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Bibleline Bibleline, here 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 by clicking on the donations link on the BibleLineMinistries.org homepage. We pray that you will enjoy our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ and that today’s first part of this two-part message will be a blessing to you and your family.

I preached this sermon tonight with a little fear and trembling. It deals with a subject of slander, gossiping, backbiting, and we all know that those are good things to talk about. And we all know that we’re not guilty of any of that, but we all know somebody who is. If there’s anything that I sometimes dislike speaking on, it’s, I don’t really like talking about the devil because I know the next day he gets me. And when I speak about how to have Christian unity, it seems like it always backfires.

I’ve tried sometimes, you know, I want all the married people to be so happy. So I speak on how husbands are supposed to treat their wives and the wives are supposed to treat their husbands and they just get into more fights. I think I’d have been better off just let it alone. It wasn’t as bad maybe. Somebody just said amen.

Okay. I like y’all too. But tonight I do want to speak a little bit on Christian unity. You said, no, that’s going to be boring. I can tell her that’s going to be a boring message. Well, maybe it will be. It’s probably not going to rank up there with my A game, you know. I want you You take your Bible and turn to the book of Matthew and chapter 18. Matthew chapter 18, the disciples came to Jesus and they had asked him a question, who’s going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

Remember we talked about the kingdom of heaven several times. That period of time where the king from heaven sits up the kingdom upon the earth. That starts in the book of Daniel in chapter 2 where it says, in the days of these kings the God of heaven set up a kingdom upon the earth. This is the stone that comes down and smites the ten toes and sets up his kingdom. So we know it’s Christ. But who’s going to be the greatest?

Can you imagine the disciples getting together and hey, who’s going to be number one? And you know, it even caused some problems because mama, she said, she had two sons and she wanted one to set He said, on one side, one said on the other side. And Jesus told him, says, you don’t understand quite how this works. You see, it’s not so much as I just want to point somebody to do. He says, it’s because of what you do.

It’s your faithfulness. That God wants to reward your faithfulness. But he says, a man in order to be great in the kingdom of God or in the kingdom of heaven, it has to be like a little child. So he brought a little child and said him there in the midst and you’ll see there in verse excuse me verse two, and Jesus called a little child unto him and said him in the midst of them and said, barely I sinned you, except you be converted and become as little children you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child the same as greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And then he talks about don’t offend one of these little ones. Woe to the offender who offends. So this is a sermon I guess you could say the offender and the offended. Now you and I, if we live long enough, we know it’s only a matter of time before we offend someone or someone offends us. It’s the world in which we live because we’re sinners and we have expectations and we really don’t like people offending us.

You know, getting on our case, saying things we don’t like, jumping in front of us in their car. You know, when I’m boogin’ down a road and then here comes Uncle George and he pulls right in front of you. And you’re goin’ 19, he pulls out and he’s goin’ 10. And you wanna just push him on off the road. But we all get offended by somethin’. Now, if you come to this church long enough, let me tell you before it happens so that you’ll know that when it happens, I told you so and you’re not supposed to let it bother you, but you’re going to let it bother you anyway, but I still got to tell you.

I’m going to offend you. Sooner or later I will hurt your feelings because you’ll think the preacher shouldn’t have said that because I talk a lot. Well, I do. Every time you see me, I’m talking or eating, but I talk a lot. And when you talk a lot, you’re going to say something that maybe you shouldn’t have said. And if I listen to you long enough, you’re going to say something that offends me because you’re not going to always do what I tell you to do that I know you should do and you’re not going to do it anyway.

Do you know there’s people that probably come to church and it doesn’t matter what I teach? They will not move. Their favorite song in the Bible is, I shall not be, I shall not be moved and you’re not going to move them. the preacher gets offended sometimes too. And the people get offended. We hurt each other’s feelings. If you’ve been married for any length of time, it’s only a matter of time before you offend each other. It doesn’t matter, well we’re just so sweet.

We’ll never hurt each other’s feelings. There you will. And the same thing with children and the adults. But what I want you to see here is something that God says how to solve a problem. And most times we don’t really want to solve the problem the way that we should. I want you to look there in verse 15, verse 15, he says, Moreover, if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell everybody you can. Put it in the church bulletin, announce it on radio, but make sure everybody knows what he did to you.

Is that what it says? No, see, it doesn’t say that. There are some things that God says that we should not do. So he says, if thy brother, now it could be somebody in your own household, maybe he’s talking about a brother in the church, somebody in the same family, the family of God. But whatever it does say, it does say, if thy brother shall trespass against the go and tell him his fault between the and Him alone. If He shall hear thee thou hast gained thy brother.”

Now there’s several things to mention here and one is if your brother says or does something that offends you. There is a statement here that says go to Him, go to the individual and try to make it right. And you’re to keep in mind that in the verses right before this, he gave an illustration about the sheep that had gone astray. And we are all like sheep and we all go astray. We all don’t always do everything right. And so there’s some problems that we have.

