice. If God is a righteous God and he loves his law, which he does, then he loves perfection and he loves holiness, but how does God display his perfection? How does God display his love for his law?

And that is by the wrath that he bestows upon those that deserve it. And so there is the love of God and there’s the wrath of God. And so God is gonna reveal these things. So in our own Christian life, God loves for us to live right. But when we don’t live right, we know there is the chasing hand of God. That is justice that is right. It is only right for God to chasten his children because he says, because of his love for us, he does these things.

So you and I can look upon the earth and we can see the judgment of the Lord throughout the land. You can see God working. If you know what to look for, but if you don’t know what to look for, you don’t see anything, it’s just day in and day out. Everything’s going on the same old way. Nothing news happening. Grace is truly the means by which God displays all of His divine attributes. So God is wanting to let man know what He’s like.

So God has to have a way to reveal Himself. Even the way He made the world. Even when you talk about predestination, it all deals with man and what God has determined from the very foundations of the world. the world and it’s all about the cross. And whenever you talk about the attribute of God, the foreknowledge of God, see, foreknowledge is an attribute of God. That’s what God knows. Predestination is an act of God. It’s what God does. And so, but these are descriptive of what God is.

God can predict the future. God can pre-determine what’s going to happen before it happens. God can do that. And God knows what every man will do. That’s the foreknowledge of God. That’s the wisdom of God. But all these things are revealed in the Word of God to man in this world and he has to have an object upon which to display all these things. All a man must be the object on which the man has all of the deuteronomy.

divine attributes of God. You see, if God just did this to an angel, an angel ain’t gonna understand it. You have to have a sinful individual so that God has somebody he can show his mercy upon, so that there’s somebody God can show compassion on. See, if nobody needed compassion, how do you show it? Nobody needed love and how do you show it? You and I have to have an object for you and I to display the characteristics of God.

If you and I are supposed to live like the Lord and the Lord for the live through us, well how do you think He does that? In what way? Take over your will? No, God doesn’t take over your will. God lets you make this choice, these decisions, these choices. It’s one story in all of its glory that is really the ultimate display of God’s description of himself. How can you tell one story that would truly describe what God is like?

And that is what? The gospel story itself. From the beginning up to Christ, after Christ, everything deals with that story of the gospel because it’s got all of the characteristics in it that we need. That one story will tell you everything you need to know about what God is like in every area. There’s no other story like this story. And that’s why the gospel is the lens by which we see God, by which we can understand the scriptures. There’s one thing that the devil hates more than anything else.

And that’s the gospel story. He despises that story. But the more you understand that the more that story is so precious. There’s a song we sing sometime called, tell me the story of Jesus, write on my heart every word for God so loved the world. Now that means that if God is love, God needs an object for him to display his love. Otherwise how do you know? How would I know that God loves us or that God his love.

So he has to have an object of his love. God so loved the object, the world, that you and I, people, that he gave his only begotten son. So to prove that he loved the world, he had to have an object and he had to do something about it. So what did he do? He gave his only begotten son Jesus Christ to down that cross so that whosoever believe it in him should not perish but have everlasting. Look at all the results because God wants to prove that He loves you.

It shows you that I have compassion, that I have kindness, that I have forgiveness, I have all these qualities. This is who I am. These traits is a description of God because how do you describe God for God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, have shined in our hearts and the other underlinedings to her to give? See, the gospel story itself, when it’s told in its purest form, is the image of God. It’s not only there’s a man on the cross that’s the Son of God, but everything about the story coming up to it and from it and the death and the resurrection all about all put together is the most beautiful picture in all the world and Describing what God is like it shows his wrath against the sin It shows his righteousness for his law shows his justice and how sin is paid for it

It shows his love shows his power shows everything about shows his compassion you name it and that story’s got it That’s why I love to tell the story. I love the gospel and I don’t ever want it to get old to me or cold to me Through the receiving and the giving of the gospel. We see how God displays There’s love on man Without charge to man his kindness on man without charge to man and and his forgiveness on man without charge to man, his mercy on man without charge to man, power on man without charge to man, compassion on man without charge to man, because it’s all by grace.

So this is what God has done for us. Now if all of this is true and you have to understand this to understand what he means when he says we’re supposed to live great. The power of God is revealed when the attributes and the characteristics of God are displayed. It is the will of God that every child of God displayed the qualities of God in their Christian life. Because if you do only what you choose to do as a natural man in the flesh, in the body, then what have you done?

That’s no different than a lost man can do. You are supposed to show divine kindness, divine love, because there’s no price on yours. There’s no charge for yours. We love people because we love people. We forgive people because we forgive, because that’s the way God is. We want to be like Him, then blessed be God. Be like Him. Be like the Lord. When Christ was here, what was He after? the same thing that he would do. A saved man’s motive of service must be loved.

What is your motive? What is my motive? There has to be a motive. Because otherwise, unless your motive is the same as God, you don’t last long and you get feelings hurt and you quit. But the right kind of motive won’t hurt. The right kind of motive, it won’t stop you. Because you see, it keeps you on going. Because if the real motive is love doesn’t quit. Love doesn’t stop. Love is not easily offended. It’s whenever you’re not doing what you’re doing because you really love the Lord and you really love souls and you really love people then you won’t keep going.

