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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 had this year sent to me, pastor. I just got off the phone with one of our vendors on the business call. And he asked me about our weather. He was up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Is it dry down there in Tampa? I said that it was right now, but we recently had a lot of rain. He said, it’s so dry here that the Baptists are sprinkling. The Methodists are using moist wipes. And the Catholics are trying to change wine back in the water.

Now that’s dry. That’s when it’s dry. You have a Bible turned to the book of Colossians, the book of Colossians. Colossians chapter 2, there’s a Bible in front of you, in the pew, and so just reach and get that Bible and turn to page 1264, 1264. Everybody wants to be a winner. Nobody likes to be a loser. You want to triumph, but to triumph, you have to have a battle. And in the battle, you’re liable to get beat up.

In a battle, you can actually lose in a battle. But the ultimate victory, you’ll win. And I want to show you something that kind of brings all of this out. Here in the book of Colossians in chapter 2, look in verse 9, in verse 9, for in Him, talk about Christ, dwelt of all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. that body that Jesus Christ had. When he lived here upon the earth, he was every bit God. He was God in the flesh.

You see, there’s a true in living God, but God, see, he can’t die. So the only way he could pay for our sins is to come into the world and take up on a body, and in that body, he had to live a perfect life, and then live in that perfect life. He lived it without sin. He had no cause to die. But because of his love for us, he took all the sin of all the world upon himself and died.

Not because he had to die, but because he loved us. And he paid for all the sin of everybody in the world. And the only thing we have to do is believe that he did it for us, and he would give us is a free gift everlasting life. And verse 10 he says, and ye are complete in him. It means that you don’t need anything else. Just picture for a moment a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, when we’re all dead and out of this old world, we’ll be with the Lord and a perfect body and a perfect place, totally complete.

All because of what Christ did, not because of what we’ve done. In other words, if it’s complete, if your salvation in Christ is complete and you don’t need anything else. In other words, Jesus is not just necessary. He is enough. The church, we love our church, but our church can’t save anybody. No church can get you to heaven. I, as a pastor, may love you to death but I can’t save you. No man can save you. Nobody. You see, Christ is the Savior.

We trust the Lord. You can’t go wrong by trusting the only true and living God there is. So once you trust Him as your Savior, you are complete in the Lord. You have all that you need. It’s finished. When Christ died on the cross, He says, it is finished. It means the payment for our sins, it’s over. There’s no payment you have to make. You see, I do not know. not serve the Lord to go to heaven. I serve the Lord because I love Him.

I’m already going to heaven. I’m going to heaven because 52 years ago when I was 18 years old, I trusted Christ as my Savior. That is what gets me to heaven. Nothing more. Nothing more. Now since all those years have passed. Yes, I have tried to do right, but doing right doesn’t get me to heaven is because I am God’s child and I want to please my heavenly Father. I had an earthly father, my earthly father died when I was 13 years old.

My earthly father was a drunk. He was a bootlegger. My earthly father beat the Torah out of me. Maybe I needed it. I I can’t believe that though. I just can’t believe it. But anyway, I’m so thankful that I have a heavenly Father, and I know that my heavenly Father made no mistakes. There’s no reason for me to be mad or upset with my heavenly Father. So he means a lot to me. So I wanna serve him because he is my Father.

I wanna be like him. The Bible is his word. I want to know what he had to say. The Bible is God’s love letter to his children, and I’m his child. I want to know what he wants me to do with my life. So he says here in verse 10, and you are completing him, which is the head of all principalities and power. Now we had already talked about in chapter one, in verse 15 through 17, how that Jesus Christ is the supreme, the Creator, the architect of all creation.

He is the Lord of the world. He made the world. He’s in charge. He has all power. He has the right. He has the authority. Then it says He is the head of the church. That means that all of us who who have trusted Christ as our Savior, were born into his family. And because we’re in his family, he is the head, the boss. He tells us what we should and should not do. How he should and should not live.

