Show Opening And Promise Of Hope

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It's time now to get the hell out of your life. A weekly broadcast with real people, sharing real struggles, and offering real hope. Today's show will encourage, inspire, and empower you to face life's challenges with a fold confidence and renewed hope now.

Ron’s Shift From Striving To Grace

Ron Meyers 0:22

Welcome to Get the Hell Out of Your Life. I'm Ron Myers, and I am so glad to be with you. You know, friends, there was a time when I first started following Jesus that I loved him so much, but yet I was trying so hard to please him. I was always wondering, am I doing enough? Am I good enough? Is God pleased with me? I probably said the salvation prayer a few times a week. I kept asking Jesus to forgive me and save me because deep down I never felt secure. Finally, I remember the day that I prayed, Lord, this is impossible. I can't do this. And wouldn't you know it? Jesus put the message of grace right in front of me. That was over five years ago when grace began teaching me something that changed my life, my identity in Christ. I began to understand what Jesus had already accomplished for me. I wasn't trying to earn his love, I already had it. I wasn't trying to become his, I was his. And I began discovering the beautiful simplicity of the gospel. Jesus is enough. You're about to hear a clip from a call-in show with my favorite teacher, Dr. Andrew Farley, where he explains our identity in Christ and the message of grace to his callers. Let's take a listen.

Caller Story That Centers Jesus

Viola 2:06

I got baptized when I was 12 and wanted to go to heaven. That's all I can do. I don't know whether the uh preacher didn't emphasize Jesus or what I don't know what happened to that. I felt like I was saved with a feeling to mean. But then as I got older, as I got older and out of my own, I thought I thought baptized salvation was like being baptized and going to a church. But that's dangerous when they don't emphasize Jesus. And they might have as you need to go.