For the love of Christ constraineth us. That word constrain means to motivate us. It’s to motivate. So if the love of Christ motivates us because we thus judge that if one died for all then we’re all dead, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves but unto him would die for them and rose again. So we have a verse in the scriptures that tells us that our motive is supposed to be because of the love of Christ and that challenges us.

That’s why we do what we do. Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels and have not charity or have not love, though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all miseries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I can remove mountains and have not love, charity is love, though I be still all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, the motive is as important as what you do.

Why do you do what you do? You come to church, but why? You give. If you don’t believe your motive is that important, you’ll find out that God says it is important. Because God’s not just after our labor, He wants it to be a labor of love because you love. Not just labor, labor of love. Comfort of hope. These things that are taught in the Scriptures. So we have a reason why we should do what we do. 1 Corinthians chapter 4 and verse 2 makes this statement, Moreover, it is required in understood that a man be found rich, popular, famous, good looking, faithful.

God did not ask us to do anything we could not do. He’s only asked us to do what we can do, and every Christian can be faithful to do what God has told him to do. Therefore, he says, judge nothing before the time until the Lord comes, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make and here’s the word manifest. He will reveal the councils of the heart, the reason, the motives of why a man did what he did and then after that because of that every man shall have praise of God.

Every man shall have praise of God after what is revealed in the councils of the heart. That’s more important. If God says though you give your body to be burned and you have not loved. Now you give your body to be burnt for the cause, but you didn’t have love. Then what was your real reason? Because you want to be a martyr? You want people to think great of you? If it’s all about you and it’s not about him, you’ve got a problem.

Because there is a God in heaven that wants all the honor and all the glory for us doing what we do. So the motive of man is very important. Why a saved man’s means of service must be grace. If God did what he did because he loved us, then we should do what we do for the very same reason. Now get this first. For you’re not under the law, but under grace. Notice what follows a man under grace. If you are under grace and you live by grace, know you’re not that the home ye yield yourselves servants to obey his servants, he are to whom you obey, whether sin and death or of obedience under righteousness been made free from sin, you became the servants of righteousness.

Even though now you’re your members servants to all righteousness on the whole of them. Whatever the Christian life is, whatever it is, that it will be produced by the obedience under righteous. If you don’t have this in your life, you’re not living by grace. Because living by grace produces it. A lot of people believe that living by grace is everybody just do their own thing. Nobody has a right to tell anybody else what they cannot do and shouldn’t should not do and this is all live by grace.

And everybody just call whatever you want to and don’t nobody judge nobody else. Just let everybody alone. That is not the book. That’s not the Bible. Because God don’t let us alone. We’re supposed to even rebuke one another, challenge one another, provoke one another to do the right things. There is a thing in the Bible talking about do’s and don’t. Don’t do this. Do this. You’ll find it all the way through scripture, but I don’t want no rules and regulations.

That’s not the Bible. That’s not living by grace. Living by grace is the power of God in your life to do what God says to do. Not to play games. Why save man’s object of service to God is the lost man through the gospel. Why do you think God left us in this world? It’s not about us. It’s really not about him. It’s about the man that we’re here to reach. Even the ministry to the saint is to strengthen the Christian to reach the lost.

Christians that are not trying to reach the lost in some way aren’t reached. But they may know the Lord. But they’re not strong in the Lord until you’re trying to reach the lost that God left you here to reach. Whether through your money, through your prayers or by your personal witnesses, every Christian is responsible. Every Christian. Nobody more than any other. Everybody’s the same. What he did for me or what he did for Robert, what he did for Leon, what he did for anybody.

He did exactly the same for all of He saved us all equally the same by the same grace. Saved us gave us eternal life and we are going to get the same thing because of that. And God left us here and all of us have exactly the same purpose in life. And that’s the honor and glorified the Lord. And He says this is our object. So you and I must have an object upon whom to bestow those godly attributes that God’s given to us through the New Birth.

says I’m a debtor. I am ready. I am not ashamed to preach the gospel. For therein the gospel is the righteousness of God, reveal to everyone to believe it. You first and also to the degree. Living by grace is when the love of God motivates you to perform. Read that verse again. Not a verse but a statement. Living by grace is when the love of God motivates you to perform. See, God being loved wants to love and wants to be loved.

And He made you in His image. Why do you think one of the most important things in your own personal life is that you want to love and you want to be loved? Think about it. You want to love and you want to be loved more than anything else in this world. Where did you get it from? Who made you like this? God did. We’ve been listening to Bibleline, a teaching ministry of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida, with Dr.

Ralph Arnold. We pray that you were blessed by today’s message. If you have enjoyed our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ, you can reach Bibleline and pledge your support to keep us on the air in your area by dialing toll-free 1-800-576-3771. That’s 1-800-576-3771. If you wish to hear today’s program again or would like to download a free MP3 of today’s or any previous Bibleline program, go to BibleLineMinistries.org and click on the spinning globe in the upper right corner of our homepage.

If you’re in the area, we welcome you to visit us. The address for Calvary Community Church is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634. Our Sunday morning services begin at 10.30 and at 6 o’clock on Sunday evening. Live broadcast of our services may be seen by going to our church website, calvaryoftampa.org. Thanks for joining us on Bible Live, and now a closing thought from Pastor Arnold. Friend, one day it will happen. The trumpet will sound. We will be changed. Caught up to meet the Lord in the air.

live today and every day. Believing that the Lord is coming soon, and just keep looking up.