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The Rock Family Worship Center
Taking The Church Outside The Walls
The Rock Family Worship Center
IS THE GOSPEL GOOD NEWS, OR JUST GOOD ADVICE?
We contrast advice that pressures people with news that frees people, and we show how the finished work of Christ reframes salvation, faith, and free will. Scripture’s completed-action language shifts us from fear and transaction to trust, identity, and transformation.
• gospel as accomplished reality not potential
• faith as sight and trust not lever or technique
• repentance as reorientation of mind and heart
• obedience flowing from identity and union
• aorist tense clarifying completed action in key texts
• John 3:16–17 without threat, condition or delay
• forgiveness, reconciliation and redemption anchored in Christ
• free will as response to reality not creator of reality
• Scripture over tradition and fear-based sales pitches
• present experience of heaven or hell shaped by awareness
When we talk about a lot of times when we talk about the finished work, I get a lot of questions. I get a lot of different looks from people. Sometimes they I hear them asking questions to other people. They don't necessarily ask it to me, but I'll hear them talking to other people and asking, does he believe this or does he believe that? And one of the things that that two of the two of the things actually that get brought up a lot is salvation. They want to know what we think about salvation, and they want to know what we think about free will. Because when you talk about finished work, a lot of times, and if we sit here and say what he did on the cross is absolutely 100% finished and sufficient, then a lot of times people say, Well, what am I supposed to do? What if I didn't choose that? You saying God finished it for me without my choice? So they start saying that we're taking away free will. So uh what I'm gonna talk about this morning is gonna kind of hit on both of those things uh and talk a little bit about them. And I want to share something with you that I think is really important uh that if you begin to read the Bible and look at it from this lens that we're gonna talk about this morning, it's gonna change the way you interpret the Bible. And it's gonna it's gonna take a lot of those misinterpretations and it's gonna bring understanding to those areas. Uh so the mess the title this morning is Is the gospel good news or is it good advice? That sounds like a really silly question to ask. Uh, because some people would say, well, well, it's good news and it's good advice. But what I want you to do this morning is look at the difference between these two. There's a difference between being good news and simply being good advice. Uh advice says, in a sense, here's what you must do to fix your situation. If you're in trouble, if you've got a problem and you come to me for advice, I can tell you my opinion, I can give you some advice on what you must do to try to fix the problem. That's advice. That's all it is. You can choose to use it, you can choose to ignore it. That's that's totally on you. But news says, here's what's already happened that changes your situation. We're looking at it from a different perspective. When it's just advice, I'm I'm taking something and I'm saying, what can I do with this information to change my situation? But when I look at it and I change my mindset, and I say, this is not just advice, but this is news. This is something that was declared. When I look at it from that standpoint, I'm looking from a perspective of this has already happened, and this is how it affects my situation. If I begin to believe it. If I begin to believe he died on the cross, if I begin to believe that I was included in that, if I begin to believe that I rose with him, if I begin to believe that I'm seated with him, it changes my whole perception on everything. When we turn news into advice, altar calls sound, you know, it sounds like sales pitches sometimes. I'm just gonna be honest. I mean, we're trying to sell somebody something and we're trying to make it sound good enough or scary enough that they will run to the altar. I'm not against somebody coming to an altar. Most of us probably, that's what happened in our life. We went to an altar somewhere. So I'm not knocking that. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a sales pitch. It shouldn't be something scary to force people. When we turn news into advice, faith is reduced to simple techniques. Salvation is treated like a transaction, and fear-driven compliance happens instead of transformation. People operate, people move out of fear versus letting the Holy Spirit transform their lives from the inside out. Now, I'm gonna slow down here in a minute. I'm trying to get to a certain point because I'm gonna slow down there and I want to show you some things that I think is really gonna be eye-opening to you. People are told a lot of times, if you respond correctly, this is what God will do. How many times have we been told that in evangelistic messages? When we're trying to get people to the altar, we tell them, this is what God, if you do this, if you come up and say this prayer, if you change your life, if you do this, if you do that, and we start giving people things to do, and we say, if you do these things, then in return, this is what God's gonna do.
SPEAKER_02:That's not good news, that's pressure.
SPEAKER_00:We're pressuring people into trying to make a decision to try to jumpstart what God will do in our life.
SPEAKER_02:When the gospel remains good news, faith becomes trust.