Dr. Andrew Farley 2:44

Right, right. Okay. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you, Viola. Wow. I mean, first all I can say is, wow, because I love your your testimony there. You know, my favorite part is what you cried out. I don't care who it is, I don't care what it is, God, show me the truth. I love that because you know, Jesus said, Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. And isn't it amazing that when we actually care enough and we submit to God and just say, God, show me, that is his favorite thing to show a human being. That is his number one favorite thing to show any person. Who is my son Jesus? Who is he? What has he done? What does he stand for? What benefit is he to you? That is exactly what the Father wants to do. And you asked him, you asked him to show you, and he did. And of course, the centerpiece of that whole, that whole gospel is Jesus Christ Himself. It's not water baptism, it's Jesus Christ. It's not church attendance, it's Jesus. And so while going to church can be very encouraging and getting water baptized can be a great uh celebration, it's Jesus that saves. And you say, how do we get away from that? You know, what happened to me? That's basically your question is like, you know, what happened to me for so many years? How could I be around church? Well, I think your story is an incredible warning to churches, congregations, Bible studies, people, believers all over the world. I mean, what an incredible warning. And it's like a red light flashing saying, watch out, make sure we have the right focus, make sure we're talking about Jesus. Let's not talk about self-improvement. Let's not talk about accountability groups. Let's not talk about do more, be more. Let's not talk about be a better person. Let's talk about Jesus. Because otherwise, I'm telling you, these congregations, these churches, these, you know, all of these things that we're a part of in our lives, if we are not careful in having the right focus, they become a country club of be a better person. Behavior improvement program, a sin management, they become a country club of be a better person. Behavior improvement program, a sin management system, a country club of be a better you. And what your testimony reveals is that you could be sincere and you could be eager and you could be in a church environment and you could be a person that kind of, you know, you want to go to heaven. I mean, who doesn't want to go to heaven? But until you realize Jesus is the door, Jesus is the gate, Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, nobody comes to the Father except through him. It's a narrow gate. It's the gate of God's grace. It is Jesus Himself. Until we realize that, we're not saved because there's one name under heaven by which we can be saved. So it is definitely, I mean, your story, your testimony there is definitely uh shocking for a lot of people, I hope, as church leaders, pastors, teachers, you know, hear what you had to say, that you could be in a church in the United States in the Bible belt of the world. You could be in a church with good intentions, the best of hopes and dreams and intentions, wanting to, you know, be a good person and go to heaven and all of that. You could be hearing church sermons every week and and and every ounce of that whole experience and yet miss salvation because Jesus is not really being talked about. I mean, if you're careful, I I've I've been in church services and I've known people who've been in them where they bring a little pad to church, you know, just a little notebook, a little pad, and then a pencil or a pen, and they sit there and they just put a little hash mark every time the preacher refers to Jesus Christ. Sometimes they leave the church service an hour later, there's nothing on the paper, no hash marks. There were three ways to be a better person, five ways to be a better Christian, seven ways to be a better husband and wife or whatever. And yet there was no mention of Jesus, no mention of him indwelling us, no mention of walking by his spirit, no mention of Christ in you, our hope of glory, no mention of being united with Christ, no mention of it being by Jesus' finished work that we're saved, and by his finished work that we grow. They're talking about a whole lot of stuff, but somehow Jesus gets left out. So your story doesn't surprise me. I I actually, you know, my parents, my dad, had a very interesting thing happen. I mean, first of all, he was sitting in a Baptist church in Virginia. The senior pastor of the Baptist church came to him. Now, this is like, oh my goodness, I mean, this has got to be 50 years ago, but came to him and said, We want you to give your testimony on Sunday morning. So he's sitting on the front row, my father sitting on the front row of this Baptist church, and he's getting ready to get up and give his testimony to the whole church. And he leans over to my mom and he says, I don't know what I'm gonna say. And my mom leans back and says, You'll think of something. Now, guess what? My dad wasn't even saved. My dad didn't know Jesus yet. And because my dad was, oh, I don't know, a good, well-behaved person in the community, an upstanding citizen, you know, they chose him. They chose him to give his testimony, and they didn't even ask him, Are you saved? Do you have Christ living in you? And so he got up that morning and said, I'm sure, a bunch of beautiful things like, Isn't it great to be in a in a family atmosphere with family values? And isn't it great to be in a Christian community? And my wife and I are so thankful to be in this Christian family, this church family that we can now call home. And he went on and on for five or eight minutes or whatever, and then at the end he sat down and everybody just, oh, big applause, big applause. He didn't know Jesus. And so that's another example of how you can just be in church and not not be saved. You can be in church a long time and not hear the gospel. So, yeah, I mean, not to mention the by the way, the pastor's wife in that same church. Get this the pastor's wife is leading a training seminar on evangelism. Okay. So she makes tapes. She starts to make tapes of how to share Christ. And then she's listening to these tapes. She's listening to herself in a minivan driving along the highway. She's listening to herself deliver the gospel so that other people can practice after they hear it. Well, she pulls the van to the side of the road and she decides, you know what? I've never asked Jesus. I've never asked Jesus in my heart. I've never asked Jesus to save me. Maybe I need to get saved. And her the voice of her own evangelism is what brought her to Christ. Now, is that not crazy? You got a pastor's wife who's doing training and she's not saved. So this problem is pervasive. I mean, it's hilarious and awful because, you know, it's shocking. I say hilarious. I mean it's shocking, it's sobering, it makes you chuckle for a minute, but then double take all over again that uh I mean, we see this on social media. We'll put something out about how you're righteous for free, or we'll put something out about how Christians have been made holy and been made perfect by Jesus' sacrifice. People go nuts. They can't handle it. I mean, religious people, church people, people that are supposedly in a Christian atmosphere, they go crazy over grace. It makes them mad, it makes them scared, they don't understand grace, they don't understand salvation by grace, they keep thinking that we're somehow excusing sin. Like it's very common in the Bible belt and in the world in general to say, well, I'm really good with church if if church is teaching behavior improvement. I'm really good with church as long as church is about better behavior, self-improvement, and being a great guy. But if you start making church about something controversial, then I'm out. And see, Jesus is controversial. Grace is controversial, salvation as a free gift is controversial. And so eventually you heard it, you got it straight from the Holy Spirit. I love that. Viola, thank you. Thank you for your story, for your testimony. I think what you're sharing is just a brilliant alarm that has just been sounded. That as pastors, leaders, teachers, Bible study coordinators, or whatever, and just friends, friends of people who need Jesus, let's make the focus Christ Himself, not self-improvement, not churchianity, not Bible study, not baptism, Jesus. Jesus is the focus. Yes, some of those things I listed are fantastic. Nothing wrong with them, but Jesus has to be the focus. Otherwise, we miss the whole message, and other people do too. So thanks for your call today. Reach out to us again anytime there in Maryland.

