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

If you were to see a fireman and there was a fire, you would think that a fireman would know how to do what? He ought to know how to put out of fire, shouldn’t he? I mean a fireman, that’s what he’s supposed to do, is put out fires. If there was a policeman and somebody was robbed on the store, you’d think, well, he’s supposed to know how to handle that job. That’s why they want security guards in some of the schools because they’re supposed to know how to handle a problem.

But whatever it is, Sometimes by your name, you’re supposed to know this. If you’re a doctor and then they know you’re supposed to know certain things. If you’re a lawyer, you’re supposed to know how to take care of a situation in court if you are a lawyer. But there’s a certain thing you’re supposed to know. But when it comes to the preacher, somebody says, you’re a pastor. That can scare you to death. People can assume you’re supposed to know all the spiritual answers to everybody’s problems, because we know that almost all of our problems are spiritual problems.

They just reveal themselves in other ways. And sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re the past or not. Have you ever had anybody come to you for counseling? Wanting to know, don’t you admire the people who come to you for your advice? Have you ever felt like you were totally unqualified to answer anybody’s questions? Have you ever given advice and then lived in fear that they might take it? Because if it doesn’t work, who are they going to blame? You might as well go look in the mirror.

This is why some people don’t like telling anybody what to do or what not to do because if it’s wrong, the best way to do is just play safe, play dumb, you’re ignorant, know nothing, say nothing, do nothing. And maybe you can just get through life. But lo and behold, when you become the pastor and people have problems, they come to you and they expect you to have all the right words to say. Well, I still find myself many times I just haven’t got the words.

And you don’t know if you’re going to say the right thing, the wrong thing. You’re going to offend or not offend. And whenever there’s two people involved, then they are in a disagreement, and then you’re right there between the two of them. And they always want to know, well, who side are you on? Well, everybody knows I’d be on the man’s side, right? And so that’s not true. There’s always three sides to everything. It’s his side, her side, and then the truth.

But when it comes to things about the Lord, it’d be so easy if we just simply knew it all. Well whenever you study the book of Hebrew, take away and be turned into the book of Colossians. of your thoughts I want to throw you away. The book of Ephesians shows us a lot about the body, the body of Christ. And we are the body of Christ, we are the church. And so when you divide the book of Ephesians up, you’ve got things that are always doctrinal, the practical after the doctor known.

So you’ve always got what you’re supposed to know. And then it breaks down and usually the last part of it, what you’re supposed to do. And so that’s why in chapter four, five, and six, it’s about of Ephesians, about what you’re to do because of what you have learned in chapter one, two, and three. And that because of our position that we have in Christ, and that some of the body is in heaven in chapter three and some of the body is on earth.

And then about we measure ourselves, not among each other, but we measure ourselves according to the full statue of what Christ is like. So we know what we’re supposed to be like, we’re supposed to be like the Lord. My goal in life is try to not be like Bob Brooks. Me and Bob Brooks have the same responsibility, we’re supposed to both try to be like the Lord. Because there’s Bob being here is in my life, he doesn’t want to be like.

Now I don’t know anything against Bob that I would not want to be like. I mean Bob is just money right up there, you know. But when he comes to the Lord, he is the one that we all should look to and want to be like the Lord. So when you come to the book of Colossians, well Colossians, it talks about two main things. It’s mentioned in chapter one, but it talks about the wisdom of God, the wisdom. Be in field with the wisdom of God.

And then the very next part I talked about, and the walk, walking worthy. So you walk worthy of the wisdom that you have. And so as you studied the book of Colossians, you’ll find out that they had problems in the church there. And these problems have broken done in the various areas, not a lot, but with ceremonies and rituals, you know, because of, well, you’ve got a thing called religions. There’s religions. And then you have the intellect, and this is why he says in chapter 2 and verse 8, be aware, let’s say, it means spoil you through vain philosophies and traditions of man and after the rudiments of the world.