SPEAKER_00:Repentance becomes reorientation in us, it changes the way we look at it, it changes the way we think. Obedience flows from our identity, not because we're trying to get something. Transformation happens from a place of union with the Father. We're not trying to get to the Father. We realize that we're already with Him, and I operate out of that. So most of us have been taught, or what most of us have been taught about salvation isn't wrong because it's evil. I want you to understand that. I'm not I'm not saying it's evil, I'm not saying anything like that. It's just incomplete. And I want to give us to a place to where we're seeing the whole picture. We're looking at everything, and then once you got the whole picture and you look at everything, now you sit down and you make your decision on what you want to believe. But we can't say something's gospel when we only give it half the story. We got to give the whole picture. We've got to let people look at everything and not just what's being passed down from pastor to pastor to pastor. I can tell you, I started out when I was a young preacher. When I first started, I was preaching exactly what Pastor Dell and Pastor Don taught me to preach. That's all I knew. And then I remember somebody came up one day and they introduced me to somebody. They said, here's a CD I found at my house. I don't know where it came from, but I just felt pressed upon my heart to give this to you. And it was a CD from Pastor Ron Carpenter. I don't know where she got it from, but she gave it to me. I remember standing out in the parking lot, she pulled it out of her trunk and she gave it to me. And I'm telling you, my life changed. Not because I wasn't listening to Pastor Dell anymore or listening to Pastor Don anymore, but he was able to get me to tap into a way of seeing things that I wasn't seeing already. And it changed my whole perspective on the way I think. And I never stopped listening to it. I never, you know, we went to his church, we went to his marriage conferences. We I've just filled myself up with what he was teaching because it just made me think. It pushed me and it motivated me to ask questions. See, scripture never describes salvation as something that God might do someday if we respond correctly. Now, I'm gonna challenge you on salvation this morning, but I want you to, I think in the end, you're gonna see what I'm talking about. But the Bible never describes salvation as something that God will do one day if we respond in the right way. If you say the right prayer, if you if you get oil poured on you, if you do this or do that. That's not in the Bible. It describes salvation as something God has already done. It's already accomplished. Now I'm teasing you a little bit right now, but I'm gonna show you in the end, we're gonna pull this thing together, and I'm gonna show you verse by verse, because I believe that anything I say can be taken as radical until I back it up with scripture. Anything I say, you can come against until I back it up with scripture. Then you gotta deal with God. It ain't just some guy speaking some radical stuff. When we back it up with scripture, now you that's a challenge for you. You gotta go in there and you gotta deal with that. Let's look at it in a way that's that's really easy to understand. Most people in this room, I don't know any, they might be somebody that we're not aware of. I don't know. There might be some people in here that ain't got no debt in their life. You you just you don't know nothing. But I believe that most people in here probably have some kind of debt. Okay? You owe something, whether it's your car, whether it's your house, whether you owe some kind of debt. Would y'all agree? Okay. Let's say that that I went up one day and I said just something was it was in me, and I said, I'm gonna I'm gonna pay all of Cynthia's debt off. I'm not gonna ask her, I'm gonna go to the bank and I'm gonna say, can you give me all of her debt that she's got and I pay it off? And then I come back to her to let her know that I paid her debt off. She's debt-free, I paid it. I didn't ask her opinion on it, I just went and done it. She's got some options now. She can ignore it, she can get mad about it, or she can acknowledge it. That's her choices. Let's say that she says, Well, that's a blessing. I acknowledge that, I appreciate it. But look here. Her acknowledgement of it doesn't make the payment happen. The payment already happened. I've already done it. I'm just coming to tell her what I've already done. Now she's got to decide how she's gonna respond to it. Her accepting and saying thank you does not activate the payment. It's already happened. This is a lot like Christ. This is a lot like salvation, right here. We just gotta look at it in a way that it makes a little bit more sense. Salvation works the same way. Jesus completed the work on the cross, and he didn't ask your opinion about it.
SPEAKER_02:He went to the cross and he did the work once and for all, according to the Bible.