So in trying to understand what does God want me to do and how to solve a problem because it’s only a matter of time, like I said, that we will offend each other. It says, go to to Him. Now going to an offending brother to restore Him is one of God’s greatest tests of genuine love. Do you really love the person that offends you? So you’re always going to be tested. So let’s pretend that somebody does offend you whoever it may be.

That is a test of do you love the person who just wronged you. You start right there. Now if you love the person, how should you respond to someone that you love? You get out of a hangerineed vazooka You want to kill them? No if it’s somebody you love you treat them differently than somebody you hate So from a Christian point of view God says Love the whole world Love everyone Now I can even love a Muslim, but I don’t have to love the ways of a Muslim.

I can love every center, but not as ways. And I’m supposed to still try to do what is right by the individual, try to love them to the Lord, try to get him to trust Christ’s Savior. Now, I want you to take your Bible and just look at this word in the book of Proverbs in chapter 15. Proverbs chapter 15. And don’t lose your place in Proverbs because I got a few verses that I want to show you from there and that you’ll be going back to it.

But first of all, and this is something that I’m still working on. I haven’t got this down to a science yet. Now you may have it all worked out and nothing bothers you anymore. But look what he says in verse 1. A soft answer turneth away wrath. A soft answer turneth away wrath. But grievous words do what? Stirth up anger. Now is it possible for you to stir up anger? I get so easily stirred up. And Then afterwards, I mad at myself because I do, because I know I’m not supposed to, and I do it anyway.

Now, that’s why I say, I’m glad that you’re not like me. You wouldn’t do that. But I sometimes have a weakness that I want everything to go my way. I wouldn’t get mad at anybody if they just do whatever I tell them to do. But not everybody does that. So you’ve got to live with it. Remember this, Satan’s program of defeat is to cut off the lines of communication. He doesn’t want you to try to solve the problem. He wants you to magnify the problem.

Always remember that. Someone wrongs you. Satan wants to cut off the lines of communication between you because he wants the problem to grow. try to believe that behind the scenes there is a devil who wants to destroy. And sometimes the devil is able to use Christians. I know that’s hard to believe. But sometimes God’s children do the devil’s work. You’re doing the work of the devil. But you may not even be aware that you’re doing it. And that’s what happens whenever we don’t do things God’s way.

easy sometimes to just pass judgment and figure out they’re wrong and then try to forget about it. But just trying to forget about it sometimes doesn’t solve a problem. God didn’t say that moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, just forget about it. They didn’t say that. It’s not just to forget about it. There’s sometimes you might need to solve a problem, try to find out what’s causing the problem. Why does someone feel that way about me or why did they do a certain certain thing?

But just to render a judgment in your mind and then not try to resolve it, sometime it can eat at you on the inside like cancer. And it can linger there. They talk about sometimes of cancer or even chickenpox. Once you’ve got the virus, it can linger in your body and they say it’s in remission and then you never know when it’s going to come out and get you. Well, I’ve experienced a little bit of that, but that’s what problems can do when they’re not resolved.

They hunt you and they eat it you like cancer and they can destroy you. Remember, a person’s life can be destroyed by things that happens to them on the outside, but also by things that happen to them on the inside. Sometimes it’s not what you’re eating that’s problem. It’s what’s eating you. That’s the problem. And a lot of people have things. They’re eating at them that they never get taken care of. And it needs to be done. It’s easy to tell someone else and genuine concern and hope that somebody else will take care of the problem.

Because it’s easy to take and mention a problem to somebody who is not a part of the problem or part of the solution. But you just hope they’ll solve the problem because you don’t want to solve the problem. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to go to the person that wrongs you and try to make it right because we don’t want to face that individual. We would rather not. But sometimes if a person doesn’t do it, the person who does the wrong has a tendency to do it again and again and again and again, because nobody calls them down on it.

Nobody confronts that individual in order to help that person, and they may not always be aware of what they’re saying or doing, and yet they could have had somebody because they love them and care about them. And in a loving manner, talk to them and pray for them and so forth, that could have really made a difference. And it’s also very easy to go to the person who’s wrong to end boldly go and tell them how wrong they are, but don’t listen to what they have to say.

Because you’ve already judged they were wrong and you’re going to get even for whatever. So, one of the first things that you have to do before you go to a person who has wronged you. Remember it says in the book of Matthew in chapter 7, and we may look at that in just a little bit, but it’s best to get the two before out of your own eye so that you can see clearly to get that little splinter out of somebody else’s eye.

In other words, God said, first of all, examine thyself, examine yourself. We can always spot the air and everybody else’s life, the faults, the flaws they have. We can always see the dirt in everybody else’s life. But very seldom do we turn the spotlight around and look at ourselves and see what we need to do or correct and how to solve that problem. In the book of Romans in chapter 2 and verse 1 to verse 7, where it talks about ye that condemn others and judge others, do us thou not the same thing?

