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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 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 message will be a blessing to you and your family.

This is called the overview that’s overlooked. In other words, an overview is stepping back back and looking at the total picture, trying to see it all. If you get too close to something, you can see one thing, but you can’t see how it relates to everything else because you’re too close. Step back and look at your life that you’ve already lived and see what God’s done for you, and you’ll be amazed. Every book in the Bible has a main theme.

There is a purpose of that book. Different people who study the Bible, they may be impressed with this theme and somebody else? Well, I think it’s this and something else, this. But the theme of the whole Bible is Christ, and the theme of every book who’s going to be Christ or something that deals with Jesus Christ, and every book in the Old Testament, New Testament always comes back to that. But this book, the book of Romans, I believe, is a picture of a duplicating machine.

I’ll show you what I mean by that in just a moment. First of all, look there in Philippians in chapter 2 and look verse 13. Once you have trusted Christ as your Savior, understand that God not only indwells in you, but He is to work in you to perform. To perform something. For it is God which worketh in you. All the problems and heartaches and the trials and tribulations, all that is God’s way of working in me. And sometimes to work in In you, he has to work on you.

And he uses those things to get you where he wants you to be and to get you to search, because if you really want God’s will, that’s what makes you struggle. But it makes you stronger in the process. And it’s the struggling that strengthens you. It’s the conflict. It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do a His good pleasure. In other words, God has a purpose. It’s for His pleasure. You are here to please God.

So he’s gonna work on you in a way that pleases him, not you, not me. Do all things without murmuring and what? Dispute and arguing. Don’t always murmur and always argue about everything, God says don’t do that. Because you’re supposed to believe that God is working in you and he uses people’s opposition to you. Look what else in verse 15. that ye may be blameless and harmless the sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation among whom ye shine as lights in the world.

Every problem that people have is your opportunity to shine. People’s problems is to get them to the Lord. So therefore, don’t mind it when people have problems and come to you with problems. Be a problem solver. Always try to help people get to the Lord. That’s what it’s all about. So the Lord tells us that we’re here and He wants us as a copy machine to reproduce others just like us. Now take your Bible and turn to the book of Romans, the book of Romans, and chapter 1.

So God desires to create a righteous man to produce righteous deeds in a wicked, crooked and perverse world. So God wants to create a machine. Now I don’t want to use this as a machine like you’re just a machine mechanical. No, you’re a person But like as a machine is only an example. Please understand that create a machine that can produce righteous deeds God created a man and a woman but the man and the woman got marred. So those were the original People that God had to work with so all the copies that came from them them because they were marred, all the copies were marred also.

In other words, have you ever taken a piece of paper and you can put a number on it or X or anything on it and put it on a copper machine and make copies and it’s gonna Had the same marks just like the original did, and the copy can never improve itself. The copy is only a copy. It’s not the original. So we had an original in the very beginning. And the copy was marked. And so all the copies, all the people on the earth have all got scars.

Sin. We have a sinful nature. Because the original copy, Adam, was bad. So in Romans chapter five, In verse 12, wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, death by sin, so death passed upon all men for that all have sinned. And then verse 14, nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come. So there is an original Adam, and he sinned for by one man sin entered into the world and therefore all have sin because of the original.

So everybody has sinned. So out of all of these copies, God could not find one that could produce righteousness. They all produced sins. So God worked with all these copies and try to make some of the copies different from the other copies, pull them aside from all the other copies and say, I’m going to make you something special, but the copies were still just copies. So God gave them the law. And did they have an advantage? Yes, they did.

Look in chapter 3. Chapter 3 verse 1. What advantage then hath the Jew? Or what prophet is there of circumcision, much every way? Chiefly because that unto them were committed the oracles of God or the word of God. So when God took these special individuals, these copies, and separated them from the other copies and was going to reveal things to them that was not revealed to the other copies. Will God work with these copies for fifteen hundred years? And the conclusion was, at the end of fifteen hundred years, all the copies were just as bad as the original, and God, God, could not change the copies.

couldn’t change the copies. God and His Word couldn’t change the copies. The copies were still copies and the copy cannot improve itself and God couldn’t change the copies. When you look in chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, He’s laying a foundation to show that everybody in the world is in the same boat and that they have all sinned. And nobody could produce the righteousness that God wanted. So once you have got a bad copy, all the copies will be bad.

Chapter 3 through chapter 5 shows that the copies cannot improve themselves, but the only cure is to replace the marred original with another perfect original, which is Christ, and do what? Make more copies. This is why Christ came into the world, Jesus Christ, He was perfect. And so if He was put onto the coffee machine and you made copies from a perfect original, then we could have some perfect copies. So He gave birth to a person. So every one of us that are born again, born by the Spirit of God, have a perfect birth.