SPEAKER_00:Belief is how we enter into it, not how we make it happen. Getting at an altar and saying, Lord, will you become my Lord and Savior? And going through the EB ABCs of salvation does not activate the cross. The cross has already happened. Salvation has already occurred on the cross. What we're doing when we come to an altar, again, not knocking that down. Do it if you feel like doing it. But all that does is activate my belief in it. It don't activate what happened. Just like with the pavement. Her believing it and saying thank you, don't activate the pavement. It's already done. This is the same way with salvation. And I'm telling you, when we begin to see it like this, it's not taking away from the salvation experience. And that's what people get afraid of is you're taking our salvation experience away. No, we're telling you it's always been there. We're trying to get you to wake up to it and realize what really happened. We're trying to not downplay what he did on the cross. Because the way we teach salvation, it downplays what he did, and it says it's more about what I do. I say this prayer. I do this. I give up this. I it's all about I. But that ain't what the Bible says. The Bible says it was all about him. There's a difference right there in mindset. So do you see that? We're not taking it away from somebody.
SPEAKER_02:We're just changing the way you look at it. What happened on the cross was not just potential.
SPEAKER_00:It's there, it's available. It wasn't just pending, and one day, if you do the right thing or say the right thing, you have access to it. No, it's finished. It's actually accomplished, complete, done, and there's nothing we can do about that.
SPEAKER_02:Well, there is, we can reject it, or we can accept it. That's our choice. But it don't change that it's already done.
SPEAKER_00:It's already been accomplished. See, this only makes sense when we read scripture in context. I want you to listen to this right here because this will, this is gonna change how you look at things, if you'll if you'll understand this. And you're gonna have to go back and study this out. You're not gonna get it just from me saying it today. We got to read scripture in context. The New Testament repeatedly uses the aorist tense. And I meant to bring my little board up here so you I can write down, but it's A-O-R-I-S-T. Aerost. A-O-R-I-S-T. It probably don't sound familiar to you because it's not ours. It's Greek. It's a Greek tense, just like we have the past, present, future tense, they have the aorist tense. It's different. But if we're gonna read a text that was written in Greek, then we have to understand the Greek tense to truly make it make sense. So go home and study out what the aorist tense is. It's a Greek tense that means complete a completed action. I'm gonna break a little bit of it down, but you really have to study this out on your own. It means completed action. It don't mean in process, it don't mean available if activated.
SPEAKER_02:It means done.
SPEAKER_00:And the difference is when Jesus said it is finished, he didn't mean I've done my part, now go do yours. That's not what he was saying. When you look that up and you read it in the air's tense, he meant it's done, nothing else remains undone. It's finished. That was his words. It's finished. And when you look it up in the right tense, it means the act was complete. So we have to ask ourselves the questions: why do translators who was translating the Bible, why do they struggle with this so much? The number one reason is English language doesn't have an equivalent tense to the aorist tense. And I'm trying to salute this in because I don't want you to think, oh, he's saying something new and that's deep. This is really not deep, it's really simple. It's just something we've probably not heard before and looked at. We don't have an equivalent tense to what the aorist tense is. So, translators, what they would often do is they would default to what? Past tense. We have a past tense. I say it all the time. I say, look, he said that by his stripes you are healed. E. D. past tense. Really not the past tense. It's really the air tense. Okay. But we read it and we translate it as a past tense because that's the only thing we have. That's the closest thing to it. So we automatically put it in a past tense. And then we add some theology in there somewhere to try to explain what the English cannot express grammatically because it don't because it's different tenses. So there's gaps in there. There's things that don't make sense in it. So what the theologians do, they went back and added certain things in there to try to make it grammatically correct. And it's not. Because we're reading it from a different tense than what it was actually written in. That's why people read conditionally into the text. What do I mean by that when it says that it is finished? If you read that from a standpoint of an heiress tense, it's done. But we read it as finished past tense, but still some more stuff to go. It's finished, but there's conditions attached to it. It's only finished for you if you believe, if you transform, if no, that's not the way it was written. There's not conditions attached to it. But that's the way we do it with our with our past tense. That's why people read it like that. And I started thinking when I was doing this, I said, What's the one verse that we could go back to? That we could pull up and we could look at this to get a better understanding of what this is talking about. And I think it's one that every person in this room can quote, because you learned it when you was probably four years old. So let's go all the way back to John 3.16. And let's rethink John 3.16 and 17 just a minute. We know the verse, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, for whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Everybody knows that verse. People that don't even go to church knows that verse.
SPEAKER_02:Because we hear it so often.
SPEAKER_00:We've quoted John 6 3 16 so often that I think we've stopped hearing it. We stopped hearing the true meaning behind it.
SPEAKER_02:For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. He didn't make his only sons possible. He gave. Once for all. That's not past tense, that's error. That means to act. Is complete. The act was done.
