Hello everyone, welcome to this another edition of the Focus of Freedom. So glad that you have joined us. We're just honored. I'm telling you blessed to know that you're there with us.
If you're not saved, why in the world, aren't you? It is time. Today is the day of salvation. I don't care what's going on around us temporarily.
This eternal truth is that God sent His Son in the fullness of time to save us that were under the curse of the law that we could have redemption through Him. He purchased us with His own blood on that cross. He was buried with our transgressions. He arose with our justification.
He ascended to seal the deal. He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having by Himself purged our sin. So thanks to you for watching, but glory be unto Him for the great gift of His salvation. And then the indwelling person of His Holy Spirit that allows us as His disciples, followers, family of faith members, the Church of the Lord Jesus gives us the privilege of living for Him and serving Him in this world.
To all of my fellow pastors, to you evangelists, to you Sunday school teachers, everybody that's a member of the body of Christ, it's just good to meet you today here on this edition of the Focus of Freedom. And my prayer is that the Lord may give us something that will encourage us and help us. And then simultaneously we've been on the radio for years. We've been on television industry for years and had so many people through the years.
There's no end world for me to know who you are, where you are right now. You may be in an old motel somewhere coming off of some old hide. Your life is in misery and you've tried to break free. You've tried to break loose.
Your mom has tried to help you. Your daddy has tried to help you. Your family has tried to help you. And you haven't meant it intentionally, but you have frustrated them.
And now they just don't know what else to do. And you might be there and you've done squandered your mom's money and even her retirement accounts. And the devil's got you feeling about that big and old devil said, well, why don't you just kill yourself? See what he wants to do is drag your soul to hell.
He's the horse fly that's got you in the shape of your end. I believe I quit listening to him. So if you would just look up and know that God is your hope and He can be your strength. And I don't care where you've been, I don't care what you've done.
All sin was placed into the body of Christ on that cross. He identified with us. He was made sin. And as I said just a moment ago, he bore our transgressions down to the depths of death hell in the grave.
And when he came out of there, that meant the law was full-filled. Glory to God. When you accept Him, everything that He did is appropriated to your account, the big word, the propitiation. He is the mercy seat.
He did it all. He paid it all. He settled it all. He cried.
It's finished. He left that tree. He come through the tomb. He ascended to the throne.
You, you can have triumph over Satan and sin and self if you will come to the end of yourself. Take one more step. Now your knee and accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Now it's not going to be easy.
The circumstances and situations in life won't change. The man I'd like to see your mom in space when you call her and tell her you got saved with the grace of God. But with the heart man believes under righteousness wrong and stand, then with the mouth confessions made unto salvation, you may think, I lose my friends. You better off without them anyhow and you don't have to worry about losing them.
They'll lose you if you get saved and start living for God. You can get out of that old rough life that you're in and you can have a new life forever through the Lord Jesus Christ. It's a basic human need to be loved. And I'm here to tell you, God Almighty, the creator of all that is, loves you.
And you won't be an orphan going to hell. You'll be a child of God on your way to heaven if you'll trust the Lord Jesus. And then give your life to him and grow in grace and knowledge that we're taught about in 2 Peter chapter 3 verse 18. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So if you're not a Christian, it's our prayer. Today it is even the prayer of Jesus that you would be saved from your sin, born again by the Spirit of God, placed into the family of God. And according to 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 19 and 20, your body will become the temple of the Holy Spirit, which will be in you. And you're not your own, you're about with the price.
And so we can glorify God in our body and in our spirit, which are God's. That's why we're here is to try to glorify God and bring His goodness to others. That's the essence of the Lord's church. Remember what you said in Matthew 18 to Peter, upon this rock I'll be on my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Through the pen of Peter, the church is called the Holy Nation, a royal priesthood, a chosen generation where the building, the body and the bride of the Son of God, those wondrous Pauline metaphors that are used to describe the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. The army of faith going out into this world under the banner of love preaching the gospel. That's what Christ called and commissioned us to do. Go ye therefore to all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
I don't know about you, but that's a joy. That's our purpose. That's our calling in life. The last time we met together on the focus of freedom, we were trying to be very humble and I hope we go beyond trying to be humble, to know that it was God who saved us and not we ourselves.
