Welcome to If Not Forgot. Stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. Have fun. We're back with If Not For God with Mike Zwick.
And Mike, we got a passage we're going to dig into today. It's sort of challenging.
Sort of challenging, but I think at the end of the day, I think it's actually, it can be a good thing. But yes, it is sort of challenging. And it's 1 John chapter 3, and I use the King James Version. And I'm going to start in verse 1. And it says, Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.
Therefore, the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear that we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him. I like that. We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.
Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law, for sin is the transgression of the law. And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins, and in him is no sin. whosoever abideth in him sinneth not whosoever sinneth hath not seen him neither known him little children let no man deceive you He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil. For the devil sinneth from the beginning.
For this purpose, the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. And so when I see that, at first, when you see that, it's a little scary. I mean, you look at verses like that, and I know people are used to hearing certain Bible verses in the church, Robbie. You know, John 3:16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Man, that sounds great, you know, or.
You know, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Hey, man, that's great news. And there are some other verses that are in the Bible that are a little bit, or passages that are in the Bible that are a little bit more difficult to understand or to deal with than the one that I just read. But the truth is, is that if it's in the Bible, then it's in there for a reason. You know, another passage or another set of verses is where Jesus said, He said, If your hand causes you to sin, he said to cut it off.
He said, It's better for you to have one of your hands than to have both of your hands and to be thrown into the fire of hell. He said, If your eye causes you to sin, he said, it's better for you to have one of your eyes and to have both of your eyes. You missed the pluck it out part. Pluck it out. Pluck it out, man.
And I, I, no, I actually, I was, uh, I was with, I knew a guy. Who actually went to jail overnight, and he said that he was in jail. And he said, One of the guys quoted that verse, and the guy was out of his mind, but he actually plucked his eye out. I don't know how he did that, but that's what he said. But, you know, there is something that we do.
We follow the Lord. And sometimes when we follow the Lord, it also means to give up other things that we were used to doing before we followed the Lord. And sometimes I know for me myself, Robbie, it wasn't something that happened overnight, but it was something that the Lord started to convict me of, and he started to change my life as I grew deeper into the Lord. I'm sure you've seen that as well. Yeah, it's kind of cool.
There's a s salvation issue that you were a sinner. Certainly, born that way, and now you're saved by grace. And so, to some extent, now. You're born again, and you're free from sin because you're underneath the blood. And that's a beautiful.
Package that you know, everybody, that's the part you talked about, John 3:16. But there's this other word that it sounds very theological, but it's actually tremendously beautiful because it has to do with holiness. And the word is sanctification, right? That God is going to make us holy. And as we go through this process, Wow, it's freedom that you really don't expect.
That you didn't realize you needed because you didn't realize you were in bondage. Even though you were saved, or let me say, I am saved, and certainly there is lots of work to do between me and the race that I'm running in trying to become more like Christ. Because I love the way that passage just ended. It says you're going to. See him, and now that you begin to see God, the more you see God, the more you get to see, wow, I'm a man of unclean lips, and I hang out with dudes that are unclean lips, man.
Yeah, man. I mean, you know, and one of the things that I've seen, and this is where I struggled, probably when I first became a Christian, what I struggled with was that, you know, there were people that I knew that I was hanging out with who were atheists, they were drinking. I mean, they were living like the devil. But in all fairness, when I was hanging around them, I was too. And then I started to realize: hey, now I've got to do two things.
Number one, I've got to witness to them, I've got to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them. But then, number two, I have to be careful not to be hanging around them while they're doing certain things because when they're doing certain things, The flesh in Michael's wick is going to want to do those things as well. And so there is a verse where it says that bad company corrupts good character. And so I think that's always kind of a balancing act that I still do until this day, Robbie, where, you know, I want to share the good news with people. I want to love people right where they are because.
I'm a sinner saved by grace, but the Lord has changed me. And so I share the good news. I want to spend time with people. I want to help people. But there is also another verse where it says, when you're trying to help people, when you're trying to love people, be careful that when you're hanging around them, that you don't fall into the same sin that they're doing as well.
And so, an example that I could give you is: my dad is from New York City, and he said that when he was growing up, he said that there was this counselor who would come in to help troubled youth. And when he came in there, he was all excited. He said, Hey, I'm going to help these guys. I'm going to really radically help change their lives. And by the time I'm done with them, they're going to be walking with the Lord.
They're going to be doing these great things.
Well, fast forward a few months, this counselor who had come in to help these kids was now drinking, smoking, cursing, and he was just as bad as they were. And now, this was back in probably the 1950s. And so, this counselor was your dad? No, no, no. No, this is the guy that he knew.
This was the guy that he knew who came into this. We'll call it a YMCA. I don't know what it was. And he was trying to help them. And what this guy did was instead of helping them, he became just like them.
