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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 first part of this two-part message will be a blessing to you and your family.

Sometimes it’s difficult trying to find the right words to say say when you know there’s people that are hurting and grieving. And I wouldn’t try to do the best that I can with what the Word of God says. You see, naturally as individuals, we don’t have all the answers. So we’re supposed to tell you what God said about certain things. There’s things that are beyond our power to do anything about. We have no magic wand, we can’t make everything go away.

But there’s power and truth. There’s to be comfort in truth. Truth of what God says. So I want you to take your Bible and follow with me in the book of First Thessalonians and chapter four. First Thessalonians and chapter four. Everyone, believe it or not, needs comfort. In other words, something that helps us to bear the sorrow or the bear of the grief that we have because something in our lives have gone wrong. Something’s happened that we didn’t particularly like can’t change, but it happens to us.

And so I love the comfort that we’re supposed to get from these scriptures here in 1 Thessalonians in chapter 4. If you will look there in verse 13, right now at this point I just want to read them, not coming a lot, but read from verse 13 down to verse 18. It says in verse 13, but I would not have you to be ignorant brethren concerning them which are a sleep. That’s those who have already passed on. That you sorrow not even as others which have no hope.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him, for this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent or go before them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel, with the Trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.

Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord, where for a comfort one another with these words. So if we are supposed to get comfort from these word than these words are not to be based upon a false hope. It’s supposed to be based upon truth. And if concludes here, we would say, and so shall we ever be with the Lord, regardless of what happens in this life, regardless of all the sorrow and the grief that we go through, the time is coming when we’re going to be with the Lord.

And none of that will be present. He says, in the 16th Psalm, He talks about us going into the presence of the Lord, where there is eternal joy, the 16th Psalm. So that’s where we’re headed. We’re not there yet. But in this world, we have these problems and how to deal with them. I know that you’re familiar with the story of Israel and how that God had brought them out of Egypt through the wilderness, then they went to Mount Sinai.

And God delivered the law by which the nation was to be governed. He gavemodified the civil laws and the ceremonial laws on how to live as a nation, and God promised that if they would obey him, he would do allryu his wonderful things for them, protect him from their enemies. None of the diseases or the Egyptians would ever come upon their people. And the people would live a blessed happy life. That’s what God wants. us to have the ideal.

But lo and behold, nothing since then has been ideal. We would love to have the peace, love, joy, happiness, and all those things that are the fruit of the Spirit. And yet at the same time we’re faced with a multitude of decisions. And sometimes we’re able to make some good ones, and then we make some bad ones. And so we have consequences. In spite of all the laws that God God gave to the nation of Israel. All those laws did not produce the righteousness God wanted.

Now I know that we have people that are grieving because of losses. Keaton sitting over here lost his dad this week. There’s been people that have passed away recently. There’s a lot of people who have been in love and even worked a guy like Billy Graham. He passed away 99 years old. I’m not interested in getting to good, bad, or indifferent. But he influenced a lot of people. And from what we understand, he was a godly man that never had much thrown at him as far as bad reports and so on, but he still died.

We can’t get out of this life alive unless the Lord comes back. And these verses we read right here. But sometime we wonder, is there any solution to all of these things that we go through? Now you stop and think. The Lord has given us all the laws in the world and the only thing that our government can do is try to solve some of the problems with what’s going on in the schools and so on. Pass more laws.

Because they didn’t obey the last ones, let’s pass them more. Maybe we pass more laws, they’ll obey those. solution is not in the laws. And all of the laws that God gave to the nation of Israel, none of them was a man on any weapons of any kind. Because that’s not the problem. The problem is Bible puts it as the human heart of man. When he made two statements, he says, love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, body, soul, and strength, and love thy neighbor.

see if we love God and we love one another, then everything’s cool. Because we won’t rob our neighbor, we won’t kill our neighbor, we won’t lie about our neighbor, we won’t covet. You see, all of it boils down in one word love, L-O-V-E. If we love God the way we should, we want to please God. We wouldn’t want Him to grieve. But we do things that we shouldn’t do because we are born with a sinful nature. It’s why we do what we do.

And regardless of our desires to maybe want to do so right, we still have the desire to do wrong. I want you to take your Bible and turn all the way over there to the book of Genesis in chapter 6. The Book of Genesis in chapter 6. It’s a well-known portion of Scripture, but there’s something that’s mentioned here that I believe would help you to get a better understanding of this so-called grieving process that we go through. You’ll notice here in the Book of Genesis it’s not far away from the garden of Eden.

