Chronicles of the End Times
Occasionally, people say, are we really in the last days? How do we know? Does it matter one way or another? We will try to answer these questions and many others in this study. But the most important question may be, how can we reach others with hope in these changing times? One part of prophecy is often emphasized over another, causing us to lose perspective and miss the blessing and beauty of prophecy in scripture. I have taken the information in this study from many authors and teachers who have their lives studying God's word. I have added some insight that the Holy Spirit taught me. With God's help, I have endeavored to keep the whole counsel of the word of God in full view to give us an accurate picture of Christ and His great love for a lost world. I pray that this will challenge you and cause you to grow in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, as it has me preparing it. Let's begin!
Chronicles of the End Times
Grace in Perilous Times: Rediscovering True Faith in a World of Deception
What does it mean to discover the pearl of great price? And how is grace often misunderstood in our spiritually perilous times?
Grace is divine inspiration to the heart. When we're knocked down by life's challenges or our own mistakes, grace lifts us up and redirects us toward truth embodied in Jesus Christ. In today's message, we explore how God's pursuit of us through grace works in our lives, often making us feel as though we've discovered Him when He has been pursuing us all along.
Two powerful parables from Matthew 13 reveal how those who truly find God's kingdom respond – they don't simply add Jesus to their collection of treasures but recognize Him as the pearl of great price worth selling everything else for. This stands in stark contrast to those who pervert grace into permission for continued sinfulness, treating Jesus merely as a Savior who rescues without requiring lordship.
The scene at Calvary provides perhaps the most vivid picture of genuine grace in action. Two criminals hung beside Jesus – one demanding salvation on his terms, the other humbly repenting and acknowledging Christ's authority. Only one heard those beautiful words: "Today you will be with me in paradise." As spiritual deception accelerates in our technological age, with AI creating increasingly convincing counterfeits of trusted voices, the need for biblical discernment grows ever more critical. Don't merely be a follower; be a disciple grounded in God's Word. The King is coming – will He find faith on the earth when He returns?
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Speaker Names
Speaker 1
00:00
This is Russ Scalzo. Chronicles of the End Times.
00:25
I hope you're doing well today and growing closer and closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to thank you all for listening in. I shared a message, more like a devotion, yesterday at our church picnic, so I'm going to share it today on the podcast. I talk about grace and the pearl of great price. There's a lot of talk about grace. What is grace? What grace allows you to do? I believe God has something special for us today.
00:51
You know, on this channel and on this podcast, we discuss a wide range of topics. From what we observe around us, it's clear that, according to 2 Timothy 3, perilous times are to come in the last days. Often, we think about perilous times. We think about wars, rumors of wars, we think of earthquakes and other terrible natural disasters, or unnatural disasters. However, the most dangerous times are spiritual. Perilous times are when the gospel of Jesus Christ is attacked in subtle ways, as people fall away from the truth and grasp at a different gospel. In the Gospel of John, chapter 1, he writes that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Grace and truth always go together. Always, grace leads us to truth, leads us to Jesus Christ. That's what grace does. Grace picks us up when we're down, when we don't know how we're going to make another step, or maybe terrible things have happened, perhaps we've lost loved ones or other things in our lives that were traumatic, and some days we don't know how am I going to get out of bed today? And that's when the grace of God swoops down and lifts us so we can continue, because it's God's great love for us. Grace is a beautiful thing.
02:09
I looked up some of the Greek words used in the New Testament for the concept of grace. One phrase I found particularly striking was that grace is the divine inspiration to the heart. Wow, that kind of says it all. Now we know that we are saved by grace, through faith, that it's not ourselves, we didn't do it, and I think this phrase or this definition of grace spells it out. So God is saying, ‘I'm going to pour my grace out on you; I'm going to influence your heart to turn to me.’ And that pretty much says we have nothing much to do with it. We didn't seek God, we didn't go looking for God. I was born out of the revivals of the 1960s and 1970s, and that was a phrase we kind of used. Now we were young in the Lord. I found God, you know, or he found God, man. He's like a Jesus freak now, but we never reallyseed God because God's always pursuing us. But the interesting thing is that God reveals Himself to us, so we feel like we’ve found Him, when in reality He's been pursuing us the whole time.
03:10
There are two parables that I love In Matthew, chapter 13, jesus talks about this first parable that I'm going to mention and it's the parable of the treasure. Well, this man finds a treasure in a field, and he's overjoyed. He runs as soon as he can to buy the field so he can have the treasure. And the other one talks about a pearl, a pearl of great price. And in this parable, Jesus says that there was this businessman who was looking for a pearl. He had some pearls, but he was looking for this special pearl, and when he found it, he went and sold all the others so he could have this precious pearl, this pearl that just knocked him out, grabbed onto his heart. So what is Jesus saying here? Can we buy our salvation? That's not what this parable is telling us. This parable tells us that these people gave up everything once they found the treasure, once they discovered the kingdom of God through Jesus Christ. Nothing else mattered after that. What I also love about the parable of the pearl is that this person didn't go back and just put that pearl he found with the other pearls. And sometimes we take the kingdom of God or salvation and we just put it in our treasure box along with the different things that we treasure, and that's not what we're supposed to do. This is the pearl of great price. This is Jesus Christ. He allows us to find him because he reveals himself to us, and that's what grace does. Grace continues to pursue us.