So you’ve got the philosophies of man. And so you’re supposed to be on guard and how do you deal with the wisdom of man? Because when you want to do things right and be spiritually guided by the Lord, every one of us, if we all trusted crisis our Savior today. We would already have built in ourselves certain traditions that we do, maybe little rituals or whatever it might be. So we already have a form of religion. But then you find out the truth.

So you’ve got to work through that and how to eliminate some of those things from our life. And then you’ve also got the same thing about the human wisdom that you have gained up to this point. Maybe you’re 20 years old, maybe you’re 50 years old, 60 years old, but there’s a certain amount of intellect that we have. And then lo and behold, you trust Christ as Savior. All right, do you think that you’re going to have any problems with any of this previously gained knowledge that you have had and wisdom that you had, humanly speaking?

And now you’ve got to change all of that and seek the wisdom of God and be able to strip your mind out of all this other things that have deluded your thinking and led you astray. All we like sheep have gone astray. And so we know these things are going to be there. And then there’s always that part of us that we are inquisitive. We want to know the secret things, the dark things, the mysterious things. And as he talks about in chapter 2 about like angels who tell you things that lead you astray from the truth of what the Word of God says and about sound doctrine.

And next thing you know, you’ve got these things that you have imagined and you think you don’t have to have any wisdom in it. It’s just the curiosity of man to the Devon of those things and the prophecies of what’s going to happen in the future. Well, that’s what the book of Colossians is for also to help deal with that because they had people in the church that had all these problems. In everything you have to have, you’ve got to have an umpire in your life, somebody to call balls and strikes.

From our own perspective, everything that I do is a strike. And everything anything you do as a ball. In other words, mind always try to cross the plate. My decisions are always right. Yours are what? Always wrong. You didn’t know that? So we all need an umpire that calls it the way it really is. And so even when we study the scriptures, wouldn’t it be interesting if we all came down on the same scripture the same way? But that is if we had an umpire that calls it the way it really is, and then to be able to tell us as we walk our walk with the Lord, walking worthy of the vocation that God’s given to us.

So we make decisions. We should always check and see whether or not is it in or out. Whenever you play softball and you hit a ball, you have a referee or a non-para that says out and safe, you know, home, everything’s good. Always somebody needs to call it. Well, every sport that we have, we have somebody that does that because we can’t always trust our judgment or from our viewpoint. So when it comes to the Lord, every one of us has been given the indwelling person of the Holy Spirit and he calls the balls and strikes.

He tells you and if you become sensitive, he can let you know that that’s wrong and that’s wrong. And when When you’re sensitive, you become more keenly aware of error. But whenever you don’t listen to the umpire and you get away from the truth of the word of God, you’re going to use your own judgment and then somebody else is doing the same thing and you’re going to have a lot of conflict. And there’s a lot of conflict in people’s lives, mainly sometimes between husband and wife, with them and the kids and grandkids and people you work with and all that because you see unless you stay strong in the Lord you’re not going to see everything the way it really is.

You have a perspective but it doesn’t always mean that it’s alright. Let me just mention this to you. You ever played checkers? Everybody ever played checkers? I used to love to play Chinese checkers. I’ve got good at Chinese checkers. Then I love to play just regular checkers. I used to love to sit at a crack of barrel and it got and it’s hard when somebody is playing checkers to walk by without stopping and giving them my opinion. Because I can look at that and I can say, they’re fixing to get trapped.

They get ready to make a move. I want to say something but you know you’re not supposed to write and when they get ready to make that move you’re trying to give them. But it’s fun when you see something and you want to let the other person know and they don’t see it. Well see it’s that way spiritually in people’s lives too. Trying to find the right way to tell somebody when they’re in air. It’s not a difficult thing to do sometimes because you know that based upon how they are at the moment, how they’re doing emotionally depends on how well they’re going to accept criticism.

constructive criticism or is it destructive criticism? SoAlabama you’re trying to figure out a way. If you ever played chess, ever played chess, now that’s a little bit more intellectual. It’s not the same as checkers but chess. Ah, now there’s a game. I remember when I used to play chess then I kind of prided myself in understanding the game fairly well. I was always looking for a victim and so the best one I could find was my 14 year old son and I knew he didn’t understand it too well.