But you’d be surprised how many years has passed. There’s only a couple of pages in the Bible, but a couple thousand years has passed. And the Lord says this in verse 5, and God saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth. And that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man, it means it greed God. God was grieved. You said you didn’t know God could be grieved?

Sure he can be grieved. Isn’t it possible that we can be grieved with one another? And God says we’re going to have grief in this world. We’re gonna have sorrow. Remember the verses we read just a minute ago? Sorrow, not as others who have no hope. So some people will grieve more than other people. Some people have a better understanding of things than making cope with things. Not everybody can cope with everything did the same degree. Not everybody’s always on the same page.

Everybody’s not as strong as everybody else. Some people are strong, some people are weak. Some people, they let it go and some people they hold it in. There’s all kinds of reactions that we go through. And sometimes you just feel some numb. You don’t know how to react. But look what he says here. Agreed in verse 6, that he made men on the earth and it grieved him at his heart. We’re talking about God that created the heavens of the earth because God is given to man the opportunity to love him, to believe in him.

believe in Him, to walk with Him, and yet man chooses to go astray. All we like sheep of gone astray. All bunch of sheep. We all want to go our own way and we don’t want to go God’s way. So we grieve God. So it happens. But He also says here in verse 8, but Noah Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. So for 1500 years that God had the law, man did not obey the law. He did not keep the law.

That’s why God automatically, when he gave the moral law, he also gave the civil laws and the ceremonial laws and what to do with the sacrifices because they’re going to break the law. And God says in the book of Jeremiah, there’s only one solution. There’s only one solution for man. And regardless, our legislatures, they’re not going to be able to solve our problems. They can’t solve our problem. No government has ever solved the problems. You see that you have freedom and individual responsibility or confiscate all of weapons of all kinds and put them locked away and put you in prison.

And your nation becomes a prison. by a few elites and we’ll say what you can and cannot do. So we want freedom but we can’t handle freedom unless you can handle individual personal responsibility. If a man loved God, then he can love his neighbor. But if you don’t love God, you don’t love your neighbor. So let’s say we don’t love God and we don’t love one another because of sin. Then we wrong each other. We wrong ourselves. We wrong God.

And all the laws in the world cannot solve that problem. You see, a law cannot make you love God. A law cannot make you love your neighbor. Laws can only make you suffer consequences if they’re enforced as a result. You see, in Israel, they didn’t have all these prisons. They didn’t have all these jails and prisons. You see, you were executed or stoned right away. One thing I used to like to watch it about the old Wild West days, but they were ready to hang you on the spot.

They said, I saw him do it, he did it, let’s get him. And you said, that’s not right. I know, but it caused more people not to do what they did. You said, well, sometimes they get the wrong guy, and they sure did. But But we now put a person in prison and give him pre-room and board for the rest of his life. Over 30 years off on death row, I think they all be done quickly and publicly. People need to see the consequences of people’s rebellion to society when they forfeit the right to live, when they take away somebody else’s, you know, wife or liberty.

But that’s another sermon for another time, but I do want to mention this to you. If we did what God says do, we would have the answer, but we have within us a sinful, rebellious nature. So we get to the next period of time that’s after the cross and it’s called grace. Law could not do the job. Now we’ve got grace. You know, the law came by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. If people only knew the truth and lived by grace, let God do something for us that would be so miraculous that we could live that way like Jesus did.

He came into the world, He lived a perfect life and everybody worshiped Him. What did they do to Him? Crucified Him, He was rejected. He came back from the dead. Now why did he let them do that to him? Because he so loved the world. He was willing to die for all of our sins. Why? Because he wanted us to have a new birth. A new birth that would not give us the problem we have with the one we have now.

See all of us born into this world, we’re born with the sinful nature. With the sent from nature. And I just want to demonstrate just a little bit. I’m going to ask John John to come up here. So John John come up here and just stand right here on the second row or something like that there. You can just stand right there. You can even put your hand on that there to balance yourself because I know you’re getting older.

And I don’t want you to fall out here or anything like that. But now John, he represents all of us. He is what is considered to be a child of the flesh. He’s born a, he has a physical birth. So as a child, he’s born a physical birth. child born into this world. Now, he is not a child of God. Now, God created him. He’s a creation of God, but God is not his father. You see, he has a mother and dad, but he doesn’t have a heavenly father.