04:30
Grace pursued me when I didn't care about God; I never gave Him a thought, as I was too busy with my life. I was a young man trying to be a rock star. I had a record contract. I was on TV. God had to knock me down, and you know, grace does that too. We might not think of grace that way. We think of it as a blessing, god's grace. We’re blessed. We're blessed when we're in alignment with Jesus Christ. That's when the blessing pours out. So he had to take me down a notch. That was grace, too, and he built me back up. He's done that several times in my life, actually, as I’ve followed Christ, where I’ve focused on the wrong things. Some of those changes were painful, but they were still a blessing, and they brought me to where I am today.
05:10
However, there's a doctrine that's circulating. I do a lot of teaching. I teach in a lot of different groups and in this one occasion, this young man we were talking about grace, we were talking about judgment, we were talking about a lot of different things along those lines in this group and he said but Russ, man, it's grace, dude, it's grace. And just by that comment, I kind of picked up on the fact that he wasn't about pursuing God, it was more about what can I do? What am I allowed to do?
05:38
Grace will never lead us away from Jesus. It will always point us to Christ. It will always encourage us to move forward. Grace will always open opportunities for us to know Jesus better, serve him, and enhance our gifts through the Holy Spirit. That's the grace of God.
05:55
Paul writes about it in Romans, chapter 6. He talks about grace, and he says So what are we going to say about this? That we should go on having a sinful life so that grace can abound. And he says, God forbid. And that's where we need to take a closer look. Are we taking advantage of grace? Are we perverting grace to do something that God doesn't want us to do? You know, in Jude, Jude writes about those who pervert grace. He says that certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. That's the key, Master and Lord, not only Savior to get us out of jams, but Lord that we serve, that we grow closer with.
06:42
I'll end this podcast with this. We go to Luke, chapter 23, and we see three crosses on a hill. Now we must understand that everything Jesus recorded in the Gospels, by the power of the Holy Spirit, everything these men saw, and everything they witnessed, was for a reason. Every miracle, every word He spoke, nothing was missed. Jesus made sure that he made a lesson out of everything, even in this scene at the cross where he's dying, and these two criminals are on either side of him. They weren't thieves, as we see some of the texts say, for the Romans did not crucify thieves, they crucified murderers and rapists. And so these men were on either side of him, and, as we read, the one starts railing on him, hey, if you're this king of kings, if you're the Savior, save yourself and us.
07:28
What was he looking for? He was looking to get out of a jam. He was dying. There was no way out. Was he mocking Jesus? Or was he egging him on, hoping somehow that Jesus had something, some power that they were all talking about, and they were going to get away with this, while yet the one on the other side? He was shocked. God was touching him, and he said Don't you fear God. We deserve what we're getting. We deserve to hang here for what we've done, but this man has done nothing.
07:57
What was he doing? He was repentant. He was repenting right out in the open, for everyone to hear, and he turned to Jesus and looked him in the eyes, saying, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus locked eyes with him and said, ‘This day you will be with me in paradise.’ That's grace. So, what are we doing with grace today? I hope that you're taking advantage of grace to grow stronger in Jesus. Allow God to wrap His arms around you, lift you when you need it, love on you, and pour out blessings upon you, because all of this comes from grace. However, we need to submit ourselves to Christ.
08:31
Don't fall for some of the doctrines that are going around, for these are perilous times—spiritually perilous times. AI is growing. Every single month, there's a new update. Soon, there will be images and videos of people who just don't look like them and act like them. They will be so exact that you won't be able to tell the difference.
08:53
And suppose you tune in and a famous evangelist is preaching a different gospel, and everybody's falling for it. Why? Because this is the person that they trust, when it's not him. Unfortunately, in some cases, it is the people. Deception is real, and it's growing every day, becoming increasingly powerful. All the more reason we need to look to the book. Be grounded in the word. Don't merely be a follower, let's be disciples. Just in case you're wondering what this guy looks like. Who's this Russ Scalzo dude? In case you're wondering what this guy looks like, who's this Russ Scalzo dude? There is a video up on YouTube of me sharing this at our church picnic. You want to check it out? You can check it out at Searchlight Church in New Jersey, or I'll leave the link in the transcript. You can click on it. This is Russ Scalzo for Chronicles of the End Times. Keep looking up. The king is coming.
Video. https://youtu.be/1oWicku1AdM?si=pSYmn0EK-5c4auGd&t=248
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