You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, but that's assuming you know the truth. Dr. Tony Evans says you can't have God, His kingdom, and His freedom without also having His truth.
And so the question today is are you, am I, are we people of the truth? This is the alternative broadcast featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans. Jesus said everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. Today Dr. Evans shows why a culture that collectively turns a deaf ear to God is destined for chaos, and why the intervention of believers willing to heed kingdom truth is desperately needed.
Let's listen in as he explains. God has a sphere of jurisdiction. It's called His kingdom.
It is the sphere of His authority from which He operates. Within this jurisdiction, this kingdom realm, is His governance and guidelines, which He calls His truth. Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world, and those who understand that understand I've come to give the truth. And everybody who is of the truth listens to me.
So God's goal for His kingdom people is for us to be people of the truth. There is a disagreement today on what is truth. So we are awash today in opinions. We are awash today in chaos. There's philosophical chaos as people doodle with ideas about the meaning of our own existence.
There is social chaos because we can't get to the truth about the issues of race and culture. There's gender chaos. What is a man?
What is a woman? There is all manner of confusion with psychological chaos. People not being able to bring order to their thinking and to their identity. Moral chaos and the worst kind of chaos of all spiritual chaos. Jesus makes the statement my kingdom is not of this world. It operates in the world, but it is not sourced in this world. It comes from another realm. So any discussion of truth cannot start with this realm. God's view of truth is that the spiritual must always inform the physical. The kingdom up there must inform the life down here.
The invisible world must inform the world of the five senses. Because truth, which derives from His kingdom, is not sourced down here. So if you start down here, you're starting at a deficit when it comes to truth. What our society wants is they want to impose our rules on God's house and wonder why there's chaos and conflict in the midst. Truth is God's view on any subject. And the reason why truth is God's view on any subject is because He's perfect.
Perfection can't make a mistake on any subject or else it's no longer perfect. Romans 3-4 puts it this way. Let God be true and every man a liar. So whenever you disagree with God, you're wrong, not Him. Because truth is an absolute standard by which reality is measured that it is God's view on every subject matter.
No exceptions. So many people today are operating on facts who don't know the truth, which is why they can't get to the root of what they need to deal with because they're dealing with facts. People say, I know my truth. No, you know your facts. You may not know your truth.
Because truth goes deeper than facts because it is the foundation for facts. Today we live in a cancel culture. If you say something that the powers that be don't agree with, they can shut you down. Not too long ago, they took down one of my messages off of one of the social medias because I was declaring what the Bible said about a certain issue. It was clear that the Bible said it, but it was going to be too offensive to many of their people. So they canceled it, even though it could be validated that the Bible said it. God says in John chapter 10, verse 35, Scripture cannot be canceled. It cannot be annulled. That means canceled. Let me put it this way. When you cancel God's truth, God's truth will cancel you.
So you need to know that. His truth will win because he cannot be canceled. Therefore, his truth cannot be canceled. So when you think you've canceled him, you just canceled you. You've canceled your prayer. You've canceled divine help. You've canceled divine assistance. You have done a whole lot of canceling.
Think you canceled. The Bible says every word of God is flawless. Proverbs 30, verse 5. When Satan came to tempt Jesus, Jesus had a need. It was a legitimate need. He had a need. He was hungry.
He had fasted 40 days and 40 nights in Matthew 4. Satan came and suggested that he turn stone into bread. A legitimate need and bread is a legitimate solution. He got a legitimate need. I'm hungry.
I got the power to turn stone into bread. So that's a legitimate solution tied to a deception. Because Satan wanted to be the source of the solution.
There's a legitimate need, a legitimate solution, but Satan wanted to be the source to solve the problem. This goes all the way back to Adam when the first thing out of Satan's mouth was, half God said. And then he goes on to say, well, God lied. God lied.
So you don't need to go there. God doesn't know what he's talking about. In fact, he lied because he jealous. So God lied to you. You need to cancel what God said, only to find they would be canceled. Jesus says to Satan, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Man shall not live by bread alone. Now we do need bread, food to live, but because that's the physical world, but man shall not live by bread alone. But if he wants to live, man must live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. So you might have bread, but you may not have life. Because all of life is to be consumed with God's perspective on whatever the life issue is.
And once he is canceled, in other words, rejected, his view is rejected, you have invited chaos into whatever that issue is. The book of Amos chapter eight, verses 11 and 12, it was chaos in society. Society was chaos.