That when you trust in Christ as your Savior and we’re born into God’s family, you were made a perfect copy. You’re perfect. They don’t believe you’re created perfect as you go through the book. You find out that God is revealed certain things and it’s all by faith. It’s not by your works. So salvation is the gift of God. But now that’s why you need to understand that when you go from chapter three, parts of chapter three, therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith.

the deeds of the law. See the first three chapters, they will show you that a man cannot save himself, that a man is a bad copy and he cannot improve his condition. No man can. So only through Christ is a perfect cure. It’s kind of like having something that’s all written over and it’s all marred and you didn’t try to get everything and you can’t get the stain out and yet Christ come along and says, here’s my blood. And you are dipped into his blood.

And when it comes out, it’s perfectly pure. And the only thing left is the image of Christ. Your second birth, born of God, is the perfect image of the Son of God. You and I, we will reach a certain level in our walk with God, and that new birth is a perfect Son of God. Within you, there is a little child that was born. That’s your second birth. It’s born of God. It’s a perfect copy. And you are going to go through various levels of the Word.

and your Christian walk and you maturing in the Lord. Now where one day you ought to be able to take a ministry just like Christ took a ministry. You go through chapter two, you go through chapter three, you go through chapter four and chapter five and about Christ dying, paying for sins, and we can therefore be justified by faith. Chapter five verse one, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So we have a new machine. This new machine can make new copies.

Now everyone that trusts Christ as Savior, you’re like a little individual copy machine and you can make copies. That’s why you are supposed to win others to Christ. And so by you winning someone else to Christ, then they become a child of God, created in his image, created in righteousness just like the original. And so we all are to become copy machines, creating others in his image. When we trust Christ as our Savior, that’s just beginning of the work.

The Lord says that when we are saved, it says that he indwells us. So the Bible tells us that he which hath begun a good work in you will accomplish that work. That’s the job. So the Holy Spirit lives within us. He’s working on us in order to work in us that He might work through us in building us. And it’s the problems of life. It’s all the conflicts that you have that works against you that makes you struggle and fight in order to build your faith strong in the Lord.

So don’t despise life. realize the purpose of it. It’s to build us to develop that character, that good qualities that the world needs to see. Because he says, in a crooked and perverse generation, it means God didn’t straighten up the world and solve all the world’s problems for you and me to live here. He let the world be as bad as it wants to be and put you right in the middle love it. Now I think I would have preferred if he’d have just straightened out everything and I could have just enjoyed it.

But that’s not the way God wants to do it. He wants us to be a light in a dark world. Means the world don’t have the answers. You do. Live like it. Act like it. Think like it. Pray like it. Walk like it. Because you’re different from the world. In other words, don’t you live like a copy from the old machine. Romans 6 shows that the new copies are not to run on the old machine, the old man. Look in chapter 6 and verse 11.

Likewise, reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed on the sin. That means the old copy machine is broke. You don’t need it and you don’t run on it and you don’t produce those copies no more. In other words, when you had nothing but the old machine, you produce sins all the time. And the Bible says, shall we that know the truth, now live in sin, walk in sin, shall we continue in sin? Look in chapter 6 and verse 1.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin? That grace may abound. How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer than in? God says, no, because he considered the old machine is dead. It don’t work no more. So if it’s dead and doesn’t work anymore, you don’t have to produce no more copies from it. You are supposed to live according to the new machine. And now you let Christ duplicate Himself in you. When Christ was here, did Christ have any troubles?

Any problems? Just like you and I. And yet He says in all points tempted just like we are. And yet without sin. Now it would be great if we didn’t have to worry about this old machine and this old nature that we have, but we do and He follows us all the days of our life. But your new birth is totally perfect. It cannot send. It cannot produce one bad copy. Anything that comes out wrong is coming from the other machine.

And you’re the one that cranked it up and you produced it. Don’t blame somebody else for running your old machine. You made me sin. And everybody blames everybody else without taking personal responsibility for their own actions. You are responsible. Let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body. In other words, don’t let this old copy machine keep producing those old bad copies. Don’t keep producing the same anger, the bitterness, the hatred, all those things that God says, I don’t like those results.

So God, in order to build a machine that could produce righteousness, had to start all over again with a total new birth and now by you trusting Christ as your Savior born of God created in righteousness. Now God says I want you to produce others just like you. And so that’s why he says so love, kindness and so forth. If you sow bitterness, you sow anger, you whatever you sow you what? You reap. And so many Many people are adding to their burdens by becoming a gossiper.