Then we must follow the Holy Spirit. I'm a firm believer in discipleship training. I don't have a problem with various denominational tenets, doctrinal tenets, dogmas and things, because we're all different. That's the wonderful thing about Jesus.
The Pharisees criticized him a lot of ways, but when they said, ask man's and friend of sinners, they hit the nail on the head that time, because he is a friend of sinners. I was born in sin. When I reached the age of accountability, I lost and go into hell, but God loved me when I was unlovable and he saved my soul and placed me into his church. Now we've got the calling and commission of Christ to preach the unsearchable riches of his grace.
Paul said in famous verse Romans 1, 16, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeeth that the Jew first and also to the Greek. The power is of God. It's not of us. Romans 8.
As many as are led by the Spirit. They are the children of God, the indwelling Holy Spirit, established that at residency, when it's a repentant sinner, we accept it Christ. Now we must follow the Lord. That's what Jesus said.
Those two words follow me. He said that to Matthew, he said that to the other disciples. He says it to us. I'll make you fishers of men.
How glorious a privilege. What an outstanding, all striking a purpose is to be one with God, one with each other in the church, going out into the highways and hedges and lanes of this world, preaching the gospel that souls might be saved. It's just a mathematical essence of one becomes two becomes four becomes eight. What have we been doing the last 40 years in America?
Where's our cities? Why is New York and California and Portland and Seattle and all these places such seed beds of Marxist, Alton and progressive ideology? Where are the powerful local churches in these places? We had some powerful local churches in those places back 50, 60, 70 years ago.
But now where are they? And even throughout the Bible belt from East Texas, all the way up to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, all the way up to the Appalachian chain through the Virginia's Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and New York, all along the Appalachian Trail, what we call the Bible belt. We can have counties whose population might be, let's say, 25,000. And we'll have 150 churches.
And yet you've got out of 25,000, you've got 20 people that are unchurched, or 20,000 that are unchurched. And I don't mean this critical. I'm just being real. And then the numbers of churches are growing.
And the church pops up here, the church pops up there, the church pops up everywhere. Deviant division equals weakness, unity equals strength. Now if you feel they had to start a church right across the street from another church, it's fine as long as you win themselves. But if the same old, same old continues, then we're not getting anywhere.
And we've got to get busy church, get back to the focus of carrying out the great commission of Christ. We say the last time we together on the focus of freedom that the two needs that we discussed, one was humility and another was unity. It's hard to get no human being to humble ourselves. I know that.
As a matter of fact, it's in Philippians chapter 2. Paul and Silas had went into Philippi and amazingly the church established there in a jailhouse. Humility equals self-denial and a recognition of our oneness with Christ in the fact that he died for our sin. So our old self of Adam is dead and must stay dead.
That's the essence of humility, giving up one's self and staying dead within the human spirit. But the devil is a counterfeiter and he loves to mount God in so many ways. So I think his feeble attempt to mimic the most glorious event and that's the resurrection of the Son of God is when he can get the child of God to drift away from spiritual mindedness, little by little by little into carnal mindedness. And I think it's Romans 8 verse 6 it says, to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
But to be carnally minded is death. And when a child of God slowly backs slides into a state of carnal mindedness, it stimulates that old character of Adam within us. And when the character of Adam begins again to be functional and operative, then I become a carnal minded Christian. Paul talked about that in 1 Corinthians chapter 3.
He said, I can talk to you as a spiritual. That is but as on the carnal. Then as unto babes in Christ, then you look at Galatians chapter 5, the fruit, the evidence, the proof of the flesh or the human spirit, wrath, division, strife, envy, all those things. Then the fruit of the Holy Spirit, love, joy, peace, long suffering, faith, gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance, those wonderful, wonderful attributes of the Holy Spirit, which he quates then him being indwelled in us as believers.
He is the very person of Christ, the Father, Son, and Spirit being one God. Then you've got the Holy Spirit on the inside, which equates to the character of Christ. And it's the inward character of every one of us human beings that dictates and perpetuates the conduct. So if I'm driven and governed by the Holy Spirit, then the character of Christ is dominant and functional within me, whom I acceptance and celebration of my oneness with Jesus, the inner character of Christ, then produces and portrays the very conduct of Christ.