He has a God who is his creator, but that doesn’t mean that he belongs to the Lord in the sense that he is his child. This is why when Jesus Christ came into the world. Jesus said, you must be born again. Because the way John is right now, he has an old sinful nature. He naturally has a rebellious spirit to him, and we’ve seen that. No, he has a rebellious spirit, and he wants to go his own way. He’s a bad sheep, and he does things wrong, and you name the sin, and there he is, right?

That’s the flesh. You see, on the inside of him, he has this sinful nature that God calls a sinful wicked heart. In the book of Jeremiah, it talks about, he says, every man has this wicked heart on the inside of him, and that’s his problem. See, passing more laws is not going to change the way he is. It makes him think twice before he does something because he doesn’t want the consequences of whatever the law may bring up on him.

But if nobody enforces laws, then the heart of man is to do more evil because I got away with it. I got away with it. We have an environment today in our world where people can do whatever they want and they get away with it. We have watched over and over again people all across this country that have been rebellious, jumping on P. Lee’s car, breaking into stores and winning. They got them on video and nothing happens to them.

So whenever people are not dealt with because of their wicked ways, then the hearts of people is to do more. And there’s copycat. Well if they can do it and get away with, I can too. And so more people do it and get away with it. How are we going to solve this problem? So God gave the law and says, they shall not lie. They shall not steal. They shall not covet. They shall not commit adultery. Thou shalt not and name all these things.

But the thing is, all those laws doesn’t keep him either from doing it or thinking it. See, sins are not just the ones that we do, there’s the sins of the mind like hate and bitterness and deceit. All these things that happens to the mind. Sometimes we can control the external part of doing something, But what we think about is still just as sinful in God’s eyes. So the law did not work. It could not make this man good enough to go to heaven.

So what God did was this. He sent his son into this world, and he looked just like John. But he sent him into this world. He had a physical body, but Jesus did not have a sinful nature. So because he did not have a sinful nature, Jesus could live here in this world and not commit one sin. Now see John, he represents all of us. We can’t do that. You see, we can’t live above sin. We are sinners, that’s what we are.

Now I’m not asking John to confess all of his sins. I don’t wanna hear him. We just wanna know that, see, he is a sinner. Now I don’t wanna hear about all of your individual sins. It’s like sin, you know, that’s an apple tree. And it’s got apples on it. All those apples are different things that we do, but it’s an apple tree. And that’s why I bring forth those apples. If it wasn’t an apple tree, it wouldn’t have apples.

Well, the reason we produce sins is because we are sinners inside. So the Bible says there’s only one solution. And the laws of man cannot solve this problem. Even God’s laws could not solve this problem. For 1500 years, it did not solve this problem. So what Christ did, he came into the world And he took up on flesh, but he didn’t have a sinful nature. And he died to pay for the sins of everybody else, because he didn’t have any sins to pay for.

And he could come back from the dead so that he could give a new birth to anyone that would believe on him and they would have one like his. A new birth without a sinful nature. See, if all of us today went to heaven just like we are, we would do up there what we’d do down here. What would be the difference? The location? No. You see, you have to be born again. This is why Jesus says you must be born again.

It’s the only hope for mankind. In this world, as long as we’re in this body, we’re going to grieve because we are going to have sorrow in this world. Why? Because of our sinful nature, our sinful nature causes us to do sinful things. We will hurt people. We’ll wrong each other. People are gonna wrong us. And because of sin, the Bible says, we’re all going to die. That means we’re all gonna be separated, eternally from God, because he God is holy, and nobody can live in his presence unless you are as perfect and righteous and just, and holy as he is.

And that eliminates the whole human race. There is no hope for man. Man cannot do anything about it. Religions will not work. So that’s why God sent his son, Jesus Christ. And he died and paid for all the sins so that John over here could accept his death as his death and get a new birth. I’m gonna ask, I don’t care which one of you guys here, you’re coming up here, a gala shirt. That’s Trent, that’s Trent. And Trent just staying right here on this side.

Now, you may not know this, but this is John, John. Now, this is John, John, but this is John, John’s new birth. You see, there came a day when John John heard the gospel, what Christ did for him. So John John accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior. So when he accepted Christ as his Savior, God did not change this over here. This is a body of the flesh. He didn’t get a new body. You see, when he got up that morning and he looked in the mirror and he was ugly, when he went home that afternoon, he looked in the mirror and he was still ugly.