And I've actually heard this with Christians as well. What they'll say is, well, there's a Bible verse. And always be careful if somebody takes their whole doctrine and they use one Bible verse to do it. Because sometimes you can be deceived by just using one Bible verse and not looking at the context and this, that, and the other. But you could take a Bible verse and say, well, judge not so that you too may not be judged.
Okay. Yes, that is true. But there's also a case where it says in the New Testament, it says that we have the right to judge each other in the church. He says, now we're not judging those outside of the church. He said, if we were trying to judge those outside of the church, he said we'd have to leave the whole world.
world because of the way that the world is. And I've seen this too, Robbie, within my, you know, probably within the last six months and really within the last five years since COVID, a lot of information has come out. A lot has been unveiled, you know, especially since 2020, the election, COVID, all of that stuff. And sometimes I think with a lot of this information, there is a lot of negativity. There's a lot of bad that we can see that is going on in the world right now.
But if we solely focus on everything that's bad, I also believe that sometimes we can miss some of the good that God has in our lives. And I've seen this with Christians as well, where they're so focused on, I've got to stop this, I've got to stop that, I've got to do this better, I've got to do that better. But I'm reminded of the guy who started the salvation army, William Booth. What he said was he said, if we're focused on others, then we're really doing the will of Christ. And when we're focused on others, we're happier ourselves.
And so I've noticed that the more I am focused on others and helping others, The less worried that I seem to be about myself, but maybe it's just me. No, no, there's all sorts of. tightropes we get to walk, right? Because Yes, absolutely, we're supposed to focus on others, but there are things that you become convicted of that you're thinking, yeah, this isn't, this isn't, I'm not becoming more like Christ in this particular area of my life, and there's lots of ways that that could happen, and all sorts of addictions, fear, pride. Oh my goodness.
The list goes on and on. But wonderfully, and I think. One thing God's been teaching me more and more lately. is in Exodus 6 You know, you have these famous promises that start at Exodus 6.6, and it says. Essentially, I will take you out of bondage.
Now, listen, all these verbs are beautiful in Hebrew, and they're all very much connected to some idea of our marriage to Christ. He says, I will take you out of bondage.
Now, are you going to get yourself out of bondage? No. He says, I will take you out of bondage.
He says, I will rescue you. I will redeem you. I will take you to be my people. I will give you inheritance. In other words, you look, there are seven of these I will statements.
And Unfortunately, quite often I think I'm gonna white knuckle it and I'm gonna get on this diet. And this is the way this is gonna happen with this particular thing. But Almost immediately after my salvation, I was in the car business, as most people know. I'm the Christian car guy. I shouldn't say most people know that, but a lot of people know me as Christian Car Guy.
My language was unbelievable. I'd hung out in service departments my whole life, and that's not to say anything disparaging about service people, but I learned every word there was and used them, you know. You know, that was very much part of the way I described things. And You should have been a sailor. Yeah, I could have been.
Easily, easily. But fascinatingly, God took that away. Yeah, I didn't. I realized it like, God, this is. Did you ask him to take it away?
I did. I was like. Wow, this is this is this is horrible, man. Could you do and and it it was one of those like Some things are a process. Other things go like that.
And it didn't go through, I need to forgive somebody, or I had some agreement that I was fighting. There's all sorts of different ways that we go about working on ourselves. But to some extent you know, it's it's kind of like the whole airplane thing. If we don't put on the oxygen mask, Right? We can't really help anybody else because we're suffocating over here, and Satan's just beating us up because he's got all the goods on the way we're really living our life.
You know, one of the ones, you know, I hate to admit this, but it's true that, you know, the Christian car guy, my kids would tell you, man, if there's somebody's got road rage out there, you know, here he is, right? I'm right there with you, man. Right.
Well, you know, when the conviction comes, who's going to fix that? I will take you out. But it requires him and it requires a process. Like, man, there must be something else in my life. You know, show me what that is.
And it's, he doesn't, we don't want to do things for God. We want to do things with God. And then, and not only when we're helping others, from my perspective, but But especially when we're trying to work on our own sin, right? We got to do that with God because according to, like I said, Exodus 6, 6, he says, I will, I will, I will. And again, we can't miss the idea that apart from him we can do what, Mike?
We can do nothing. And there's a verse when you were saying that. It's Jeremiah 33, 3, and it says, Call unto me. And I will answer thee and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not. And so.
There have been times where God has absolutely taken a desire away from me, and there have been other times where I've prayed to ask God to take it away from me, and there's some times where we just have to make a decision, you know. I have a decision. If I'm an alcoholic, I have a decision whether I'm going to go take that first drink or not. And sometimes with sin, everything within you wants to do something and You have, like you said, you ask God, you say, God. Take this away from me.