SPEAKER_00:But for God did not send his son to the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Notice that what's what's missing in here. There's no threat.
SPEAKER_02:There's no condition. And there's no delay. You will not find a thread in this verse that threatens you.
SPEAKER_00:You will not find any condition in there that you have to meet to receive that. And you will not find anything that says that's coming in two to three thousand years when you make it to heaven.
SPEAKER_02:The issue has never been God's willingness to save. The issue has always been our blindness to what's already been done. Your belief does not create salvation.
SPEAKER_00:Let's just put it plainly like that. Your belief does not create salvation. It reveals it. It reveals what Christ has already accomplished. This is hard. This is hard to let go of. Because we're taught that we're only saved when we do certain things. Admit I'm a sinner? A. Believe that he died, that he was the Son of God, he died on the cross? B. Confess your sins, C. That's where we get the ABCs of salvation. You want to go look on Facebook, I put a new ABCs of salvation on there. That's more related to what we teach.
SPEAKER_02:There's no conditions in this right here. That's man-made conditions. Now I'm not saying they're bad. I believe that we should acknowledge certain things. I believe that we should confess.
SPEAKER_00:We've got to understand what confession is. We got to understand what belief actually is. We've got to understand what faith actually is. We've got to understand those words, what they truly are, and not just what somebody told me they were. That makes a difference. But belief does not create salvation, it reveals it. This is where many people get uncomfortable at because they think you're taking, again, they're taking you're taking their salvation experience away from them. No, it's not. It's actually just opening it up even more and helping people to understand it. But belief does not manufacture salvation. Belief awakens us to what? To what he done on the cross.
SPEAKER_02:Faith is not some lever that you pull after you believe.
SPEAKER_00:Now I step into faith. That's kind of the way we're trained up. Faith is not a lever that forces God's hand. Faith is when our eyes open up. Faith is when our eyes open and we finally see that Christ already finished the work. What he done on the cross was sufficient. And I believe it. That's faith. That's faith in him. It's not faith in me. It's not faith in the prayer that I'm kneeling down saying. It's not faith in that pastor that's coming up laying hands on me. It's faith in what Jesus Christ done on the cross. I preached a message one time saying we need to get rid of our misplaced faith. That's not saying people don't have faith. It's saying that we misplace our faith sometimes. I put my faith in men sometimes. And they have led me astray. We put our faith in a lot of things sometimes that lead us down a road that God never intended us to be at. So all this is saying is let's take the faith back to what it really is, our opening of our eyes to the truth of what Christ done. Faith in Him.
SPEAKER_02:You don't believe to make it true.
SPEAKER_00:You believe because it's already true. My belief system doesn't change anything as far as what happened on the cross. It changes the way I see it and the way I perceive it. That's why it's important. But guess what? The people who are out there right now who say, I do not believe what you believe. We've got atheists out there right now that says, I don't even believe there is a God. Guess what? It still doesn't change what happened on the cross, whether you believe it or not. Your belief does not activate the cross. It's already happened. Your belief opens you and activates your faith to it, to understand it and to see it. But it doesn't make it happen. You don't believe to make it true, you believe because it's already true. Some people worry that seeing scripture from a finished work lens, like we teach, takes away free will. I've heard that so many times.
SPEAKER_02:Think about that a minute.
SPEAKER_00:If you believe that the finished work is true and that everything that Christ did on the cross has already been done and it is absolutely 100% finished. They're saying you don't have any free will. That if God done this for you and Jesus done this for you and he didn't ask your permission, which he didn't, then you didn't have any choice in this. And it's take, therefore, it's taking away your free will. I can understand that. I can understand where that thought's coming from. But see, telling the truth does not violate freedom. I can tell you the truth about something, never violate your freedom. If I tell you the sun is up, think about this. This is going to sound really crazy, but it makes sense. If I tell you the sun is up, I didn't force daylight on you. I just simply told you a reality. Now you can stick your head under the pillar, you can close your eyes, you can do whatever you want to do to reject it, but it don't change the reality. The sun's still up. Your free will is how you want to respond to it.
SPEAKER_02:It don't change the facts of what happened. The sun doesn't turn off because you refuse to look at it. Jesus ain't going to change what he did because you refuse to believe it. It ain't going to change the fact. Christ is the same way. You are free to resist truth.
SPEAKER_00:You are free to misinterpret scripture.