He has earned that right because of what he did. There’s only one person who ever was born into this world who lived a perfect life and has a right to tell everybody else what they ought to do and not do. Don’t you despise when somebody who lives worse than you do try to point out your sins? But he has the right to because he, nobody can point to him and say, hey, you messed up. You shouldn’t have said that.

That was wrong. He never sinned. So he has the right, the authority to say something to the rest of us. He earned that right. He lived a perfect life under the same law that we live under, made of a woman, made under the law, and he lived a perfect life. Now he’s talking about he is the head of our principalities and powers and dominions. In verse 17 of chapter 1 it talks about Jesus Christ, He is the head over everything, even in the mysterious angelic world of fallen angels.

And there are powers that you and I cannot see nor understand. He is the head of all of that. Every spiritual wickedness in high places that were against Jesus Christ. They thought we finally got this man. We finally got him to mess up. We got all the people to kill them. Boy, were they victorious. I bet the wicked, mysterious, angelic world were having a heyday. They thought we finally took care of this Jesus. And notice what he says here now in verse 11, in whom, talking about Christ, also ye are circumcised with the uncircumcision or the circumcision made without hands.

At not putting, as he says here, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. Circumcision just means to remove the flesh. You see, I was, let me just use a simple illustration for a quick. Come up here just a minute, Steve, just stand right there. And I want you to see this because it’s a simple illustration. All right, this is my old sinful nature. You just behave now for the first time in your life.

This is my old sinful nature. You see, I can’t go to heaven because I have this old sinful nature. Because if I go to heaven and he goes with me, he’ll cause me to sin when I get to heaven. What God doesn’t want in his sin in heaven because of her sin, then there will be sorrow there. And if he goes with me to heaven, then there’ll be death and disease and destruction. He’s everything that’s bad. Well, that’s the old sinful nature.

It’s everything you don’t want in heaven. He is a bad man, bad man, he leads you astray. He’ll lie to you, deceive you. He’s everything you don’t want to be. But every one of us in this room, we have an old sinful nature. So God says you need to be circumcised. What do you mean? I have to get rid of my old sinful nature and it’s called the cutting away of the flesh. So when I trusted Christ as my savior, God separated me from my old sinful nature.

Now he’s over there. He’s still very much alive. He’s just as bad as he’s always been. But in the eyes of God, God sees me separated from my old sinful nature. I now have a new birth born of God without a sinful nature. So whenever I die, see, he lives in my body, in my body, the members of my flesh. And that’s why when you trust Christ as Savior, it’s a spiritual birth, you can’t see it. So you think I’m over there, I’m over here.

So God sees me separated from the first birth and I’m now in my second birth. This is how God sees me. So when I’m in my body, you might still see my old sinful nature because he’s just as bad as he’s always been. So what I have to do is try to find a way, how can I have victory in my Christian life with this bad man living inside of me? So that’s why the Holy Spirit lives within you to give you power not to let him have control of my body.

Now he lives in my body, but God doesn’t want him to have control of my body. So therefore, as I grow in the Lord, then I learn how to discipline myself to make right decisions, why is the decision? Because if I listen to him, he’s always whispering in my ear, telling me to do just the wrong thing. Always trying to lead me astray because he wants his own way. You understand what I’m saying? Do you understand what I’m saying?

Thank you, buddy. Give him a big hand. So circumcision is the cut in a way and you have been separated from the flesh by circumcision without hands. In other words, it wasn’t done physically to you as a little child, a little boy that’s been circumcised on the eighth day. Now Jesus was circumcised. His circumcision became mine. His baptism became mine. And Christ’s life, his righteous life became mine. When he died on the cross, his death became my death. And when he was buried, that was for me.

When he came back from the dead, he did that for me. So his death, burial, and resurrection was for me, because he did it for me. He paid for my sins. So what Christ did was put to my account as though I did it. I didn’t really do it. He did it for me. And so his victory over sin, over the devil, over the grave, all that victory was put to my account. He was victorious. Well, me, I wasn’t.

