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Bibleline Bibleline, here God’s word on Bibleline, 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 concluding message of this teaching will be a blessing to you and your family.

So there’s things that you and I are going to go through in life that will produce pain. But God can use the pain to help you and I to be wise. Now all pain is inflicted to teach us that only the Lord gives permanent comfort. So as you live your life and you go through these things and you’ll find out there’s some things that you may not like. God even cursed the ground so that it would not produce its yield.

And it comes with thorns and briars and all these things that happens which we don’t really like. But God, loving us, knows that we would truly be some bored individuals if it wasn’t for having to work. Do you know one of the worst things in the world is when you have nothing to do. You don’t know what to do with yourself. I haven’t been there. I just heard people talk about it, but it must be a terrible thing. So sometimes we learn how to pray.

So God allows the pain because the pain produces something and it helps us to grow closer to the Lord. Now, I was told about Josephus who was a Jewish historian and wrote a lot back in the times of Christ. And he said that when they talked about Elijah and how that he prayed and that when he prayed for the the rain to come, their theology was that he drew a circle on the the ground and got inside the circle and he says, I will pray and not leave the circle until the rain comes.

Now I don’t know if it’s true, but some people call it a circle a prayer where you believe God so strongly that you would draw a circle and get into that circle and say, I am going to pray to the Lord to answer my prayer, or I will not leave this circle till He does. How strong is your faith? Now that’s going a little too far. I won’t leave the circle until God answers my prayer. Now, buddy, you talking about putting out a fleece.

Gideon did it. He got away with it. There’s other people that do it and they get away with it, but you need to be very slow and careful before you just copy what somebody else does. Unless you find out you are tempting God, you know, like jumping off the Empire State Building, and trust, well, if the Lord doesn’t want me to get hurt, He’ll catch me. So I’m going to trust the Lord. I’m going to show everybody my faith in God.

Yeah, you might show your faith in God, But there is a thin line between faith and foolishness. You may have an appointment with the ground. The Bible talks about, Tim, not the Lord thy God. I wonder who said that. Jesus said that. He said that to Satan. When he says, jump off the temple, that pinnacle of the temple wall there, he says, you’re not even going to hurt your little foot. The angels will bear the up lest I’ll stub your toe.

It says, temp not the Lord, thank God. In other words, you don’t test God. God wants to test you. But there’s things that God has said that He says, this is fair game. You can do this. Things that are within the will of God. So you studied the Word of God so that you can talk to the Lord and pray to the Lord. You see, if we didn’t believe in spite of everything that goes on, that it would ever make a difference most people would never pray.

Why pray if it’s not going to accomplish anything? So evidently there is something about prayer that we don’t understand how it works. But only that God says that it does work and we’re supposed to believe that it works. So I wrote a couple of things down here. When it comes to children, you can tell them, don’t put your hand on the stove because the stove is hot. What will generally a child do? He’s going to test and see if what you’re saying is true.

Sometimes we want to test God and see if what God says is true. And maybe there’s some things you can do. There’s some things you cannot do. Be smart. So if you lay your hand up on that hot plate and you leave it too long, what’s going to happen? You’re going to get burned. And when you play with fire, you’re going to get burned. But the pain is supposed to teach you and I that if we do this again, we will get burned again.

So it teaches you to be wise so that you don’t do that again. What is one of the main reasons for inflicting pain to a child when they’re young? There is a reason for it. And it’s a good reason. Parents should inflict pain to her child when young to teach her respect for authority. Believe it or not, God’s words children obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. And it says in the book of Proverbs, spare the rod and spoil the child.

The reason that we’ve got such a rotten government is because we probably have too many spoiled brats that were raised and now they’re in Washington. So you learn by inflicting pain, suffering some consequences. One of the greatest ways for you to be wise is to make wise decisions. And one way to learn how to make wise decisions is to make bad decisions and suffer consequences.

We wanna keep everybody from suffering the consequences of their decisions. We don’t want them to hurt. We always talk about, I want a better life for my kids than what I had. I don’t. I want them to learn just like I learned because that’s the way most people do learn. And so I want them to learn. I told my kids you can afford to go and borrow as much money as you can afford. Daddy will not go into debt for you.