And I live like a Christian is supposed to live because I'm led by the Holy Spirit and the fruit is the proof. If you go out in an orchard and the guy says, it's my apple orchard and you pull a pear off that tree. And you know there's something that happens between the seed and the fruit. I mean, it's not apple.
It's not apple. It's not apple trees. It's got a pear on it. So if I've got hatred, division, strife, criticism, all these things, then it's obvious I'm being controlled by the human spirit of the flesh and not by the Holy Spirit.
So that inner character of Christ will inevitably produce and maintain the conduct of Christ, which is highlighted by the compassion and charity of Christ. The Corinthian believers were really messed up in a lot of things all the way through the book of Corinthian. He said there in chapter three, you're just babies, you're immature. I can't even talk to you as in the spiritual.
They had marriage messed up. They had the spiritual giftings messed up. They had even the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead messed up all the way through. And especially when he discussed the sign gifts of the Spirit in chapter 12, he said in verse 31, the last verse of chapter 12, I'll show you a more excellent way.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, if I have the faith to remove mountains, if I have given my body to be burned, if I sell out and give all my, the residue of my holdings to the poor, if I don't have charity, it profits me nothing. And then he goes on through chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians and he talks about the great love of God from within the people of God, being the greatest of all gifts. And in verse 13, and now abides faith, hope, love, these three and the greatest of these is love. Like the last time we talked from John 13 by this, shall all men know that you're my disciples if you have love one for another?
Yes, we need humility and yes, we need unity within the body of Christ. He said in 1 Corinthians 15, 57, thanks be unto God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. I think with humility and unity becoming reality in the body of Christ, no wonder, I quote it again Psalms 133, how beautiful and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. Your church may have a vibrant food pantry helping the poor in your community.
You may have a youth camp, you may have a Iwanak club, whatever you're doing for seniors, for teenagers, for young people. It's not your work doing that, my work doing this. It's the Lord's work that we're all doing. And individually we do this, we do that, it's just like this television network.
They're called to do this, they're doing this. So there's no point in East Art and TV ministry. I didn't want to already going on. I've tried to follow this through my life as a pastor.
If another local church was doing something, then a particular ministry or outreach, then we are to try to fuel that and support that and the gift of exhortation, cheer that along. Can you imagine if we could just have the mind of Christ, how much we are already doing, but when selfishness comes and stubbornness comes and the old human spirit rises up and then there's division and there's pride and there's self-sufficiency and that old, pandemic character on the inside, the devil resurrects at Rascal and we become carnal-minded and then that it's the opposite effect from the character of Christ. It's the character of the older, regional Adam and then it's the conduct of Adam. It's the conduct of the human spirit.
See, I can't hate you from the Holy Spirit. I can't be jealous of you from the Holy Spirit. That comes from the flesh. When I squawk my mouth off and tell other people, hey, that preacher got a bad reputation.
So I've got to protect my reputation. I can't have done it with him. Jesus in Philippians chapter 2, one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, made himself of no reputation. All of us old human beings had to receive mercy from God and I received such an abundance of mercy from God.
I can't be selfish and hold it up to myself and just my little circle of friends. I've got to give the mercy of God out to other people as well and it all starts when we allow the Holy Spirit of God to have preeminence and dominance in our life and constantly recognize the old human spirit of Adam is now dead, non-functional, inoperative and every day by celebrating the cross, celebrating the cross every day that old man is dead. And when I hear of sins or faults or flaws in others, to be spiritually minded, I immediately remember who Jesus is and what He did for me on the cross and what He did for me on the cross, He did for them on the cross. So even if they have fallen, my Lord desires to pick them up, He picks me up.
How can I like that great parable of Jesus, that servant that the Lord forgave in today's economy millions of dollars. And then that same servant went out and found another servant who owed him about fifteen dollars, started choking him, said, give him a fifteen dollar, prayed the same prayer that he had prayed to these masters, but he didn't have mercy. And when the fellow servants told the Lord about it, he said, listen, I'm going to put you in prison. This is the way you treat my mercy.