Encouragement To Keep Sharing Grace

Dr. Andrew Farley 12:44

All right, let's go now to Oklahoma and we'll talk with Charles. Hey Charles, what you got for us today?

Charles 12:52

Hey, Andrew, I want to just say that what Viola just said that you know, I asked God for truth. I remember 10 years ago, I said, Lord, I want truth of the gospel, and I found Andrew Harley. And I've spent 10 years listening and you know, and just growing and rethinking, retooling, re-evaluating what I actually believe fundamentally. Yeah, you know, and I just want to encourage you and thank you and say you're you're you're doing an awesome job and the the the Bible lap, the the Bible questions, I use that. I tell people all the time, hey, you check this out, it's just a great thing, and I'm just so thankful to God for you and your team and what's happening there in Texas, and keep pressing forward. And these days when it feels like the wheels are falling off, the church needs to come together and just settle on the basics of who Christ is in our life. Christ lives in us, the world comes at us, and we just keep pressing forward, knowing one day we're gonna be with the Lord, and you are put put you're putting that message out, and I'm just excited about it, and thank you very much.

Dr. Andrew Farley 14:11

And oh wow. Thank you. Thank you. That's all I got, man. All right. Well, that's all we needed to hear. I sure appreciate what was on your heart there, and thank you for encouraging us and our team, you know, our Grace Message team and our Grace Church team. A whole lot of people get encouraged by comments like yours, Charles. So thank you. We love what we're doing. You mentioned the BibleQuestions.com website, biblequestions.com. If you haven't checked that out yet, you want to. Trust me, you want to because you can get your answers in 10 seconds in any language of the world. And it's become an enormous mission. I mean, through that and all kinds of other means over the years, we've we've answered over five million questions as a ministry, five million Bible questions and counting. And, you know, it's because of that mobile app, but it's also this program and the different ways it's delivered. So it's our privilege, it's our honor to point people to Jesus and his grace. And like I said, like you said, I mean, the world gets tiring and there's a lot of conflict and people are coming at us, and people don't always like a message of Jesus plus nothing, do they? They don't always like a message that's centered on God's grace. So we over the decades have experienced all kinds of obstacles and rejection and all of that. How do we keep going? Well, we keep going because we know it's the truth and we know that we're accepted in the beloved. You know, that's actually a beautiful verse, that we are accepted in the beloved, and that if God is for us, who can be against us? And you know where the overreaction happens? It's interesting. I've watched human behavior, and here it is. If somebody's never heard it said a certain way, then they assume it's wrong. If something is said in a new, fresh way, they assume it must not be right. And so many people sit in church and they're absolutely correct on how to get saved. But the message has stopped there. They know how to get saved, but then they have a totally different message in their mind about how to grow and how to mature. And so then when they come along, they hear the grace message, they think, oh my goodness, I've never heard it that way. This must be wrong. Now, some of us go, whoa, I've never heard it that way. And that makes sense. It just resonates. I mean, thank you. It's right there in the scriptures. Other people take a little while longer and they say, I have never heard, I've been in church 20, 30, 40, I've never heard that we are forgiven past, present, future. I've never heard that we are forgiven for our next sin. I've never read Hebrews 10 where it says we're made perfect forever. Or how about sanctified? I've never heard these four or five passages that say we have been sanctified. I always thought it was a process that I had to be set apart, set apart, set apart for God constantly. You know, I never heard that we don't have to put God first, that Christ is our life, that there's a bigger message, that He's, I've never heard that we don't have to get closer to God, you know, inch in closer. I never heard about my union with Jesus. That vine branch is really, I've I just swallowed all the jargon, all the Bible belt jargon. I just swallowed it. And now as you're clarifying these things, I just gotta say, I've never heard it like that. And then there's two reactions, right? The first reaction is maybe I've never heard it before, therefore it must be wrong. Or I've never heard it like that. And wow, that fits with everything else I see in the Bible. And so we got to be patient with people. We got to allow them to learn and grow. And sometimes they need to have their reaction where they freak out and you say grace, and they say, Hey, did you say sin was okay? And you say, No, I was just talking about grace. And they say, wait, aren't you saying sin is okay? And then you say, No, no, I was just saying that, you know, God's grace is enough and that you're forgiven. Are you saying sin is okay? No, I'm just saying the cross worked. And they have to kind of relax a little and realize, oh, you're not excusing sin. You're actually giving us the one way that we can have victory over sin. Because the grace of God teaches us to say no to sin. So those are some thoughts. I sure appreciate your your encouragement today, my friend. And reach out to us there in Oklahoma anytime. New Hampshire next, and we'll talk with