Are you guilty of doing to others what somebody did to you? And you’re offended by that. But you do the same thing to everybody else. Sometimes God will allow things to happen to you because He wants to reveal to you what’s wrong in your own life. And God wants you to examine yourself because when you go to help somebody else see the air of their way, they just might tell you about the era of your ways. And this is why we’re afraid to go to somebody because if you ever heard somebody say, before you tell me about what I need to do, you need to clean up your own backyard.

What do they mean by that? It means you’ve got faults too. So instead of you trying to correct me, why don’t you go straight not your own life? Do they have a point? They might have a point. And so we’re sometimes easily offended by the very thing that we’re guilty of doing to other people. Well, this is why we first of all, we do that. And in the book of 1st Samuel in chapter 12 and verse 23, it talks about did you pray about this?

Did you pray about it? Did you pray about what they did, or about what you understood? Did you pray about your feelings, about how you received it? What did it do to you emotionally? What did it do to you spiritually? How is it affecting you? Is it making you worse than you were before? Or is it making you wiser? I had to tell this to several people because they had allowed themselves to be hurt by what somebody said. And so they were not going to keep serving the Lord and doing right because they were so hurt.

And I says, serving the Lord means you have to serve the Lord as though you have never been hurt. You cannot allow all the people in the world all the wrong that they do to so hurt you that you stop loving people, that you’re afraid to go out on the limb because you don’t want to be hurting you more. If that was the case, I would have to stop being the pastor. Because see, over the years, 40-something years that I’ve been preaching, you have no idea how many hours, weeks, years that I have put in the people and have them turn on me and knife me in the back.

and try to destroy me and my ministry. And I’ve done them no wrong, except I love them. I try to, I want them to Christ and teach them to serve the Lord, challenge them to serve the Lord, and teach them enough Bible where they can challenge you on it. And then tell you what you’re doing, it’s wrong. And what you ought to do, and just rake you over the coals, and as the pastor many times, the pastor can’t say anything.

The pastor can’t do anything to stop it. And even if he goes to the person and you try to get it settled correctly, people can say things and plant seeds in people’s minds that you can’t get out of their mind. The seeds are there for the rest of your life. They don’t have to be true. Somebody can say something about you to somebody else and it not be true but they’ll never come to you and they’ll believe it for the rest of their life.

But they never got it resolved. And it can be a terrible thing. It’s a wicked thing to do. So this is why you need to be very, very careful. You should always examine and say, now, have I been the kind of an example that I’m supposed to be? What kind of an example am I? What if I said or what have I done that would bring the criticism that comes to me? Maybe there’s something that we do. Sometimes we don’t always see ourselves the way we really are.

And sometimes we respond in such a way and we answer in such a way that it’s kind of hurting, sharp words. But we didn’t see it that way because we didn’t mean it that way, but it still come across that way. Sometimes whenever we let people become the interpreter of what we mean because we’re not clear, you can’t blame the interpreter for what he interpreted. What his understanding was, because we were not clear ourselves, I want you to take your Bible look into the book of Galatians, the book of Galatians in chapter 6.

Galatians in chapter 6, I want you to look there in verse 1. Galatians 6 and verse 1, and it says, brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fall, is it what’s the fall? A Christian walking in the flesh from the previous chapter. So if you see a brother walk in the flesh, and you see a man walking in the flesh from the previous chapter. So if you see a brother walking in the flesh and he brings what works of the flesh, well then you that are spiritual are walking in the spirit.

Remember in chapter 5 verse 16, walk in the spirit, you’re not going to feel the lust of the flesh. Okay, if you see a Christian that is walking in the flesh, what do you do about it? You will, number one, draw attention to that person. Make sure everybody knows that they’re walking in the flesh. And if they fall, you walk up and put your foot on their head and push them down into the mud and make them cry uncle.

And let them know you saw every, we know one of the best ways I think of Christians to live. One eye and one ear. Don’t see everything and don’t hear everything. In working with teenagers, I had to develop that. Because at first I saw everything they did wrong. And I knew what I expected of them. And I wanted so much for these kids, but they can’t see what I want for them. Their blind is a bat. And everything that they said, everything they did, man, I could so criticize everything.

And I could see every area of flesh. And they just revel in it. And I wanted them to be so spiritually minded. I wanted them to be so godly. And they were so worldly. Boy, I had a problem. And I realized, see what one eye and hear would one ear. Because I would become so bitter and so critical at them, because they disappointed me over and over again, because I wanted so much of them. Don’t they see what I want for them?