I failed at the devil got me. I got an old sinful nature. I kept listening to Stephen all the time because he was just a bad man, but he had a great influence on my life. Told me to do things wrong. It’s not my fault. It’s all his fault. So God says, now that you know Christ as your Savior, there’s something he wants you to understand. Oh, look what he says there in verse 12, buried with him in baptism.

you are risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God who hath raised Him from the dead. So when God raised Him from the dead and you believe He did it for you, then God see takes you and puts you spiritually speaking into the body of Christ. And if you’re in the body of Christ, you’re in Christ. Then wherever Christ went, you went with Him because you’re in Him. So He has risen from the dead and ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father.

And that’s why the Bible talks about it in Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 3. We are seated in the heavenlies in Christ because that’s how God sees you. You’re in Him. You’re not going to heaven because of all those good things you’ve done. We’re going to heaven because of all those good things He did. He paid for all of my sin and put His righteousness to my account. And I go to heaven on what he did. I did not earn it.

I did not work for it. I do not deserve it. And verse 13 he says, And you being dead in your sins? That needs to be separated from God because you are a sinner. Means you do things wrong. You’re not perfect. You can’t go to heaven because of your sins. See that man that was standing up here? That’s my old son from it. Because I can’t go to heaven because yeah, I got to get rid of him. If he goes to heaven with me, so he didn’t, God won’t let me in because I got him.

So I gotta get rid of my sin. And Christ came into the world and took care of it for me. He took care of all my sins, paid for them in full. And get the last part of verse 13 where he says, hath he quickened, that mean made you alive, together with him? So when you trusted Christ as your savior, You are joined together with the Lord, and you are baptized with Him into the grave. You came up out of the grave with the Lord.

Now He says, because of what I did for you, walk in newness of life. I’m supposed to live for the Lord for the rest of my life, not to get to heaven, but because I’m going to heaven. And he says this in the last part, and you ought to underline these words, having forgiven you all what? Trespasses, hath forgiven you. You mean all those bad things that I’ve done? He hath forgiven you of all of them. When Christ died 2,000 years ago, all of our sins were in the future.

So that means he’s already paid for what I’ve already done. But when he died, he also paid for the ones that I haven’t done yet. Has he paid for those two? Of course. Because see, if he didn’t pay for those, I’m in a heap of trouble. Then I got to pay for them. So when Christ died, he paid for all of my sins once and for all. And I have eternal life. Now look in verse 14, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances.

That was against us. You see, God gave His righteous law. The Ten Commandments, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy hard mind, body, soul, and strength, and Thou shalt not make images and so forth, and Thou must love thy mother and father, and Thou shalt not do this, and Thou shalt not, and Thou shalt not, and all of those laws was against me because you see, they were too strict. Thou shalt not commit adultery. And then Christ says later on in the New Testament, if you so much as think it, ooh, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not hate.

Man alive, I ain’t got a ghost of a chance. So the law, that’s perfect. I’m wrong with it. It’s just I can’t keep it. It’s too good. It’s too perfect. I’m not that way. I’m a sinner. I’ve come short of God’s glory, short of God’s perfection. So therefore, I failed. And every time God says, don’t cross this line, I did. So when God says, you transgress, you trespass, it says, thou shalt not walk on the grass, I did. .

. . . . . . . . So I transgress, I overstep the boundary. And because of that, I am a sinner. And so God took all these things that He is keeping a record of, and He’s making a list of all the things that we do that’s wrong. And God took all of these things that we did wrong, and He didn’t write them on a piece of paper and nailed that to the cross. You see, Jesus was the one that was nailed to the cross.

But look what He says there in verse 14, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross. when he nailed it to his cross, means he nailed Jesus to the cross because all my sins that I’ve done, he took them all and he died in my place and he was nailed to the cross for me and he paid for all of my sins and in verse 15 when he was nailed to the cross, When he died, there’s no doubt that the angelic underworld was probably in hysterics.