I will not borrow money for you. You want to go into debt? You go into debt. Go as far as you want to go. And if you go to jail, you can pay your way out. I didn’t put you in there. I will not get you out of jail. I just wanted to make it sure. They understand. I think it’s good. They know there’s a limit. And if you want to make some stupid idiotic decisions, you suffer the consequences of your decisions.

Daddy’s not going to bail you out. Every time you turn around and they just think that’s what I am. No, I’m not going to do that. I want to teach you to be responsible and make good decisions and the way you’ll make good decisions is suffering the pain of some of your bad decisions. You said, that’s cruel. No, that’s not cruel. It’s kind of like having some bird eggs and say there’s four of them in a nest and three of them have already hatched and there’s one that’s trying to get out so you want to help that one.

So you crack open the rest of it and you try to help him get out of that and for some reason or other he just so weak he can’t do anything and he dies. The other three are okay. So why? Because the struggling is what builds the strength to live. By the way, a young couple gets married. Do you think during the marriage they may have the pains of misunderstanding? The pain of adjustment, the pain of submission, you know, some couples they spend half their life trying to find out now who’s in charge.

Hey, I’m the head of the home. Not around here, you’re not. Buddy, and you talk about having a war on your hands. And you thought that little woman would just come be that little just meek-mile sweet little thing. And she’s a dynamite like a cottonmouth. And buddy, they’ll call up like a rattlesnake. And get you. I mean, you got a lot to learn. When you get married, there’s all kinds of things you’ve got to go through. And trying to settle that, who’s in charge right here?

It’s usually the biggest one. But the pain of financial disaster, I’ve seen finances destroy more marriages. For the simple reason, there’s no way to sometimes how to get out of their financial debt. Because most couples when they get married, the first thing they want to do is have what mom and daddy had now. And they don’t realize they work for it for 30 years. They got to have it overnight. They go in the debt for everything you can think of because after all, I’m always going to stay healthy.

I’m always going to make more money. money and it’s going to get better and better and better. And then when everything goes wrong, and you talk about people being each other because money, it can happen so quick. It produces pain, pain. And so how do you deal with the pain? Some people serve their conscience as with a hot iron and they lose their feelings, their sensitivity. They can say things to each other as mean and as ugly and it’s just become part of their life.

It’s good to be sensitive, to be teachable where God can use you and bless you. I had a friend of mine that went to Florida Baba called. He came out to Colorado and he worked with us for a while. His name was Jack Herring. He was in a wheelchair and he married a sweet little lady and taught in a Christian school and one day he developed a great big old sore on his foot. And the problem was he didn’t know it because he was a diabetic and he had no feelings in the lower part of his body.

He was paralyzed from a car wreck. But he’d always gone through Bible school, but he went to a lot of pain and agony because of that. And some of the pain that he had, he had no clue that his His body had that big ole sore on it. When he found out it caused more problems because more problems, and it just seemed like there’s no end to it. And in life, things that you let go that could have been solved so easy with the kind word.

You know the Bible says in Proverbs 15, it says, a soft answer, what? Turneth away wrath. But you know a sharp word can create, inflame, can become antagonistic. The word, you kind of stir up that old sinful nature in somebody else and it can do an awful lot of damage. So people deaden the pain. Some people use alcohol, the deaden, their pain. Some people use drugs that are dead in their pain. And some people use substitutes of other things and other reasons in life of what they want to live for.

And they don’t want to deal with reality. They just can’t face it. You see, the Lord, His Word is, and I’ve said this before, like a gigantic medicine cabinet. So when you have this pain, take these two verses and call me in the morning. So a lot of times the preacher I say, now, what you need to do, you need to read this Psalm. I say, read Psalm 37. And I’ll tell somebody, read Psalm 73. Somebody else, you need to read the, you know, the 14th of it.

You need to read this one. Now, read the 40th Psalm. This will really help you. You get somebody old until you read the 90th Psalm or read the 23rd Psalm. Both these will really help you. Are you what you need to do is you need to take and go to the book of Philippians and read the second chapter or read the third chapter. the fourth chapter. You’re always pointing. The Bible is a book of medicine. And you and I have all kinds of pain problems.

Some people want to take and do something. Some people just go to sleep. That’s how they handle their pressure. I go to sleep and I wake up, it won’t be there. That problem’s gonna go away. They wake up and they’ll be, oh, there it is. They didn’t go away. Some people, they get under stress, so they got to do a lot of things, a lot of activity. Just stay busy. Work, work, work, work, work, work, work. So they don’t think about it.