And I’d be in there and I’d get everything set up and he wanted to go in there and watch TV. I wanted to play chess. And so I said okay I’m going first, I’ll move my move. I always go first. It was my game. I went first. Say Eddie, your turn andWER And now I spend so much time trying to figure out how to move it. I can know all the options. Now finally after about 20 minutes I’ll make my move.

Eddie! And he’ll run in there. He’ll run back. And four moves he had me in checkmate. It’s not a lie. I didn’t know that the guy at school who was teaching the school how to play chess. I forgot the guy’s name, but he was teaching how to play chess. I hated him. But a 14-year-old kid should not be superior than Daddy. So we had to stop playing that game. But sometimes the goal of chess is to get you in checkmate.

Sometimes even when you’re witnessing to somebody, They asked this question, you answered. They asked this question, you answered. They got this question, you answered. Checkmate, when you’ve answered their questions and they don’t know which way to go, you’ve answered all of them. You got them where they can’t move. Now I enjoy doing that when it comes to soul winning. But do you know there’s a God in heaven who’s looking down and he’s watching us? And we have a tendency without even being aware that we’re going astray and God blocks.

Why did God close that door? Well, I had an open door and God closed that door. Did you know that God knows what’s on the other side of the door that we’re sometimes not aware of? And God may have blocked you. Did you know that God sometimes maybe wants you to go this direction and you’re going that direction? Do you know that when God knows your heart and you really wanna know and you’re not sure what decisions to make, sometimes you can make a decision and God can help you change that decision.

And he’s gonna get you where you’re in checkmate. You don’t know what to do. You’ve ever been where you don’t know what to do. You don’t know which way to go. There’s an umpire that you’ve got that will always find a way for you to move forward or to accomplish whatever it is God wants you to accomplish. I’ve done a lot of driving over the years. I used to hate driving a bus because it did not have automatic control on it.

You know, you couldn’t just set it and it would just drive. You had to always keep your foot on the pedal all the time. You let your foot off of it, it slows down. You’ve got to always keep the pressure on that pedal. Now when we get cars today and you’re going down the highway and you know a fast song and you’re going 90 and all of a sudden it’s you know, my God is real. You’re going 20 miles an hour down expressway.

And your wife tells you this, what are you doing? are you doing? Where are you? What are you thinking? And I realize that I’m in a dream world. She says, would you please set that control on that thing and set it at the same speed so it’ll go the same speed? Yes, dear. So I have to set it. In your Christian life, You can learn how to depend upon the Lord to keep you moving and keep you even killed.

Or you can wind up having yourself. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re like a yo-yo. You’re sprinting and then you’re in it for the long haul and then you’re running out of it. Listen, learn how to trust the Lord in so many things. Now when you get here to the book of Colossians, and I’ll get to it in a minute, but as you read some of these things you’ll find out, and I mentioned to you before, that Christ is to have the preeminence in our life, and this is what this whole book is about.

See, Ephesians is about the body, that’s us. is more about the head. And Him draw off the fullness of the Godhead, and He is superior. The preeminists, over all these other religions and beliefs, and it’s called New Age Today, but it’s the same old age that they’ve always had. It’s just a lot more junk. And so you find out that some of these things that they talk about, we have a word from God on how to deal with all these problems that people have.

So there is a verse even in the book of Romans in chapter 15. It’s only three words long, but it just says competent to counsel, competent to counsel. It means simply that you’re able to take the word of God and tell people what God says. Meeting people’s needs with the word of God. Now here in chapter one where he says, Paul and apostle of Jesus Christ. Now you think just that one word apostle, we know he’s God sent. He’s a witness of the resurrection of Christ after Christ came back from the dead, personally sent by the Lord.

So there’s no clue Paul wasn’t a possible, but I’d look at it just a little bit different. It means Paul had the authority to speak on God’s behalf. That means that whatever he’s going to say, he has God’s mind upon whatever it is, he’s going to tell us. And because God knows everything to have his spokesman speak for God and tell us these things.