We finally nailed this guy. We won. We were victorious. And then all of a sudden there’s this earthquake and Christ comes out of the grave, triumphant over the devil, over principalities and powers. You see, that’s why he says in verse 15, having spoiled principalities and powers. And up there in verse 10 where it says that he is the head over everything. Even the angelic world has no power over God, over Jesus Christ. He was over the world, he’s over the church, he’s over the angelic world, there’s nothing that has power outside of him.

Let me ask you this. Does this great God have the right, the authority, to be Lord over me? Does He have the right to tell me what I can and cannot do? Shouldn’t I obey the one that created the heavens and the earth that has all this power. Look who He is. Why would I want to make God mad with me? Why would I want to defy God? I would lose. And look at the last part of verse 15 where he says, “…and having spoiled principalities and power because He stole all their power away from them, they could not win.

They could not beat Him.” Now, you know what I liked a lot about camp and so forth. You get a chance to see competition. Competition, somebody’s going to win, somebody’s going to lose, but it’s still a wonderful, exciting thing to watch. But you know, there’s always some kids. There’s always even some adults. We’d like to stand on the sideline and just watch and watch these kids being pulled through the mud. I don’t know, I love it when somebody, somebody’s got to go through the mud.

I won’t see who goes in the mud. I couldn’t hardly wait to see whether or not are they going to be able to pull Jonathan into the mud? Wouldn’t you love to see that? Jonathan going to the mud, but Jonathan says I’m not going to the mud. And you’d have to have a tank on the other end to pull Jonathan through the mud. But you know, there’s always somebody on the side that says, you know, well, what we’re going to do, and he should have done this, and they should have done that, and there’s everybody telling them what to do, and how to do it, and criticizing, and the world has its critics.

The world has its critics. Even when it comes to church, there’s always somebody, well, that ain’t the way I would have done it. Did you You see that mistake you made? You ever watched these Monday morning quarterbacks? I can’t believe the guy was so stupid. The guy was wide open and he ends on. And the quarterback doesn’t even throw the ball to him. Because when he got really throw the ball, five guys slammed him to the ground. I don’t know why nor will he let them do that to him.

I wouldn’t have done that. Let me read this to you. Theodore Roosevelt once said, it not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or the door of deeds could have done better. credit belongs to the man who is actually And the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives violently, who airs and comes up short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spins himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement, and who at the worst, who fails to be in the world.

And if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those timid, cold souls who never knew victory or defeat. See some people who never know what it’s like to be defeated because they never thought, they never tried. They were afraid of being a failure. failure when you don’t try. Afraid of passing out a track. Afraid to talk to somebody about the Lord and whether you’re going to go and die. So they’re always critical of all those that do it.

They probably didn’t really get saved. I mean, they probably really didn’t get saved. They’re just making up those numbers. And how are you doing? Those that get into the arena that walk up to somebody and have somebody tell them where to get off and where to go, who mock them and make fun of them, who wade up that track and throw it back at them, those that say something mean and nasty and unkind to them, at least they’re out there fighting a battle and maybe they get whooped every once in a while and maybe they don’t win as many as they’d like to, but they were in the arena and they were fighting, they were giving it all that they had.

But there’s always the critics of the world, even spiritual critics. Well, I wouldn’t do it that way. And how would you do it? Well, I don’t do it like that. How do you do it? And you’d be surprised there’s a lot of people who never do anything, but they sit on the sidelines and they can always see what everybody else should have done. Aren’t you glad when he makes a statement there in verse 15? He made a show of them openly.

He came out of the grave and there were witnesses. He walked the streets of Jerusalem. They saw him over 501 times. And look at the last part of that. And you ought to underline this, triumphing over them in it. You see, we want to have triumphant, we want to have the medals, but we don’t want the battles. We want God to deliver us from every trial and tribulation when they want worth that away. Sometimes you have to be drugged through the mud.

But at least you hang on, you keep trusting God. And like David says, though he’s slavy, yet will I trust him. You’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. 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 Dye-Link Tool 3, 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 Bibleline 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 six 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.