Do you know if you gossip to somebody about somebody, those people that will listen to your gossip will also spread gossip about you? Because they know that person gossips. And they’ll tell other people about you, God, don’t do it. Keep control. Look what else it says here in verse 13. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness. In other words, don’t let this one body that you’ve only got one body. Don’t let this one body that you have be an instrument that produces unrighteousness.

Now you have something new. You have another original, a new man. But you’ve only got one body produced righteousness. No, you’re not. That to whom you yield yourself, servants to obey his servants, he art to whom you obey. In other words, you’re the one that determines whether or not what kind of copies do you reproduce? What are you producing in your life? Show why the new copies are not to run on the old machine. You say, well, why? Because you get a conflict of interest.

You’ll get double vision, double image. It won’t be clear. This is the battle of the two, what? the two natures. Romans chapter 7 is the battle of the two natures. It means you cannot try to produce the righteousness on the old machine. In other words, you cannot serve God in the flesh in your own energy. Have you ever heard about people who get in? I just get in so burn out. What? Because you’re trying to produce righteousness on a bad machine and it won’t work.

But if you’ll try to produce the righteousness just by letting the new machine run, it won’t where are you out? I have never yet. I’ve never come close to burnout. Well, I’m not going to serve the Lord. I’m just tired of serving God. I’m going to quit. And so as you read down through Romans chapter 7, look in verse 18, for I know that in me that is in my flesh, develop no good thing. In other words, there’s an old bad coffee machine inside of me that wants to produce some bad copies.

And every time I want to make good copies, the old bad machines cranks up and starts producing bad copies. That’s what he’s talking about. When I want to do that which is good, I wind up doing that which is wrong. And when I sometime want to do that which is wrong, I find it good as with me. He said, oh, I get so confused in verse 15, for that which I do, I allow not for what I would that do I not, but what I hate that do I?

Yet then I do that which I would not have considered to the law that it is good, not that it is no more either do it, but send it to all of them. I got an old machine inside of me that wants to keep producing bad copies. For I know that in me that is in my flesh, well if no good thing, but how to perform that which is good, I find out how do I perform just the good copies.

Don’t you struggle in your Christian life trying to produce just good copies? Isn’t the old copies easier to reproduce? And it’s so easy to get mad and angry and bitter and not to trust to be disobedient. So easy to do that. Well, that comes from the old sinful nature. That’s that old machine that lives inside of you. But how can I perform? In other words, where does the power come to run on? The flesh cannot perform. The flesh is work.

But then Christ says, come into me, all you that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn to me for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Then why should it be hard to serve the Lord? because how to perform has not been found. See, what is this new power? So you don’t even until you get to the eighth chapter, find out what is the new power that this new machine is supposed to run on.

It doesn’t run on the flesh. It doesn’t run off that bad machine that you had. God says, you consider that one dead. It doesn’t work. All you get is bad copies. If you live in the685 flesh and you walk in the flesh, you produce in bad copies. That doesn’t produce the righteousness of God. That’s not why God left you here. So here in chapter 8 of Romans, you’ll notice there in the last part of it, after the Spirit. In verse 1 verse 2, for the law of the spirit of life in Christ, it hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

And then he talks about that in verse 4, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, but not by us, who walked on after the flesh, but after the rest of it. In other words, if you walk after the Spirit, the Spirit that lives within you will give power to produce the righteousness. Now if you don’t allow the Holy Spirit that lives within you to control you, you cannot produce the copies of righteousness that God intended.

So therefore you cannot walk in the flesh. It’s the flesh that wears you out, that makes you tired and miserable and all those things that just drag you down. It’s not the power of God that does that to you. The work of the Lord will not kill you. The work of the Lord is not where it wears you out. It’s that when you’re trying to do the work of the Lord and the power of the flesh, it will not work.

When you don’t depend upon God, and you worry about things, And you think it all depends upon your talent and your power, your ability, you’re into lake, you’re you, you, you, you. Then you, you don’t miss the whole picture. It won’t work that way. And that love, that’s power, that desire that comes from God, that’s power. It means it gives you that which you need to faithfully keep serving God when it seems like everybody else seems to stop in the quit.

You’d be surprised how many of you probably sitting right here, but how did that have to hear with serving God and going to church and doing right? You just get tired and worn out. Be to a frazzle. Don’t want to do it no more. And the flesh is where you are. You have gotten away from the power of the Holy Spirit. And the Bible says in verse 5, look in verse 5, you need to see that. Well, they that are after the flesh, That means that you’re going to run this old machine after the flesh and produce some bad copies, but they that are after the Spirit are going to have some good copies.

