Listen, if you go to a church and evil is not shaken by the existence of that church, I don’t think it’s a New Testament church. Why is it that among so many believers, there’s confidence lacking? What’s wrong with us? Somehow when social media reaches out with nefarious plans and your young person in your life can say, “Get out of here.
” The Bible thrives in a wicked world. Am I yelling? You probably know 25% of what happens regarding this church in its life. That guy was going to kill himself. It was said that this baby was going to be born dead and the baby’s born perfect. We need to do away once and for all with this lack of spiritual confidence. It’s a self-inflicted wound in the church and we need to stop it.
Listen everyone, you belong to a family. One way or another, you belong to a family. In this Bible study that you’re going to be hearing, you’re going to see me interchange both in the conversation and in the argument interchangeably. Family and church. Church and family. Family and church. church and family.
The parallels cannot be separated. There’s a reason for this. So, the church that you attend, is it a New Testament bibleelving church? I pray that it is. And I pray that this message helps you experience the true family of God. Friend, listen. If blood is thicker than water, then the spirit of God is thicker than blood. God bless you.
The Bible makes it very clear, folks, as we look at a title series, one family, one and all. One family, one and all. As Paul now begins to uh land the plane, as it were, regarding his epistle, his writing to the book of Romans or to the people of of Rome through the book of Romans, uh he’s now beginning to uh give his uh benedictions to people.
He’s it’s an interesting thing because from Corinth where he writes this book to the believers in Rome, he’s intending to go see them. He’s he’s intending uh to go and minister in Rome. Now you all know that having known the Bible and read the Bible, Paul will get to Rome not the way that he expected.
Uh he will not arrive with a ministry tour, a ministry team that he normally traveled with. uh he will arrive, he’ll get a free government-paid trip to Rome, but it will be under arrest. He will not far from this time be arrested for being a Christian. He will be arrested for preaching resurrection. He will be arrested because there’s only one Lord and the Lord was not Caesar. It was Jesus.
A lot of people uh want politics to be their Lord. The Christian is to use politics to advance the cause of righteousness. But you do know that any and every political leader ever elected is not our deliverer. Amen. They’re not our salvation. But Christ is and he would go to Rome.
Paul will go to Rome under arrest and he will appear before the powers of Rome and before Caesar himself. Exactly as Jesus prophesied back in the book of Acts when Jesus appeared and said, “Do not be afraid of Saul of Tarsus, whose name is now Paul, for I have called him to be an instrument of mine to preach the gospel to the gentile world and to appear before kings and rulers of this world.
” And lo and behold, it’s exactly what he did. Why? Because in Christ Jesus, this man who was a Jew came to faith in the Messiah who was a Jew, who was commissioned to preach that messiahship and that salvation to the gentile world, to all the world, and by the writings and the use of the Holy Spirit on Paul’s life.
Much of the New Testament is authored by the Holy Spirit using the man Paul the Apostle. and our knowledge of the word of God and of Christ would be much limited if it were not for the salvation of this man Saul of Tarsus. But when we talk about uh one family one and all, we we mean this.
And I’m going to ask you to write these uh introductory verses down please if you would or take uh the notes. Matthew chapter 16 verse 13. Now I love this portion of scripture. I have to confess right now that when we go and take our tours of Israel, which by the way, we’ve got a tour coming up this uh coming spring and uh it’s it’s all filled up. We’ve got I think 10 buses filled up and I think we have 2,000 people on a waiting list uh to go with us. But you might have to wait till next year or the year after that.