So when we're spiritually minded, brothers and sisters, we have not only the inner character of Christ operative, the conduct of Christ operative, but his charity and his compassion and the zeal to forgive and to restore is there. Within the church, we need to repent, absolutely, but we do need to revival and we need to repent in order to get to that revival. And then, second Chronicles 17 says that the Lord will forgive our sin. And once the church is cleansed and refilled with the anointing power of the Holy Spirit, prayers will start being answered.
And then the perpetual living for God by constantly seeking his face and thereby simultaneously turning from our wicked ways, there will be a healing in the land. And God saved the lost. Yes, he can. Jeremiah 32, God told Jeremiah, there's nothing too hard for me.
And can we have an ear in our heart to hear God say today in America, there's nothing too hard for me. And when we first tumble ourselves and repent and have a purification about the blood of the Lamb and the church being cleansed, then we can pray under the power of the Spirit, we can pray with faith believing and get out here with the two things seeking God's face, doing things God's way according to God's work, his witnesses forgot, and then simultaneously fighting off that old, a damnit man, that old carnal man and walking in the Spirit and off fulfilling the left of the flesh, our sins forgiven, our land healed. While you say, let's just do it. It's like David told young Solomon, he's done years ago, do it Solomon, do it.
So Jesus tells the church today, stop squawking about it, thinking about it, and do it. To obey is better than sacrifice and to, you know, to harken than the fad of Rams. That's all her God Almighty say that through Samuel. Can't we hear that today to simply obey God and go by the tenants found in this blessed book?
Again, as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God. So what a job and what an opportunity. And when we've got obedience to God receiving omnipotence from God, we can take advantages of the opportunities that God's given us. As we start to wrap things up today, Ezra in the Bible, Ezra is a rubable, Nehemiah, all of that post-captivity remnant that had gone back to rebuild Jerusalem, the walls, and the temple.
Ezra heard God say, God said, I've given you a little space for grace. To the American church of the Lord Jesus Christ, to those of us who are saved, we have a little space for grace. On the next edition of the Focus of Freedom, we may very well talk a little bit about Jeremiah and Isaiah's day, in the 70 years of exile and captivity. But then Nehemiah was raised up by God.
Joshua the high priest, the rubable, and Ezra. And Ezra brought the treasures back from Babylon and began to place them in the temple. And God gave them a little space for grace. To all my brothers and sisters in the faith, I believe we have a little space for grace.
Let us get humbled, truly, biblically based in our humility. And then Bible-driven. Let us celebrate and perpetuate our unity as one with Christ and one with each other. And then let us seek the face of God for a real revival in the church.
And then the consequential result of that revival in the church will be a restoration in the country. There's nothing too hard for God. Academia says that Christianity is evil. There is a livian spread by the devil to our young folks and others in America that capitalism and Christianity is rotten to the core.
And historically they try to prove that by revising history and all the rest of it. And so hence you hear the cries for socialism and polytheism. But Christianity is not evil. Christianity is good.
Christianity is not a, as you've heard say many times, not a religion about God, it's a relationship with God. So our oneness with Christ, our oneness with each other, all things are possible. Nothing's too hard for God. Let's believe God.
Heavenly Father, touch our hearts, touch our lives. Reach out with your grace to the lost and your word to us that are saved. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Amen. It has been a joy to be with you on this edition of the Focus of Freedom. We appreciate you so very, very much. Thanks for watching.
Until next time, may God bless you richly, then may He use you for His glory and to be a real, real blessing to someone else. I have the privilege of pastoring and being the Director of Freedom Tabernacle Babbitt's Church and Freedom Tabernacle Ministries in Atkins, Virginia. And we are going to get to know one another a lot better through the weeks and months to come. It's my prayer.
But right now you can join us on our Facebook page, Freedom Tabernacle Ministries, Atkins, Virginia or our YouTube channel, Focus of Freedom, Atkins, Virginia, our website, ftministries.org, or you can download our app, the Freedom Tabernacle app, download it for free from any app store and we can stay in contact that way as we labor together with our Lord for His glory and for the advancement of His glory as gospel of grace.