And then you have others that want to go play sports. Like a game of golf or something like that, you know. You got to find something else to do. We need a vacation. That’s what we need a vacation. How would you like to be on that shift that’s out there in the golf of man? Mexico, about 4,000 of them, and they have no air condition, and no, I guess you could say the toilets aren’t working. They say the place stinks to high heaven.

Ah, dear in the middle of nowhere. And some are on this ship and it’s their honeymoon. This is supposed be their finest hour and it’s a nightmare. How would you handle pressure? And they’re talking about it might take another two days before they can get maybe New Orleans or wherever they’re going to go to it. They’ve got to be towed. How would you like that? And they say that people are just sweltering because after all, you know, you want to go to the God.

And it’s going to be the cruise. Eat all the food that you want. Sleep in an air-conditioned room. All the facilities of home. And nothing go right. Sometimes you’ll have an experience like that in your life. Everything seems to go wrong. And you’ll know what in the world you’re going to do? But understand God is, he’s working and he has a lot of things that he wants us to know and what he wants us to do. I had wrote down a couple of things.

You would not fear God if you did not have pain because you don’t like more pain. When God says that he can chasten and discipline you, if you have an idea what chasten is about, don’t want anymore. When my daddy used to hook me, I didn’t want to hook me anymore. When I got hooked in the school, I didn’t want anymore. And so that’s why there’s times when it can be a benefit to you. When I understand that there is a literal hell and God says it’s a fire and it’s torment, I’ve had enough torment in life.

I don’t want any more. Not for eternity, that’s for sure. So these things are to help us to be wise so that we don’t keep doing the same exact thing. So children know that that’s going to happen. And you know that you’re going to have hunger pains. Have you ever had hunger pains? I got a few right now, just a few hunger pains. But there’s always pain and there’s things that happen in life that inflicts pain. But God and nature says pain is a good way to teach.

Pain can ruin your life and make you bitter if you don’t understand its purpose. So understand that God has a reason. God has a purpose for why He allows things to happen in our lives. understanding that God is righteous, perfect and just, He can do no wrong to anybody. Never get mad and bitter toward God. Remember, bitterness is an element of the sinfulness of the flesh. And bitterness is because of an attitude problem. And we have need of an attitude adjustment.

Have you ever, have you had a child that needed an attitude adjustment? Oh man, attitude adjustment? Sometimes you think, well my wife needs one, or your husband needs one, you’d like to give them one, an attitude adjustment. God is always working on things in our life to adjust our attitudes. You know what a transmission is for. You can have a motor in a car and you can have the wheels in the back and you can even have a drive shaft if necessary, but you need a transmission because it kind of connects the two together.

You need a motor, you got the rear end, but you got to have a transmission and it adjusts and regulates speed and transfers the power from the motor to the wheel so that it’ll go. Well, God is always working on our transmission. Because he’s the one that wants to speed us up or to slow us down. That’s what teaches us patience. But there’s reasons that sometimes you just don’t go as fast as you like to go at times. And sometimes maybe you’re going too fast and God has to slow you down.

Biddie’s dad told me one time, says, Yankee, God could lead you if he could ever get in front of you. He says, you outrun God. I can outrun God. He says, you just get what you want and you just go. And you forget, you’re outrunning God. Wait on the Lord. That was this point. Yankee, wait on the Lord. Well, I’m tired of waiting. I’m an impatient guy. I want to do something. And because of my impatience, We lived in five states in the year and a half.

Because I just… I’m so glad that God has slowed me down just a tad. Not a lot, just a tad. I still have so much that I want to do that I just can’t wait for the next day. Tomorrow is going to be exciting to me. I enjoy going to a school and maybe get a chance to talk to, I don’t know, maybe 100 kids. Maybe they’ll have 150 in there. I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be wonderful to give the gospel and have kids trust the Lord?

Now nobody may respond, but there may be a whole bunch that will. But I’m going fishing and then you might influence some kids to go to camp. You might get some kids might think about going to college. You’re always trying to figure out a way how to reach people. See years ago, Florida Bible college grew because there were so many ranch directors They had gone out. They had gone to FBC. There was only one main ranch. And that was when Dr.