But then there's also times, Robbie, where I've had to remove myself from that situation. And so, if I'm an alcoholic, I'm probably not going to be driving by the ABC store back and forth because it's going to create temptation. I certainly don't want to go inside. You're right. You don't want to go inside.
You definitely don't want to do that, but you don't want to be driving back and forth past the ABC store. I don't want to be hanging out inside the bar. I don't want to be hanging around other alcoholics.
So, you're right, God can take it away. But I, like you said, there also is our part. If I'm struggling with sexual sin, if I'm living with my girlfriend and I'm not married, and I know what the Bible says, if I'm not married to my girlfriend, if I'm not married to be married to a woman, and that's the only way I can have sex. If I'm a woman, I need to be married to a man, and that's the only way that I can have sex. Any kind of sex outside of a marriage between a woman and a man.
Man is sinful and you're living in rebellion to God.
Now, have I ever done that? Absolutely. And when I did that, I felt horrible. I heard a preacher up in Danville, Virginia one time. This is what he said.
He said, when a Christian gets into sin, he said they fall into sin. And they hate it. He said, but when a non-Christian goes into sin, they get into sin and they just like bathe in it because they don't see a problem with it. I remember before I was a Christian, if I had a girlfriend and I was having sex with her, I just felt like, hey, I was just. Fulfilling the desires, my desires.
Hey, this was fun. I was having a good time. This is what people do, right? I didn't see anything wrong with it. And if you're looking for the world to give you confirmation of what's right, oh, they'll always tell you, yeah, it's okay, don't worry about it.
But going back to that passage that I said before, that the wages of sin is death. The wages of sin is death But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. When you turn on the movies or when you turn on daytime television, the days of our lives, or I think people are probably watching that stuff now or whatever, as the world turns, guiding light. I think those are some of the names of them. But when you're watching these shows, they glorify sin.
I mean, it makes it look so good. But the beautiful thing, then that same book that you started out the show with is 1 John 1:9, right? If we confess our sins one to another, you know, and ask. You know, he will forgive us. And cleanse us from all unrighteousness, all you know, the whole enchilada.
And it's amazing to me, like, a lot of times. Uh we have Secrets. Right? And and I you may have heard it say that And I I think it's true that we're as sick as our secrets. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I got to tell this story. Man, I was doing these interviews at the. convention of Christian counselors. It was in Nashville.
I think it was. their worldwide convention or whatever, and they had asked me to do a hundred interviews in one weekend. Mm-hmm. And so I'm interviewing all these counselors and I'm discovering that whatever it is that they are counseling people about, the reason why they're counselors, guess what? They had experience in that, right?
That if people were counseling in abortion, that quite often they themselves had had an abortion. And it goes back to that 2 Corinthians, you know, chapter 1 idea that the God of all comfort. Comforts us that we might comfort others with the comfort we were comforted with. Absolutely. I knew that going into these interviews, God had given me some wisdom to say, Here, ask him about that.
And so here's this woman and her husband is sitting right there. Like there's her husband. And we're we're on a national radio show, right? I'll never forget this as long as I live because God is so good. Like God was so amazing.
Because I just said to that woman, I said, you know, I. I noticed that your counselor for women are considering abortion and I I've seen a real trend here where God is the God of all comfort and comforts others with the comfort he was comfort you were comforted with. How did that play out in your being able to help people that have had an abortion? That's right. And she looks at me And it was like Here it comes.
And she just had this look, and she says, in front of her husband. Robbie? I've never told anybody this. Right? Right.
And here she comes out with it. And she got to see. And I got to see her husband Forgive right? This is her husband. He didn't know.
Yeah. But she Confessed Not just to me, but it's everybody whole radio confess your faults one to another. She did that to her husband right there. But I mean, I saw the whole thing like God orchestrated that secret to come out at that moment so that she could get healing. And oh my goodness.
Like, oh my goodness. And there it came.
So we all have stuff, and God has given us opportunities all the time. Two. find somebody that we trust.
Somebody that will speak the truth and love to us, as we talked about earlier. These things are just like, man, opportunities for freedom. And I don't know what the story was behind that, but I saw the end of the story, and I saw what happened was she became more like Christ, and so did her husband. Hmm. Mm.
So she had a an abortion. Was it while she was with him? Was it his childhood?
Okay. It was a relationship prior to their dating and all that happened. Yeah, it was.
Well, the Bible says, it says, for nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest, neither anything hid that shall not be known and come abroad. You know, there's a verse in Numbers 32, 29, and it says that you can be sure of this, that your sin will find you out. And so, one way or another, I mean, eventually it's all of us have experienced that. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's all going to come to the light, anyways.
So, you might as well come clean. And definitely, you want to come clean to God. But also, the Bible talks about, it says, if you've sinned against somebody, to go directly to that person. You talk about humility. I mean, when you've done something wrong to somebody to be able to have to go to, I mean, that's a humbling experience.