How To Discern A Healthy Church

Dr. Andrew Farley 19:02

Scott. Hi, Scott.

Scott 19:03

Hi, Dr. Farley. Thank you so much for taking my call. I am a I'm an academic, and during my 35 years since I've given my life to Christ, I have bounced around from church to church, all claiming to be Christ-oriented and Christ-focused. Yet with all these different churches, sometimes I've run into churches that you need to attend a class, interviewed by the elders, and then sign a card, or you're not really a member. Now I understand that's probably part of the church's corporation that that they set up, but I've gone to others that they speak something about Calvinism every other week. I finally went to the pastor and I said, I just don't understand where the Bible is Calvin in here, please. And I mean, it depends. Some churches are medium or oriented, some are Calvinistic. What's the mechanism that we can use to help us discern what is right and where should we be following? What structures can we use to help figure this out?

Dr. Andrew Farley 20:08

Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Well, you're an academic, and I come from academia too. Maybe you know that. I was a professor at Notre Dame and at Texas Tech in linguistics for a couple of decades, so I can relate to your background. And, you know, I mean, can I give you uh some basic ideas about what would guide you to a healthy place uh where people are gathering to worship? Sure, I could. I mean, you know, number one obviously is are people talking about Jesus? And I I say that and it sounds really simple and easy, but as I mentioned earlier, you'd be shocked. I mean, you'd be shocked how many church services you can leave and they didn't talk about Jesus. As you mentioned, maybe they talk about John Calvin, maybe they talk about their ideas on predestination, maybe they talk about oh, all kinds of things, maybe even the sovereignty of God or whatever, whatever key words they like to push, but are they talking about Jesus? So that would be number one. As surprising as it is, that's not always a given. You might be finding 50-50 on that one. Now, beyond talking about Jesus, I would say the next question is do they believe the work is finished? Now, what do I mean by that? Well, Jesus said it from the cross, right? He said this proclamation, it is finished. So are they believing in and proclaiming the finished work of Jesus? Now, what does that mean? Well, that means that Jesus will never do what he's already done. And so is their premise off? Are they really pushing the idea that Jesus did what he needed to do and that it doesn't need to be done again? Now, here, what am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about number one, the shed blood of Jesus. Did Jesus die for our sins? Yes. Will he ever die again? No. Did he leave any sins out? No. He died for every single one of them. And because he'll never die again, then we can be forgiven once for all. Forgiven once for all. That's the finished work. Secondly, through the cross, Jesus fulfills the law. The law has been fulfilled past tense. So what the law could not do, God did in sending his own son. And he condemned sin in the flesh. It is finished. So forgiveness is finished. The fulfillment of the law is finished. And then when we become a believer, we enter into the finished work of Christ and our old self dies. That becomes a finished work for us. When we get saved, I'll keep it simple. In order to be born again, your old self has to die. You can't be born again unless the old creature, the old creation, is done away with. And that's what happens when we are born of God. So, you know, there's a finished work concerning your identity. You get a new heart, you get a new spirit, you get God's Spirit living in you. You become complete in Him. You're not lacking anything. You're not shopping constantly for a new experience. You're not shopping constantly for more of the Holy Spirit. You're not shopping constantly to get more of God. Remember, Jesus said you'll never hunger and you'll never thirst again. Why? Because you'll be satisfied. So the finished work of Christ relates to you and me being satisfied in Jesus, that He's made us complete. Secondly, it relates to our forgiveness, that you can't be more forgiven than 100% forgiven