Stanford had. And I became his youth director a couple of years later. So the kids came out of the ranch and went into the Bible college. Well, I didn’t come from a ranch. I came from Georgia. And I came down here and got into this situation. And then whenever the graduates started going out and they got ranches and then those kids came back and college grew. Well, no, we don’t have those youth ranches anymore. But now, instead of youth ranches, there’s thousands of Christian schools.

And the thing it’s interesting is that because I’m president of a Bible college, I can get into some schools and present the college. And because of that, I know that eventually I might have to have some help and somebody else is going to have to do some of it also. Look how many schools are across this nation. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we can get in all these schools, these Christian schools? Because, see, they have seniors. And a lot of the seniors that come from Christian homes or Christian churches or Christian schools are trying to make decisions what they’re going to do with their life.

A lot of them will already know the Lord, but they may lack the information about where can they go to learn to be a good soul winner. So we can’t teach everybody everything, but we want a major on the major. We can tell people and teach them how to win people to the Lord. We can teach what the Bible says. So that’s why I want to Bible caught up. I want to teach the Bible. I want kids to learn the Bible.

I want them to experience some of the things in their life that I’ve been able to do and experience. I want to teach the kids that if you listen to what I’m saying, I can help you make better decisions, how to make wise decisions. Because see, that is what I believe is so very, very important. Now there’s a lot of things that I want to say and probably should let go. home. Sometimes you have to know where to dwell and when to move on.

But understand that God wants to use this church, I believe in a great way. And this church has been around for a long time. And they probably have experienced some times of pain, times of comfort. And so we know know and we learn and we grow from that. If we start a Bible college, do you actually think it will be without some pain? I believe we will probably have problems. We’re going to have problems with us from a thousand sources.

We haven’t even began to understand because you’re always going to experience something new and different because God keeps on teaching and training you. We haven’t yet arrived. But we must trust the Lord and believe. And go out on that limb and say, I’m trusting the Lord and believe in that God’s going to do something wonderful. And I can’t wait to see what it is because I just believe God. I’ve watched him before. I’m watching him again. I want to see what he’s going to do.

So I believe that we have before us our finest hour. every good and perfect gift comeeth down from the Father of Lights. And He is not a double-minded God. And I am not a double-minded man. And I don’t believe the guys that we have are either. So therefore, it makes it exciting, don’t it. This hand represents you and me, the well it represents sin, we all have sin on us. It means all of us are bad news. We’ve all done things wrong.

And God says to pay for our sins is eternal separation from God in hell, but He loves us and wants us to go to heaven. And to go to heaven we have to be perfect as righteous as God and none of us are righteous. We’re all sinners. We’ve all come short of God’s perfection. This hand represents Jesus Christ. He’s the Lord, God in the flesh. Came into this world because he loves us, hates our sin, because it separates us from him.

So Christ took the sin, paid for it on the cross, and came back from the dead, and said, if we believe that he did it for us, he would put this payment to our account, and we get to go to heaven on what Jesus Christ did for us. That’s the best news in all the world. Let’s pray, shall we? Every head bowed, every eye closed, no one looking around. If you have trusted Christ as your Savior, yes, you’re God’s child.

You’re going to heaven when you die. But buddy, you can still go through a lot of pain and suffering in the meantime. But understanding that God wants to give you comfort in the midst of everything else it goes on. It doesn’t mean just because everything seems to fall apart in your life at times that God has forsaken you. No. God said, He’ll never forsake you and never lose you. He said, I will be with you always. He lives within you and He loves you.

And he doesn’t tempt you to do anything that you should not do. He always leads you right. He loves you. He wants the best for you. And though the trials may come, the testings, God uses those and He says, blesses the man that endures. It doesn’t mean you’ll always enjoy him, but endure it. Trust the Lord. Be patient. Don’t be double-minded. Father, we thank You so much for this opportunity to come together. Bless each one. And Father, for those that are watching by internet, we pray that the message tonight would be a blessing to them and to help them.

And if they’ve never trusted You as they’re saved, that they would put their complete confidence and trust in You because only You can save. And when You do, You save forever. You give the free gift of eternal life. Thank You for this time. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen. You’ve been listening to Bibleline, a teaching ministry of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida with Dr. Ralph Arnold. We pray thatelvet you are 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. 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’re in the area, we welcome you to visit us. The address for Calvary Community Church is, 2011 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. live today and every day. Believing that the Lord is coming soon, and just keep looking up.