And so, as you go through life, whenever we get to heaven, God’s the one that separates the bad copies from the good copies. So, when we’re in heaven at the Judson of Christ, get which ones are burned up. But all the what? All the bad copies. The wood, the hay, the stubble. All that is going to be burned. So if you spend your life producing bad copies, you’re wasting your life. You understand what I’m saying? It’s simply an illustration, but I believe it bears witness.

Now chapter 9, chapter 10 and chapter 11 is simply the past, the present, and the future of the nation of Israel. Here’s an example of someone who tried to produce better copies on an old machine. Israel promised that they would, chapter 9, but they failed. Israel showed that they could not, chapter 10, that’s the present and they’ve been set aside. Israel will eventually submit to their new original, which is Christ, the Messiah when he returns as their only hope, and that’s the future.

And the Bible says Israel will become the greatest nation on the face of the earth. looking Romans chapter 12. Romans 12 to 14 shows the products to be produced for God and for others as a result of chapter 8. In other words, if the Holy Spirit controls your life to produce the works of righteousness in your life, you should be able to expect something from your life because it is God that works in you that is to produce something from you.

The rightest needs among whom you shine in this world that is crooked and wicked and perverse. And you’ll shine as the light. See in verse 1 of chapter 12, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that ye present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy acceptable unto God which is a reasonable service. Be not conformed to this world, but be a transformed by the renewing of your mind. And then he goes down here and talks about all the things about service in a verse six, having then gifts, different according to the grace.

In other words, if the Holy Spirit lives in you, and if you listen to what the word of God tells you, that the Holy Spirit teaches him, and as he guides you and directs you, you will find out what God wants you as an individual to do with your life. And then he talks about all the various gifts, in verse seven or ministry, or he that exhorteth in verse eight, And Derek verse nine, let love be without the simulation or hypocrisy.

It talks about in verse 10 being kindly, a fashion, want to, those are the outflow that been produced by this new power that lives within you on this new coffee machine that can be some copies made that God’s been looking for. But that’s the product. That’s the end result. This is what God wants to come forth from your life. So when you get a chance chapter 12 verses 9 through especially 16 read that and see what God wants to produce from your life.

It’ll help you tremendously. Now in chapter 15 and 16 it shows the glory, the patience, the hope, the love, appreciation for what God is doing and bringing forth righteousness from the righteous people. In other words if I serve God, if I do God promises these are going to be the things that comes from me, but that might come from me, but what does it do for me? Well this is what God says it does for you as an individual.

God becomes a God of patient for you and a God of hope for you and a God of love for you. Look what he says there, this is in chapter 15, chapter 15, looking verse 5, now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus. In other words, you become a copy like the original. And that pleases God. And remember, serving God is for the purpose of pleasing Him. Look what He says there in verse 1.

We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves. If you’re always the kind that sit back in what can people do for me, you missed it. Because then you want people to please you, make me happy, make me happy. No, do it for others. You reach out. You want to try to win them. You want them to go to heaven. You want this person to serve God because you want God to bless them.

Don’t you want all of God’s people that when they get to heaven to be rewarded, wouldn’t it be great? Or do you just want it for yourself but you don’t want nobody else to be happy. You don’t want nobody else to have joy and all those thrills that when they get to heaven, they want people to cry. That’s why I try to challenge people to serve the Lord and win people to Christ because when you get to heaven the Bible says the ones you want in the Christ those are going to be your joy in the Lord.

Paul says my joy in the Lord are ye at the coming of Christ. I want everybody to have that. I think it will be fantastic. So that means you want others to have what you have and to know what you know. Are you a new listener to Bibleline? Do you enjoy the teachings of Dr. Arnold? Well if you’ve never contacted us before, we want to give you Dr. Arnold’s book, The Gospel Driven Man. Every day we receive many emails from folks who have questions about repentance and salvation, about faith in works, and about how to share the Gospel with friends and loved ones.

This book, The Gospel Driven Man, covers all those topics, and we want all new listeners of Bible line to receive a free copy. There’s no obligation, no donation necessary, simply call us at at 1-800-576-3771 or write to us and request your free copy of the Gospel-Driven Man. The mailing address is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634. Again, don’t forget to include your mailing address and God bless you and thank you for listening to Bibleline. Thanks for joining us on Bibleline.

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. 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, believe in that the Lord is coming soon, just keep looking up.