One chance to make it count

We all have only one life to live. Let's make it count for Christ. When we pass to be with Christ, we will look back and wish we had done more for Christ.

email: RuggedTruthGodsWord@gmail.com

God has a super huge plan. We all have to do our part as He assigns to us. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, brothers and sisters in the Lord. This is Brother Rick. And I hope there are uh some people that are listening that don't know the Lord or want to learn more about God. You know, I don't have all the answers, but he does. Christ has the answers. He is the answer. He is the only way to God. As it says in uh the book of John, chapter 14, verse 6, where he is the only way to God. The only way, no other way. Not through Islam or Buddhism or any other religion there is. Christianity is not a religion, it's a life. And it's a relationship with Christ. And it's the only path to eternal life. With that being said, I hope you all are having a good week and enjoying the springtime as the summer comes rolling in, and the flowers are popping and the bees are buzzing, and it's a beautiful time of year. There's something that's been on my system, and uh the Lord's been laying on my heart, and I've talked about it a few times. I'm going to talk about it some more. It's about working our way to heaven. Uh we cannot work our way to heaven, but we prove that we are Christ and we belong to God by doing good works. In Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, that's where uh talks about it is a free gift. Salvation is uh a gift directly from God through Christ. But then a lot of times uh verse 10 is thrown out because people say, well, all you gotta do is speak the words and all this. No, you do more than speak the words, you live the life, or you're not his. In Ephesians 2 10, it talks about that, that God has set up works that we walk in them. He's already done the work, but we have to follow in them. We follow in Christ's footsteps, being Christ-like, helping others, doing for others, putting others first, showing love and kindness, letting things roll off your back like water off a duck's back. When people do bad things, it's hard to do, but we've got to grow in Christ, grow in love, because either you're serving the God of hate or the God of love. I choose the God of love. The world is full of the God of hate. I mean full of it. You can walk out the door and find it very quickly. In Matthew 25, 14 to 30 is a story of that. When he spoke of when the master left and he gave his servants the talents to go use to make him some more profit. We are Christ's servants as we are here and living. Some are given more abilities than others, but the ones with many abilities aren't using all that they're given. So we need to all be busy using what Christ has given us. The one with one talent is the one that went and hid his. That's similar to the one that, or the same thing as the one that uh takes and bury his uh and doesn't do anything with it and gets in trouble when Christ returns. That's the same as speaking the words. Say, oh, please forgive me, then go live your life however. You know, and then say, oh, I mean to do better, I mean to do better. But you're never turning yourself over to Christ. We've got to make every effort to enter heaven, every effort. In Luke 13 and 24, when Christ is saying this, he says, make every effort, every opportunity that you have come before you, jump on it. Christ has put it before you for a reason. He puts things before me, and I'm doing my best to I'm doing much better than I used to, that's for sure. I've got a ways to go, but I'm working on it. Um to do uh something with what he puts before me. But we don't shake our fingers at each other saying, you need to do better. We just worry about ourselves and we encourage one another. We try to say, come on, you got this, you got this. It's hard. It is very hard to keep going. But like getting back to uh Ephesians 2, 8 to 10, uh, we are to be doing the works of Christ. We don't just set back on our laurels after we uh speak the words. We have to carry our cross daily. As Christ Himself told us in Luke 9 and 23, we deny ourselves and we pick up our cross and we keep marching forward, following Christ, being Christ-like. And then after that, we we keep going and we stand firm to the end. In Matthew 10, 22, and Matthew 24, 13, we stand firm to be saved. Did you hear that? To be saved. We have to stand firm to the end. It's not just a few words. The teachings and the and the churches here are not following through on the whole message. They're not telling what Christ had to say, they're telling what fills the pews, what tickles the ears. We speak the words in belief and we trust God. Well, in that we take up our cross daily and we stand firm to the end. That's what we do, and we encourage one another all the way. These are part of the good works in encouraging, and also we help others. We do what we can to help others. And seriously, I'm talking to myself also. If we were all doing what we were supposed to do, the way Christ set it up, there would be no need for buildings except for us to come together and to strengthen one another. As the church, we are the people, the people are the church, not a building. You don't come to the church building to be holy. We are holy. God makes us holy by his Holy Spirit living within us. And with that, we do good