Means he has the authority to rebuke, to refute, refute any false teaching, any air and any doctrine of any kind. God has enabled him to do this. So Paul knew how to solve problems. So with these major teachings in these people there in Colossae, he was able to take the truth and give it to them. You see, just look very quickly in verse 9, where it says in verse 9, for this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you and to desire that you might be filled with the, and this has to do with the wisdom, the intellect, the knowledge.

You see, that’s what some people are looking for and searching for, but it’s the angelic wisdom behind the scenes, the deeper things, you know, the deeper meaning, the spiritual depths that lies beyond our human understanding. And they seem like they know what they’re talking about. All wisdom, all knowledge, all true intellect that we should know is in Christ. And so he says the knowledge of his will can get this in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. So this is what he wants the children at this church to understand what he wants them to know.

Because when you know God’s wisdom, you’re able to refute human philosophy. Look what he says there in chapter 2 and verse 8. In chapter 2 verse 8 he says, be where lest any man spoil you through, here’s the word, philosophy and vain deceit. And see when you talk about after the tradition of men, whether it’s the religion, the ceremonies or rituals or maybe it’s certain days that they worship on. A lot of this is explained in chapter 2 and verse 13 on down to the end of that chapter.

But it’s talking about the things that God says, now this is what is wrong, this is what they believe, this is in air and this is how you correct the air. You see if it wasn’t for problems in the early church, much of this knowledge that’s told to the church we wouldn’t need. It’s because they had these problems then, recurcurrentians and see how many problems they had. Look how much truth we learned when you’re trying to solve a problem.

It’s whenever you have difficulties in your life and you don’t know what to do, it calls you to seek truth. You’re seeking for understanding and because we know that majority of people’s problems is a spiritual problem, we want to get spiritually and try to help them spiritually. This is what the word of God says and notice what he says. Now in verse 9 of chapter 1 is the wisdom And then in verse 10, that you might walk worthy. So you’ve got wisdom, you’ve got walk.

You’ve got to get the wisdom before you know how to walk. And you walk worthy of the wisdom that you have. And so that’s why you need to learn what the word of God says. Now look there in chapter two and verse nine. And verse nine says, for in him, dwell of most part, all of the fullness of the Godhead bodily. You have all that you need and notice this in the very next verse there’s one word that’s very important.

You see that word complete? You are all complete. In Christ you are complete. That is your position that you have in the Lord. Now another thing is the reason for studying the book is because there is a purpose, a goal of what you’re trying to accomplish. And he makes this statement very easily there in verse 28 of chapter 1. I love skipping around the scriptures. I don’t know why I do that all the time. But I might get back to verse 2.

Oh, that’s right, we never finished verse 1 yet. But anyway, in verse 28, whom we preach, warning every man, teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. Where unto I also labor, striving according to his working which worketh in me mightily. Now there’s several things in that verse that are, I believe, very important because we said this before when you talk about the preeminence of Christ, it means concerning our motive. He should be the main motive of why I do what I do.

There’s got to be something behind all of this. What is this gas in my car that makes me go? And that’s why we study, found that in 2 Corinthians 514 that the love of Christ constraineth us or motivates us. So there’s a motivation, but it’s all about because we know the Lord. And He should be the main reason why we do what we should do. And as you read the Word of God, and if you’re going to walk and you’re going to talk, you’re going to say the things that God wants you to say, Jesus Christ, the gospel, should be our message.

So that you have a motive and you have a message. I preached a sermon a long time ago on the motive, the message, the man, the means, method. It all had to have an M. And it worked out good. It’s a great sermon. But that’s what I’m not talking about yet. But here we’re talking about… God, you’ve got a message and we have a message. The wisdom of God and all that He is and what He can do for us is greater than all the wisdom of all the universities, all the colleges, and all the world.

What God has for us. 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 Bibleline to receive a free copy.

There’s no obligation, no donation necessary, Simply call us at 1-800-576-3771 or write to us and request your free copy of the Gospel-Driven Manon. 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. Believing that the Lord is coming soon, just keep looking up.