See, God didn’t change the body. He didn’t change his own sinful nature. He didn’t convert him. He didn’t do anything with this old birth. What God did is gave him a brand new birth. This over here is a spiritual birth. You see, you can’t see it. Now, you just think you see him, but you can’t really see your second birth because it is born of the Spirit of God. is the Father because you see when John John believed the Word of God, God gave to Him a new birth.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. This is a spiritual birth born of God. Now this birth over here understand this. I would venture to say 99% of all preachers in America don’t understand this. That’s why they get all mixed up on what the gospel is. Over here this new birth came from God because of believing the incorruptible seed, the word of God, he saw it, he read it, he believed it and God gave to him a new birth.

This new birth born of God does not have a sinful nature because he, God doesn’t have a sinful nature and all of his children, God’s children, are those who have been born of God. You see, the flesh is not born of God, but the Spirit is. This birth is born of God. And as a little baby, now John, John over here, he’s probably up there close to 50 years of age. He’s an old man. Over here, you see, he’s only how old, about 22?

20, he’s younger than I thought. He’s only 20. But see, he’s the new birth, but this one doesn’t have a sinful nature. If it doesn’t have a sinful nature, it can not sin. And if it can not sin, it can not die. Which one of these can die yet? This one. Where does he live? He lives inside of him. His new birth lives inside of him. But you see, He only has one body, but he has two births. And so God says, I want you to take control of this body.

But the flesh says, I was here first. And I’m not going to do it. So you have a argument, you’re gonna have a fight. So you have the flesh and the spirit, and they fight back and forth over who gets to control one body that they have. And God says… Whenever you indwell this body over here, he’s been there a long time and he’s experienced on how to go his own way. But I want you to go my way, but you only got one body.

He says, I’m going to give you the indwelling Holy Spirit. So when you indwell him, I’m going with you. And if you will listen to me, I’ll tell you how to have victory. But the problem is not all of God’s children obey their heavenly Father. So now that we’re over here and we’re living in this body, you have to understand this person over here in the flesh can still commit every sin in the book. Why? Because he still has a sinful nature.

You say, well, what happens when he sins? He didn’t do it. He can’t do it. That’s the new birth. It’s this one over here. So God can still chase and soraught because he’s still, he’s not right. The flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God, never will. You see, as a child of God, he inherited everything his father has. This one cannot die. And so whenever a person dies physically, And there’s deaths that happens all the times, all around us.

When he dies, the body will go to the grave. And there’s many people that have him cremated, but whatever. The body’s going back to the dust. To be absent from the body, present with the Lord. Absent from the body, that’s the end of this old sinful nature that lives in the members, in your bodies, in your flesh. of the eyes, the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life. But this person will live forever. And so whenever he dies, acts in from the body, present with the Lord.

And this is why when he goes to be with the Lord, when the Lord comes back, he’s going to bring him with him. And he can’t bring him with him if he’s not there with him. And the Lord says, I’ll never leave you and I’ll EntityItem I’ll never forsake you. When he was living in this body, he was with him. And then they are leaving this body. That’s what death is separation from the body. Death is not annihilation. So when you leave this body and one of these days, you’re going to hear that Yankee has passed away.

And that’s the end of him. I will be more alive at that moment than I have ever been in my life. I will be with the Lord in heaven. And when you stop and think about where I am at that time, do you think you’d ever walk to pull me back into this world, back into this body that I finally got rid of in that old sinful nature and all the heartache and the sorrow and the pain and the grief that you can go through in this life?

Because when you live it in this old body with with this whole sinful nature, with everybody else, God can give you the strength and the grace to live and to face life with the Lord. With the Lord, you can face anything. But there’s a struggle that goes on between the flesh and the Spirit. Thank you, fellow, you’re gonna be seated. Give me a big hand, I appreciate it. They might pat each other by that. That doesn’t happen. Fresh in the Spirit never gets along.

Never gets along. This is your invitation to join us for our third Sunday dinner held in the Florida Bible College of Tampa building on the Calvary Community Church Campus. The dinner is a family-style, covered-dish dinner and a great way to showcase your favorite dish and pick up new recipes. Each month you shenan the opportunity to invite your family and friends to join us for our Sunday morning service at 1030 and then stay for our third Sunday dinner immediately Immediately following noon, third Sundays at Calvary Community Church where you’ll be fed spiritually and physically.

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. 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, just keep. and look enough.