once for all. And lastly, the law has been fulfilled. We're not under the law. Christ is the end of the law for all those who believe. Now you would think, oh, these are just kind of academic points, or these are just theological uh principles that are interesting. But why is why is Andrew saying this is the big deal? Well, remember, first we said Jesus. Jesus is the big deal. And Jesus says it's a narrow gate, and he's the gate, he's the door, he's the way, the truth, the life. Well, it doesn't get any wider after you're in him. After you're in him, it is still about what he has accomplished, what he has done through the cross and the resurrection. And it doesn't get wider because, you know, I mean, religion out there is going to tell you, oh, I think it's fantastic that you're a Christian. Now we need to engage in self-improvement. I think it's great that you're a Christian. Now we need five ways and seven principles and ten steps and the la la la. I mean, you can go from church to church and find all of those sermons being preached. But it is a narrow gate, even when it comes to the truth about growing. Growing in Christ is a very narrow concept, meaning it's about Jesus all over again. Just as you received him, so walk in him, rooted and grounded in him. So if you want to know what to look for, look for a message about Jesus, look for his finished work being showcased. And then as you ask, what is the finished work? Well, pervasive, pervasive throughout the New Testament is his work in fulfilling the law, his work in making us totally forgiven, and his work in causing us to be a new creation. That's why we need to learn our identity in Christ. We need to learn that we're forgiven, holy, righteous, blameless, and not just have that be trite little phrases that we memorize, but to really believe that's who we are. So that's the message of the gospel, not just for getting to heaven, but for growing daily. And so I would argue that's what you find in a healthy church environment or a healthy Bible study. Look, I'll say it another way. A lot of people are teaching the Bible, but not very many people are teaching the gospel. Do you hear that? A lot of people are teaching the Bible, but let's make sure they're teaching the gospel. And a lot of people say they're teaching the gospel, but then the focus is on you and how much you're doing and whether you're doing enough. If we're really teaching the gospel, it is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is about Him and what He has done, not what we're doing for Him, but what He's done for us. I love

Ron’s Challenge To Ask Jesus

Dr. Andrew Farley 27:11

it.

Ron Meyers 27:11

Friends, and if you are struggling the way I was, constantly wondering whether you're doing enough for God, whether He's disappointed in you, or even whether you're truly saved, I want to encourage you to learn more about your identity in Christ in the message of grace. Dr. Andrew Farley's teachings helped me understand something I had missed for years. Jesus is enough. And please hear my heart. I'm not trying to bash churches, pastors, denominations, or anybody else's teaching. That's not what this is about. This is about freedom. Because if we don't understand grace in our identity in Christ, we can spend our lives trapped in condemnation, shame, and insecurity, always trying to earn what Jesus has already given us. And I lived that way a long time, and it's quite exhausting. So here's my suggestion for this next week: spend some time with Jesus and ask him, Jesus, show me who I am because of what you have already done. Then start discovering your identity in Christ. Friend, you were created on purpose for a purpose by a God who loves you more than you can imagine. Now go live like you believe it. Jesus plus nothing. Jesus is enough.

Resources And Listener Support

Announcer 28:48

Today's show was produced by Ron Myers Ministries, a listener-supported ministry. For a copy of today's broadcast, please visit our website, thepromoter.org. And would you prayerfully consider making a tax deductible donation so that we may continue to share stories of God's amazing grace with the world? And join us next week for another broadcast of Get the Hell Out of Your Life Real people, sharing real struggles, and offering real hope.