SPEAKER_02:You are free to sleep right through it. But your freedom does not override the finished work. It's already happened.
SPEAKER_00:Your free will and your choice to believe or not believe has nothing to do with what happened on the cross. It will not change it. It only affects your awareness of it or your lack of awareness of it. Here's another important thing to understand, and we have to see this. Some people don't like to hear this because, again, this goes back to free will. Jesus never asked your permission. Is there anybody in here that Jesus came to and said, Is it okay if I go to the cross? No. He never asked your permission. He never asked your permission to die for you. He never asked your permission to take away the sin of the world. He never asked your permission to reconcile the world to himself. He never asked your permission to be the land that was slain before the foundation of the world. He never asked your permission on that. Now, freedom means you can respond to it or you can resist it. There's your freedom. There's your free will.
SPEAKER_02:But what we're not going to allow is for you to become your own savior. You can't get up here and say, because I done this, I'm saved.
SPEAKER_00:Because I said this, I'm saved. Well, you're becoming your own savior. You're putting things in there to save you that was never in the Bible. If you do that, you are setting up your own savior experience.
SPEAKER_02:When Jesus says, I've already done it. It's complete, it's finished.
SPEAKER_00:Now I want you to wake up to it. I want you to understand it. I want you to walk in it. This helps us understand the gospel properly. The gospel is not God overpowering human will. And that's the argument against what we teach is that God, that we're just allowing God to overpower everybody. That it's already finished and it's already done, and there's nothing we can do about it. That's not true. The gospel is not overpowering human will. And the gospel is God overwhelming human darkness, is what it is. Darkness is lack of understanding. Darkness is ignorance, not knowing. And this is Jesus coming in saying, I'm going to give you the opportunity to see the truth. So this is Jesus coming in saying, I'm going to override darkness, ignorance. You're not knowing. I'm going to bring truth into it. I'm going to bring light into a dark situation. I'm going to bring wisdom into your ignorance. And that way you don't have to walk around and say you don't know anymore. You don't have to walk around unsure anymore. Awakening isn't God dragging people against their will. It's God opening the eyes of his sons and daughters who never stop belonging to him. We've always belonged to him from the very beginning. And the Bible says that. That's not one man's opinion. All through the Bible it says where he is. I mean, that's a foundational thing that we believe. But yet when you put it in the realm of talking about finished word, people reject it.
SPEAKER_02:And I'm like, how can you reject that? He says it all through the word. We're one with him.
SPEAKER_00:We're in him. He's in us. He chose us before the foundation of the world. Do you really believe that Christ is the author and the finisher? Now that's a dumb question because you know, most of you, if you know it, you're going to say, well, yeah, the Bible says it. He's the author and the finisher. Beginning and the end. From here to here. Now, if we believe that, I believe that 99.9% of Christians would say, yes, that is the truth. The rest, the other half percent just don't know the verse. He is the author and the finisher of our faith. What the word says. If Christ is truly the author and the finisher of faith, now think about this.
SPEAKER_02:If he's truly the author and the finisher, then your belief doesn't start the story. And your unbelief ain't gonna end it. That's a tough way to put it. That's how you talk to somebody who says, Well, I don't believe. What do you got to say to me?
SPEAKER_00:It don't touch his story. Your faith didn't start it, and this guy's unbelief ain't gonna stop it. It's already happened. You can choose not to believe in it, you can choose to reject him, that's fine.
SPEAKER_02:You're just gonna walk around in darkness. But it's not gonna change what he does. Why is this important to see?
SPEAKER_00:Because it shows us that grace didn't begin with your yes. When you said yes, most people you could walk up to and you could say, When did you get saved? And uh most people can tell you down to the day because it was a it was a special day for them. I'm not knocking that. They can tell you the day they got saved, the location, the church they was in, the pastor that prayed with them, all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_02:But the gospel it it didn't start the day you got down and said yes to a prayer. And it doesn't end at any point that you say no. We gotta see that. The gospel is not try harder to believe so God will save you. The gospel is wake up, you already belong. If I truly realize that salvation happened on the cross, it changes everything. It really does, it changes everything, and there's people that will argue that point until you go back and pull scripture up and show them what it says. Once you see that, everything changes.