Everything, everything was wrong. And the prophet said, because there's a famine in the land. He says, it's a famine of God's word, God's truth. He says, and that famine of truth has led to chaos in culture.
You know why there's all this craziness going on in our culture, in our neighborhoods and with us and all that? Because truth has been abandoned. Truth has been abandoned. And when truth gets abandoned, the space is filled with conflict, confusion, and chaos. Probably there are very few people in here who've not experienced what happens when we have abandoned truth. We are living in a day when truth no longer is the standard based on God's definition of truth. And you know that because God's view is rejected. Once God's view is rejected on any subject, this is math, this is science, this is biology, this is sexuality, this is gender, this is whatever the subject is. Once his truth is rejected, chaos sets in, so then people got to come up with all these other ways to try to fix the problem that the rejection of truth caused.
And so as a result today, we're living in a time of chaos and confusion. You can download them instantly or get them on CDs that we'll send straight to your home. Along with the audio collection, for a limited time, we're also including the One Kingdom Under God paperback from Dr. Evans that goes hand in hand with this series. Through these resources, you'll begin to develop a whole new way of seeing the world and your place in it, leading to greater purpose, peace, and fulfillment. We'll send you this package with our thanks and the donation God leads you to make to help us keep Tony's teaching on this station.
Don't wait. Visit tonyevans.org today to receive Unleashing the Kingdom and One Kingdom Under God. That's tonyevans.org. Or give our resource team members a call at 1-800-800-3222. They'll be happy to help with your request.
That's 1-800-800-3222. We'll return to the second part of today's lesson right after this. You'll discover how God has wired the world to work by prayer and experience for yourself how it connects heaven with earth and time with eternity.
You'll not only gain a new understanding and appreciation for prayer, you'll actually pray in transforming ways you've never experienced before. The course is intense, but you can work through it at your own pace and get all the help you need through our online forum. And of course, there's custom content from Tony not available anywhere else. Connect with the Tony Evans Training Center at tonyevans.org. It's like having a seminary on your smartphone or other device.
Start today, tonyevans.org. Jesus says, I have come to testify to the truth, and everybody who's serious about me or serious about truth is serious about me. Let's put it another way. If you don't pursue this definition of truth, then you're not, I'm not, we're not serious about Jesus. Because he says, I've come to testify to the truth. See, many people want God, but not his truth. And you can't have God, his kingdom, and not his truth. So they're praying in vain, they're working in vain, they're doing all this in vain because there has been a rejection of the truth. First Thessalonians 2 13 says that they received the truth, and it did its work, it performed.
Because they didn't just hear it, they received it. That means to embrace it. They embraced the truth, they hugged the truth, they stood with tenacity with the truth. And it says, and therefore the truth performed its work. He says the truth must be received, not merely heard, which means you begin to operate on it.
That's the way you embrace it. It becomes your operational information and not just an amen clause. We all love the verse, John 8, 31, 32. You'll know the truth if you abide in my word. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. But that's assuming you know the truth. It's the truth that you know that sets you free, not the fact that truth is out there.
You must know the truth, which means you want to find out what God thinks or says on the matter so you have the truth. And now that you know the truth, the truth can do its work to release you, me, us from illegitimate bondage. Juneteenth is now a national holiday. It's a national holiday. Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln January 1863. But the slaves weren't notified till June 19th, 1865. In other words, the truth established one year was never communicated and never known. So a whole race of people were held hostage to Jim Crow and segregation and a whole myriad of other slavery and all of the negative realities of that era who actually were legally free.
But the information hadn't been transferred. So they were functioning as slaves even though they were declared to be free because folk hid the truth. But once the truth hit in January 19th, we've been partying ever since because we'd heard the truth. And therefore, freedom could be exercised. One of the reasons we live as hostages is because we either don't know the truth or we do not embrace the truth. So we're not set free because verse 36 of John 8 says, he who the son sets free is free indeed. So he says, when you get the word, you're free.
And when you get the son, you're free indeed. So the word gives freedom, the son gives you indeed freedom. So what that means is the written word connects with the living word to release you, me, us from illegitimate bondage. But there must be abandonment to the truth. Now I warn you, your soul will throw a temper tantrum when it hears truth that it doesn't want to hear. Your soul will complain, I don't want that, I don't want that.