works, and we we help love on the world as much as possible, as much as it will let us. And so many times it's like a young boy that your son, as he gets older, you try to give him a hug or a kiss, he'll push away. That's kind of like the world. Well, we've got to we've got to be like that. We've got to try to love them no matter if they want to be loved or not. We've got to show them that Christ is real and that he's coming back. And we tell them, say, hey, this is what God did for me. He can help you. Please don't don't be thinking it's empty or useless to live a life for Christ. That's what you tell them, because it is an exciting life. Like in the movies when a hero has a supervillain. Well, it makes the movie all the more exciting. Well, you know what? As Christians, we have the most supervillain in Satan. And through Christ in us, we can defeat him. As a matter of fact, he has been defeated. But he doesn't want to go down without swinging. He is going down swinging, and we've got to keep doing the works we can. Because America is in trouble and collapsing and imploding on itself, just like a black hole. I guess you could say it's like the black hole of sin eating itself alive. And we've got to keep going, keep marching forward with all the perversion and religious misdirection and religious misinformation and half-truths. The truth is in the New Testament, if you read it yourself. Just read the first four books and the Gospels, and it will explain to you what Christ really wants, because so many churches, even down here, everything from Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, everybody, they're telling partial truths. They are not telling the full truth. About how we we ask the Lord for forgiveness. We believe it and we take up our cross daily. These are all words that Christ said. Don't believe me, look it up for yourself. Look it up for yourself. Christ said this. Unless we do this, we're not going to make it. We won't make it. We'll be like the servant that did that. And you know what? What does it say happened to him? He's thrown out with the unbelievers, gnashing of teeth and all that. Let's don't do that. Let's make every effort, brothers and sisters. I guess I'm sounding pretty urgent in this, but it's it is an urgent message because time is getting short and it's getting really weird now. And uh unless we get strong in our faith, people are going to turn from the faith because persecution is coming from the and it's going to be driven by the homosexual movement. And uh saying that uh Christians are narrow-minded and and uh we hate people. We don't hate people, we love people. We hate the sin. We hate the sin that we commit ourselves. But we've got to stand firm and we've got to get busy. Get busy getting busy. And uh as it's written in Ephesians 2.10, right after 2.8.9, after we understand that it's a gift of God, but we are to be busy walking in those and doing the works of Christ, living a Christ-like life, walking the path. We don't just say, okay, that's a Sunday morning thing. No, it's an everyday thing, it's a moment-by-moment thing, thought-to-thought thing. And we keep the line of communication open to God. That's how we do it. One of my favorite verses, uh 1 Thessalonians 5.17, it says, pray without ceasing. That just means keeping open the line of communication to God. It's hard to sin when you're doing that. It's hard to get caught up in it and pulled into it. Keep talking to God. He'll guide you through it if you keep listening to him. He's a gentleman, he'll step aside if you want him, but I've done that enough and I don't want to do it anymore. It's a tough life out here without God. It's it's it's a hard life with God. It's difficult. It is. This life is hard and brutal. Swimming against the stream, swimming against the flow, going against the flow, going against the pull of Hollywood and all these commercials and vulgar crap that's out here, and the perversion that's just inundating our society and being accepted. I don't accept it. And Christians should not accept it either. Christ didn't accept it. He loved the people and he hated the sin. That's what we did we are to do. We're to love people, to show them there's a better way. And we do that through the works. In Ephesians 2, 10. We walk in the works that God has already set up for us. We just walk in them. And we we follow Him. We follow Christ and the path He He has walked, and yeah, it might be to a final point of death. But you know what? All of us die doing something. Either it's a car wreck or a long drawn-out through old age or cancer or something. But let's make it count. Let's make it count, brothers and sisters, doing the works of the Lord. We have one life to live, one time through this part of eternity before our good eternity starts. Eternity's already started for us because our souls don't die. Our souls live on forever somewhere. So let's make it count, brothers and sisters. Let's do it for Christ, for what he's done for us, to show us the love to come down here and die for us. Well, brothers and sisters, I'm going to get off of here. Uh I pray the good Lord's face shine down upon you. I pray he saves your souls. He helps us all to see the true path to life, to eternal life through Christ. And I I truly do love you in the name of Jesus, or else I wouldn't be talking like this. This is tough love. It seriously is. I love you in the name of Jesus.