You know, I think people have the wrong idea of humility, Robbie. I see somebody who's just won the Super Bowl and they're the MVP of the Super Bowl, and they say, This is so humbling. And I'm thinking, that is not humbling. I'm so humbled by this experience. No, you just won the Super Bowl and you're the MVP.
You're being exalted right now. This is not humble. Being humbled is where the Lord brings you down. But see, in my life, Robbie. That was the other quarterback.
That was the other quarterback. Yeah. I mean, and my in one of the examples that I think of is the Super Bowl. And it was, I think it was January or February of 2017, where in the third quarter, the Atlanta Falcons and Matt Ryan were ahead 28-3 against Tom Brady. And then Tom Brady and the Patriots ended up winning it in overtime.
Now, you talked about it. Talk about a humbling experience. That was pretty humbling right there. But the truth is, Robbie, is that we've all been humbled. I remember when I was in kindergarten and I had these big sweatpants, and I was going up.
I didn't know what I was doing. And so I had a tray, a tray of food, and I'm standing there with my tray of food. And all of a sudden, my sweatpants fall down in front of the whole cafeteria. And so I'm six years old.
So what do I do, Robbie? I just stand there holding my tray. I didn't really know what to do. But I tell you what.
Somebody did help you out, right? They did. Yeah, I think somebody grabbed my tray or they realized I was just in kindergarten and this, that, or the other. And I think the interesting thing about that is, you know, I think that's a picture of all of us when our sin finds us out. We're standing there with our pants down, and it's just embarrassing as it can be.
However, You know. That I love what John Bunyan Talked about the valley of humiliation. And I've thought a lot about the valley of humiliation as I've spent a great deal of time there. And I imagine most of us have. That the soil is so much richer.
You know, if you think about a mountain top, the water's right taking all the topsoil and it's sending it down to where? The valley. And down in that valley. Is where we really, we really, because pride itself is fundamentally, you know, one of the block build or the building blocks of sin. And somebody that I listen to sometimes, his name is Joseph Z.
And this guy has the gift of the prophetic. It's almost scary. He'll say something and then like he said, oh, there's going to be tariffs and the stock market's going to go down. And like sooner or later, it's in immediate, it was amazing. But what this guy said, he said something that was interesting.
He said, God hates pride. And he said, I don't like to be, you know, I don't like to be around a prideful person. He said, but the only thing worse than pride is a false humility. And he said, So somebody who is, they're really prideful, but they know how to act humble. He said, I would rather be around somebody who's prideful.
He said, Because at least we know what we're dealing with. At least we know what we're dealing with. And so, you know, we've talked about this before, but one of my favorite passages in the Bible is Luke 18, starting in verse 10. And what it talks about is there were two men who went up to the church one Sunday, and one of them was a Pharisee, and one of them was a publican. And the Pharisee said, God, I thank you.
I'm not like this Robbie guy. I give 10% of my money. I don't steal. I don't kill anybody. Not a car salesman.
He said, man, I'm a pretty good person. I'm not a car salesman. Not a car salesman. Definitely not a car salesman. And Robbie is sitting over there and he beats on his chest with his head down.
And he said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And Jesus said that the guy with his head down asking for mercy, he's the guy who went away justified, not the guy who was exalting himself. And so, yes, when we talk about sin, we want to love people. We want to treat people right and all of that. But at the end of the day, whenever I talk to somebody about sin or whenever I talk about it online about sin, I want you to realize that I'm.
I've got three fingers pointing back at myself. I've done a lot of things that were wrong. I've made a lot of mistakes, and I'm sure you have too, Robbie. But the truth is, is that understatement, but the truth is, is that we don't have to stay where we are. And I like what you said, Robbie, that he can help us.
And what we said before as well was that it's not just one sin, it's not just one thing. I'll tell this story and then we can finish up. But there were three preachers who said, We're all going to sit down and we're going to confess our sins one to another. And the first preacher says, Well, my sin is adultery. He said, I've been having an affair with my secretary and I just wanted to tell you guys.
And the second guy said, Second preacher, he said, Well, I've been embezzling money from my congregation and I just had to tell you guys. The third preacher was kind of squirming in his seat. And they're like, What is wrong with you? And he goes, My sin is gossip, and I can't wait to get out of here and tell everybody.
So, you know, the truth is, is that we all have our sin, we all have our faults. And I'm not saying that I'm any better than anybody else, but what I'm also saying is that I'm not going to be able saying is this, as it says in 1 John 3, 7 through 8. If we're a Christian, we're going to act like a Christian. If we're a Christian, yes, we're going to make mistakes. But there is going to be something different in our lives.
And I like what you said, Robbie. The only one who can really change us from the inside out is Jesus Christ himself. Amen. If not for God, if not for God. All right, for my YouTube channel.
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