No. Don’t they care? No. Don’t they care about me and my feelings, like I care about them? No. And a lot of people, they don’t care what you think. They don’t care how you live. Most of them just leave me alone and let me do my thing. Don’t you know this is the 21st century. This is everybody do whatever makes you happy. Sensory. And yet you love them. But you also got to realize that with people you have to be patient.

If people see fault in me, don’t you think I see a few in you? No, I don’t see anything wrong with y’all. You all little darlings? You all the perfect little angels you are? And somebody says, thank you. Somebody’s getting the wrong message here. But look what he says here. Yee, which are spiritual. Restore such a one in the spirit of migness considering thyself lest thou also be tempted. In other words, except for the grace of God, it could be you.

and be careful how you judge somebody because you know it might come back home to roost. If you want to receive mercy then you need to show mercy. If you want a little grace from people then maybe you need to show a little grace to people. If you want to receive a little forgiveness maybe you need to give a little forgiveness. You know the Bible says you reap what you what you sow. You sow meanness you might reap meanness but if you sow some kindness you might reap a little kindness and a soft answer turneth away wrath.

For example, it’s so easy between boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife. Say something bad and if that person comes back bad, boy you could get at it real quick. But if the answer was a real soft voice, he kind of deflates you because you know that’s what I should have done. Especially when you’re supposed to know better and we fail. We mess up. In Matthew chapter 7 verse 3 and 5 where it talks about realizing what you’re doing and how you’re saying these things.

Look over there very quickly in Matthew chapter 7. Matthew and chapter 7 and look there in verse 3. Verse 3 and why beholdest thou the moat that is in thy brother’s eye but consider if not the beam that is in thine own eye. Or how will thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the moat out of thine eye and behold a beam is in thine own eye. Thou hypocrite first cast out the beam out of thine own eye and then thou shalt see clearly to cast out the moat out of thy brother’s eye.

See, it didn’t say you couldn’t see the moat. It didn’t say that you can’t help the moat out of his eye. It just says, make sure you get the two before out of yours first. That’s why I said, be careful that you judge, that you be not judged. In other words, so that when you try to correct somebody, they’re going to try to correct you back. So, first of all, examine your own life. Is there something that is in my life that could hinder someone from being the way they ought to be?

Could they stumble over my pride, my arrogance? Because you see, we don’t always see ourselves the way we are, but we sure can dissect other people very easily. And we can see all their faults and all of their flaws. You see, whenever you go and tell him his fault to him alone, it’s got several good points to bring out. It assures that you’re loyal because you went to the person, because you want to resolve the problem. You’re not condemning and you’re coming as a learner.

Or is there something that I’ve said or done that caused you to react toward me this way or for you to say what you said? Have you ever said these words? I didn’t mean that. You said something and somebody took it and they got hurt because of it. And then later on you find it, you say, I didn’t mean that. I have said a lot of them. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t say it the right way. You can say things with a certain tone or say something and you get a word left out that can change the whole meaning of it.

as you get a little bit older like I am. And I have a hearing aid in this year, and I got another one for this one, but I can’t stand it with both of them in there because they just talked back and forth and I can’t understand anything. And sometimes I can’t hear the words, and then when I can hear the words, I can’t discern what the words are. And I was sitting talking with somebody today, and I could not hear what they were saying.

And it’s very, very difficult. I just hope that people don’t get offended because of it, Or sometimes you may talk to me and I give you an answer that clean off the books. It has nothing to do with what you asked. Because what you said and what I heard are not even in the same room. And all I can say is, I’m sorry about that, but I can’t improve that. I don’t know how to improve that. I’ve asked people over and over again sometime that says, huh?

What? And sometimes it gets to be a joke. And sometimes I just figured, I don’t guess I really need to know what they said. And if I gave an answer and nobody said anything strange, I guess it was the right one. Whatever the question was, I don’t know. But I know that I’ve lived long enough, and so have you, that sometimes we say something but we don’t mean that. Or we didn’t mean for people to take it in the wrong way.

And so sometimes it happens and people get offended. But when somebody comes to you, how they do it is so important. And so that’s why you need to understand there’s things about attitudes that you have. The attitude by which you can be confronted. Can somebody confront you with a problem without you falling apart? Without you getting mad and coming and glued on the person. and listening to Bibleline, a teaching ministry of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida with Dr.

Ralph Arnold. We pray that you are blessed by today’s message. Part two of this teaching will conclude with tomorrow’s broadcast. 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. To listen to today’s message again or to obtain a free download of any of our Bible line programs, just go to our homepage at BibleLineMinistries.org and click on the Radio Broadcast link.

If you are 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 clicking on the Calvary Community Church link at BibleLineMinistries.org. Thanks for joining us on Bibleline and now a closing thought from Pastor Arnold. Friend, one day it will happen. The trumpet will sound and we will be changed.

Caught up to meet the Lord in the air. So live today and every day, believing that the Lord is coming soon and just keep looking up.