SPEAKER_00:Not because God finally acted, but because you finally realize He'd already had all this accomplish. He already did it before he asked your permission. Just like the example I gave. If I pay Cynthia's debt off and I don't ask her, and then I come to her and say, I paid your debt off, she can deny it, reject it, or get mad about it, but it don't change the fact that I've already paid it. She can be mad all she wants, but she's a mad, debt-free person. It her believing it doesn't make it happen. It's already happened. She can just agree or disagree with it. That's her choice now. That's her free will. It's the same thing with this. Jesus already accomplished it. Nothing we do activates it. Nothing we do turns it on or turns it off. He's already done it. We can agree with it or we can deny it. And there's consequence, there's there's always going to be a consequence on a decision that we make or benefits to a decision we make. We're not going to get into that today because that's when we can start getting into what we talk about living heaven on earth right now, or living hell on earth right now. We're not waiting to go to a location we can live heaven right now on earth. We can live hell right now on earth. The people that choose to reject it, the people who choose not to believe it, or living in hell right now. They're going through things mentally, physically, emotionally, psychologically. They're living in a place of hell. So you can have it now. You don't have to wait until the time that you die. That's what we're saying. We're not worried about location. We're worried about now. What he's given us now to access to heavenly things, now. Finished work theology reshapes how we think about faith in a really, really profound way, in a really challenging way. I love it though. In the traditional view, faith is often seen as a lever that makes salvation effective. Come up, you say a prayer, you boost your faith, and as soon as your faith is up, that lever is pulled, and now you're born again. I mean, sometimes when we start really breaking some of this stuff down, looking at it, it sounds crazy. And you I hope you can see that a lot of it is about what we do.
SPEAKER_02:I say a prayer, I build my faith. I have trust in this, or trust it's all about me. When really it's all about him.
SPEAKER_00:So in the foundational traditional view, faith is often seen as a lever that makes salvation effective. In the finished work, faith is the eyes that finally see what Christ has completed. That's all faith is. You gotta understand the difference in what we're saying versus what most of us have been taught in traditional uh teaching. A traditional assumption is my my decision makes me forgiven.
SPEAKER_02:Think about it. My decision.
SPEAKER_00:I come to an altar and I make a decision. Nobody's forcing me to I make a free will decision. But look what it says in Colossians 2, verse 13 and 14. I'm just going to challenge these traditions a little. And you being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he being Jesus, he has made alive together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses. So if we're looking at this in context, then it's saying, and going back to the right way that we're looking at the right tense, the Arian's tense, that's already done. Past tense that we use tells us when something happened. Eris tense tells us what happened. This is going back to what happened. It ain't about time frame. Having nailed it to the cross. So therefore, if it happened on the cross, if the decision to forgive happened on the cross, as this verse says, and nobody can argue what that verse says, how can it happen when I come up here and say a prayer?
SPEAKER_02:I have a choice to make now. Am I going to believe what the word says, or am I going to believe what tradition says?
SPEAKER_00:Now listen, it ain't going to hurt me to come to the altar and do this experience. Don't get me wrong. But I'm just saying it's not what activates it. It was already activated 2,000 years ago. This just opens my eyes up to it. That's all it does. But see, when we teach it that this is what activates it, then as soon as somebody walks out here and makes this mistake, deactivates. And then they got to come back next Sunday and do it again. And then next Sunday and do it again. And then next Sunday and do it again. And then they finally just say, forget this crap. This is too hard.
SPEAKER_02:And then you don't never see them again.
SPEAKER_00:And what is it's running them away? It's not Christ running them away. It's the tradition that we teach that's scaring them away because it's telling them they're not good enough. When he said right here that we are good enough, that it happened on the cross, having wiped away the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to ours, and he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. That means everything that was contrary, everything that was opposite of him, everything that was different, everything that we would call sin, he nailed it to the cross.
SPEAKER_02:Didn't have nothing to do with us. Now something else we would tell people is my choice brings me reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00:But look what it says in Romans 5 and 10. My choice brings me reconciliation. But it says here for if when we were enemies, we were reconciled. That looks, that's an ED on there. We would call that past tense, but this is actually the eras tense. It means reconciliation, boom, happened. The event happened, the thing happened. It's not about time frame. To God through the death of his son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be what?
SPEAKER_02:But wait a minute. During this time I hadn't gone to the altar yet.
SPEAKER_00:During this time, I hadn't said the ABCs yet. During this time, I haven't gone through the prayer of salvation.