The soul has to be brought in line to the truth. The Bible calls it like a mirror, a mirror calls it, James calls the word a mirror. In biblical days, they didn't have glass mirrors because they didn't have glass with silver in it, which is where you get a mirror. So they didn't have that. So when you watch those Roman movies, if they're accurate, they don't show you glass mirrors because they didn't exist.
What they had was brass. And in order to see yourself, you had to keep moving the brass until it got the right reflection in order to see yourself. You had to manipulate it, okay, because they didn't have mirrors. See, you don't know what you look like. Let me ask you, look at your face. Nobody can hear just with their eyes, look at their face. But James says, when you look at the word of God as a person looking into a mirror, you will see reality.
Because a lot of us are not living in reality because we're not seeing straight. We think we look good when we're a hot mess. And then you hang around people lying to you, telling you you look good. Girl, you look so good today.
Then she go to her friend, that's the worst hairstyle I've ever seen in my life. We lie to each other. We don't deal with the truth. He says, but you manipulate the word until it shows you the reality of things.
And then you respond to that reality like you do to a mirror because when you go to the mirror, it shows you what you really look like. It reveals what needs to be corrected, changed, forgiven. So if you want the kingdom that is not of this world to join you in this world, then you and I and we must become people of the truth. We must hold to what God says or thinks or feels based on his word. And we must hold to it lovingly and kindly, but with clarity. We cannot have an uncertain sound when it comes to the truth. To confess when we've wondered from the truth, the Bible talks about people wondering from the truth so that there is a radical return to the truth so that his kingdom can be manifested in our last circumstances world and certainly in our ministry.
So we want all of you, all of me, us, to be people of the truth, that you are concerned what God's perspective is and you are seeking through the help of the Holy Spirit to adjust to that perspective because you, me, we, and us, in spite of our weaknesses and limitations, but our commitment is to be people of the truth because we want to see the benefits of the kingdom. And so I invite you, if you will remember it, it was the offer of the hippest trip in America, going across the tracks of your mind. 60, nonstop minutes, Soul Train. You remember Soul Train? And they had the board. They had the board where there was the name of a singer or a group or a song, but it was confusing because the letters were all mixed up. So they got two of the dancers to come over and straighten out the word.
When the dancers came over and started straightening out the word, so now you knew what the group was, the singer was, the song was, then they went back to their jam because they had gotten the word straight. There's a lot of confusion out here, but people of the truth get the word straight so they can go back to their kingdom jam. So they can represent the king and his kingdom because we are people of the truth. A powerful message today on the importance of aligning with God's truth rather than the false declarations of the world. We'll hear a final word from Dr. Evans in just a moment. First though, if you'd like to get the complete full-length version of today's message, it can be yours as a part of our current teaching series, Unleashing the Kingdom. As I mentioned earlier, we're offering all 12 messages in this powerful collection digitally or on CD paired with Tony's empowering paperback, One Kingdom Under God.
They're both yours as our thank you gift when you make a contribution to support the ministry of the alternative broadcast. Contact us at tonyevans.org to get the details and make the arrangements. Again, that's tonyevans.org, or call our 24-hour resource center at 1-800-800-3222 and let one of our team members help you.
That's 1-800-800-3222. Well, here's Dr. Evans with a final word for today. I don't want to conclude our program without giving our listeners a clear opportunity to become a Christian. A lot of people can listen to Christian messages but never have a personal relationship with the Christ who is the center of that message.
So let me explain it very simply. You and I are sinners. We can't save ourselves. So God came up with a plan to provide salvation for us for free. He sent Jesus Christ His Son to die on the cross as our substitute, validating His purpose by raising Him from the dead and so all you must do is come to Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and for the gift of eternal life and He will give it away. He will give it to you if you come to Jesus for it, believing Him to forgive your sins.
Do that right now. God has already made provision through the death and resurrection of Christ. You just have to accept that provision personally. When you do, you are born again.
You get to start life all over again. Why don't you respond right now by receiving Christ into your life? If you're ready to do that, take the time to visit tonyevans.org and click the link on the top of the home page that simply says Jesus. Tony has more information there about becoming a follower of Christ as well as some free resources to help in your journey. Meekness is a godly quality. Weakness isn't. Next time we're together, Dr. Evans will reveal ways we can connect with and use the strength God wants to give us. Be sure to join us for that.