SPEAKER_02:But yet he's saying, saved. That's another one you're gonna have to wrestle with. You're gonna have to wrestle and say Bible or tradition. Another one. My prayer initiates redemption.
SPEAKER_00:Ephesians 1 and 7. If I believe that my prayer initiates redemption, and then I go and I read this, in Him, whoa, whoa, whoa, I can stop right there.
SPEAKER_02:In him we have redemption. So you're telling me it's not because I prayed a prayer?
SPEAKER_00:It's not because the oil was poured on my head. No, it was in him. You were just told that it was your decision. All we're trying to get you to do is wake up to what he's already done. In him, we have redemption through his blood. See, this would be this would be great if it says in us we have redemption through our choices. But it don't. It says, in him we have redemption through his blood, which means it wasn't our decision, it was his.
SPEAKER_02:The forgiveness of sins. But I thought I had to go to an altar to get my sins forgiven. Now he forgave them here. You just still think you have it.
SPEAKER_00:So you still keep doing the traditional things of forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. All we're trying to do is say, wake up. He's already forgiven you. He's already forgiven you on the cross. He's forgiven your sins according to the riches of what you believe. These verses is pretty simple. But we've taken them and we've turned them around and we've let tradition override scripture. And we've got confused and we've got lost. Last one right here.
SPEAKER_02:I must accept salvation. John nineteen and thirty. So when Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished. And bowing his head, he gave up his spirit.
SPEAKER_00:And this is saying here traditional assumption is I must accept what we teach and what we believe about salvation to make it real in my life. So that I can say I'm born again, so that I can say I'm a Christian, so that I can say I've entered into the place of salvation. When this is actually saying it's finished. And again, if you go back and you might be saying, well, that ain't say nothing about salvation in there. Well, it is if you understand the word salvation. We see salvation as this. Salvation, the word the Greek word sozo, is a lot different. When you look that up and understand what true salvation meaning is, these verses start to make sense and they start to kind of just fit together like a little puzzle, and you're like, wow, that makes so much sense. I see what it's saying now. So all we're saying, we're not trying to knock anybody's theology out. We're not trying to stand up and say my theology is better than your theology. No, we're just trying to say this is what the word says. And either, and we've and it's challenging, it really is. It's challenging because when you start to see these things in the right way, what you see in this scripture is going to challenge what you've been told. And now you've got a decision to make. Am I going to stick with what I've been told, even in the face of the truth hitting me? Or am I going to go with the truth? I'm going with the truth.
SPEAKER_02:But there's a lot of people who would rather go with tradition. And that's okay. That's their choice.
SPEAKER_00:But don't call what we're saying wrong and radical and unbiblical and heresy when it's lining up with scripture. And it is. That's why we need to know these verses. We need to be able to pull these out and we need to say, this is what the word says. This is what you're saying, but this is what the word says. They flash. They don't go together. So if they don't go together, then we've got to look and we've got to say which one makes sense. Which one did Jesus say?
SPEAKER_02:Not Pastor Brian, but Jesus. Because I'm going to bow to him now. I like to think I'm right when I say a verse, but I'm going to bow to him. His word says something different than I'm saying, he's the winner. I'm going to change my thought process on it. And there's a lot of them I have. I've been doing it every day. That's all we're saying.
SPEAKER_00:But man, I'm telling you, online, there's so much coming up, and people are writing about finished work and about salvation and universalism and all this kind of stuff. We're not saying everybody says I don't even want to get into that because that's not even what we're saying. Somebody asked me that question. This is the only thing I say. When I use that word universal, I say everybody is universally reconciled. Because it says that in that he was in Christ reconciling the world. That's pretty universal right there. The world. But he said I'm reconciling the world. That's universal. So that's why I say I believe in universal reconciliation. That he's pulled everybody back into relationship. But people don't understand that, so they automatically try to shoot it down by saying, Oh, you're a universalist. I don't even fight with him anymore because that's not what we're saying. All we're trying to say is what Jesus done. And all we're doing is repeating exactly what he says in Scripture. That's it.
SPEAKER_02:You don't have to agree with it.
SPEAKER_00:But I'm just enjoying the fact that there are some people who's open-minded. And there's fixing to be a lot more people who's beginning to open their minds up from different denominations and say, makes sense. This is answering questions I've always had. And that's why it's important that we are here to answer those questions. I believe we are trained up in this church, we're trained up to be the forerunners to answer those questions, people. I really believe that.