The 4 Rivers Fellowship's Podcast
Worship and Message 08/11/2024
[inaudible] No, it's too curvy to go fast. [inaudible] It's a couple of yards. [inaudible] [inaudible] [music] You give life, you are love, you bring light to the darkness, you give hope, you restore every heart that is broken. [inaudible] Great are you, Lord. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise to you only. Great are you, Lord. Great are you, Lord. You give life, you are love, you bring light to the darkness, you give hope, you restore every heart that is broken. Great are you, Lord. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. In our lungs. So we pour out our praise to you only. Great are you, Lord. Great are you, Lord. All the earth will shout your praise. Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Great are you, Lord. All the earth will shout your praise. Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Great are you, Lord. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. Pour out our praise. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise to you only. Great are you, Lord. Great are you, Lord. Great are you, Lord. Great are you, Lord. We pour out our praise to you only. Before I spoke a word, you were singing over me. You've been so, so good to me. Before I took a breath, you breathed your life in me. You've been so, so kind to me. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the 99. I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it. Still you give yourself away. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. When I was a fool, your love fought for me. You've been so, so good to me. When I felt no worth, you paid it all for me. You've been so, so kind to me. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the 99. I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it. Still you give yourself away. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Before I spoke a word, you were singing over me. You've been so, so good to me. Before I took a breath, you breathed your life in me. You've been so, so kind to me. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the 99. I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it. Still you give yourself away. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. There's no shadow you won't light up, now you won't climb up, coming after me. There's no wall you won't kick down, lie out dead and coming after me. There's no shadow you won't light up, now you won't climb up, coming after me. There's no wall you won't kick down, lie out dead and coming after me. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the 99. I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it. Still you give yourself away. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the 99. I couldn't earn it, I don't deserve it. Still you give yourself away. Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. I can't earn it, but I can't earn it. I can't earn it, but I can't earn it. I breathe you in, I breathe you in. Come fill me Holy Spirit with your mighty rushing wind. I breathe you in, I breathe you in. When you come, all of a sudden, I am strong again. I breathe you in, I breathe you in. Come fill me Holy Spirit with your mighty rushing wind. I breathe you in, I breathe you in. When you come, all of a sudden, I am strong again. Breathe on me, oh, breath of God. Breathe on me, oh, breath of God. Brush of me now 'til my soul overflows. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. I feel it coming all of a sudden, oh, it's gonna come all of a sudden, oh. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. I feel it coming, oh, I won't see when, and you won't see rain. But the drought will end, everything will change all of a sudden. I feel it coming all of a sudden. He will come when you call his name. The Holy One will renew your strength all of a sudden. I feel it coming all of a sudden. No, you won't see when, and you won't see rain. But the drought will end, everything will change all of a sudden. I feel it coming all of a sudden. He will come when you call his name. The Holy One will renew your strength all of a sudden. I feel it coming all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. I feel it coming all of a sudden, oh. It's gonna come all of a sudden, oh. It's gonna come all of a sudden. It's gonna come all of a sudden. I feel it coming. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Holy Spirit, come breathe on us down. Come feel us. Bring rain to those dry places. We proclaim the drought has ended. ♪ We proclaim your suddenly right now, all of a sudden. ♪ We breathe in your strength. We breathe in your power. We breathe in your presence. We breathe in your love, saturate us in our life, your life. It's no longer us, but Christ is living in us. No longer is it us that is living, but Christ is living in us. It's no longer us, but it's you working in us and through us. We pray your good works. ♪ We call on your name. We call on your name. Not by our strength, not by our mind, but by your strength and for your will, for your glory. For your kingdom come. Your will be done. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is with you and the skies. ♪ We breathe you in. It is your breath. It is your breath in our lungs. It is your life living in us and through us. We are completely and utterly dependent upon you. We are the living sacrifice. Our eyes fix and focus on you as you are the author and the perfecter of our faith. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It is our hearts cry to him, but that is also him speaking that over us. It goes both ways. So this time just hearing him speaking that over you. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Thank you for your love towards us, Father. Thank you for your unending reckless love towards us. That you gave your only son. And that truly if we were the only ones on this earth you would have done it for us. Thank you Jesus for your unending love. That you took it upon yourself to die for us so that we could have life and life to the full. ♪ And thank you that you've put your life in us through Holy Spirit. ♪ Thank you that you're the breath in our lungs. That you're the lifeblood that flows through our heart that keeps it beating. ♪ That you bring life to every cell in our bodies and keep it just right. ♪ There's none above you. There's none higher. ♪ You're the beginning and the end. ♪ Thank you that we get to be a part of your kingdom, your world. Thank you for your love. We love you. We love you. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Periodically, but who is like you, O Lord? There is none like you. ♪ The unique and heavens in the earth is the fact that he is the Son of God and he's the Son of Man. Very unique. No one like that. It's none like you, O Lord. And none like you. He's gone. ♪ This week I've been hearing this thought. ♪ So we'll see where it takes us this morning. But the kingdom of God is what? The one I'm hearing is, I don't remember if it's a man or a woman but lost a coin, swept the house, to find the one. And we're talking about the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of man, but the kingdom of God is like, right? Isn't that what it says? The kingdom of God is like into a man or woman who did such and such. There's one man who had found a piece of land and he went and sold everything he had to get that. And the idea of it is we should do whatever it takes to make sure that we are in the kingdom of heaven. Or the kingdom of God. The whole purpose of Jesus coming is that God would make a way for us to come back to him. I was, again, I was talking the other day and I said something about something she had done. And I said, there'll be a reward in heaven for that. And she said, good, it'll just give me more to lay at his feet. And it melted me to lay at his feet. It'll give me more to lay at his feet. And I hadn't, you know, it kind of washed over me pretty strong when you think about it. And that's the idea. That's what we were singing about this morning. By the way, thank you. I bring you in, praise God. I want to come into his presence. We're made in the image of God, and yet there's none like him. One of my favorite scriptures, it's a foolish. It's not a foolish scripture because it's scripture, but it might appear foolish to somebody. He's in the Proverbs. I think it's Proverbs 23. It says, slap a foolish man that he may be corrected. And chastise, I can't remember the rest of it, but the first portion is the portion that you used to stick with me. And there's a story behind it, but I won't bother sharing it right now. And I thought, Lord, how does that balance out with your word? How can you admonish somebody to slap somebody for being foolish and still maintain that you are a God of love and a God of? He said, you're consideration of what I mean by slapping somebody is completely different than mine. The thing I do, this is what I heard the Lord say, everything I do, I do to bring you closer to me. I don't do it. The Lord's anger is a different thing than our anger. It is not the same. Our anger comes out of selfishness, personal harm and hurt, past hurts that haven't been healed and then rise up inside of us and we want to defend ourselves against something and anger comes out of us in the midst of it. That's where our anger comes from. God's anger is in that way. God gets angry when His children are hurt. Now, we can kind of understand that if we're parents, but it's not to the same degree. God exists, and I know this sounds almost narcissistic, but it's not. God exists solely to bring us closer to Him so He can have relationship with us because that was His desire. Now, there's other reasons for His existence, but we don't know what they are yet. We will someday let us make men in our image. You know, we have the point I'm trying to make is we have so, and there's no other word I can use for it, so I'm just going to use this word, it's not meant as a swear word, but we have so bastardized the scripture and the gospel of God of Christ that most people have no concept of who it is they serve or why they're serving Him. And until you can understand the sacrifice that He made for us and does so continually, you won't get it. One of the biggest, and I'm going to take some slack for this probably, but I'm going to say it anyway, one of the biggest errors that the modern church made was back in the 1800s when they adopted a translation loosely said of a scripture called the Scofield Bible. The Scofield Bible brought a broader understanding of pre-trib rapture. I'm not here to take a stance, but I am here to say this. There's no other place in the scripture that says we're not going to go through things. That somehow we're going to be miraculously saved from everything. And the only place that that Bible defines that happening is in the final tribulation. I'm not going to go into revelation today, I'm not going to go into any kind of tribulation, teaching, etc. What I'm saying is the love of God from that point on was mistaught by that scripture, by that understanding of scripture. God doesn't show us He loves us by letting us skip things. He shows us He loves us by what we go through. When we go through something, one of the worst times in my entire life, and I've shared this before, but one of the worst times in my entire life, in a matter of a year because of actions taken by my former spouse. And I thank God she's doing real well now, but she wasn't then. She lost her children to social services. I had to start fighting for them. She had left me because of mental illness. My father had passed away, and then at the tail end of that year my grandmother passed away. And all in consecutive order, and then there was other things that happened in regards to like car accidents. And it all happened in a year to 18 months. And I thought my world was coming unhinged, but in that time I was never closer to the Lord, and it wasn't because I pressed into Him, it's because He pressed into me. And there are, again, I'm not teaching on end times or on the stance of pre-post or mid-trib or anything like that. That's not what I'm saying, so please don't take it that way. I'm just saying that at that point what happened was there were individuals that were taught this, and we've been taught over many, many years. But what it did is it changed the way we think about the Gospel of Christ. As though somehow He's here to serve us. When in fact we're here to serve Him. We're here to learn from Him. We're here to be loved by Him, and when we truncate things like experiences in our life that would cause us pain or discomfort, or we limit the Kingdom. And we don't get the fullness, we stay juvenile, we stay babes in Christ. We don't take on the things that God would have us take on. And that is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is a miraculous thing. The Kingdom of God is a miraculous place. It's a place for love and expansion, creation, manifestation, joy. It's a place of miracles unabounding. It's a place where you can walk up to something that's died and say, in the name of Jesus, get up. And not even give it a second thought. And when that happens to you, it blows you away. It changes everything inside of you. You grow to such a degree. But at the same time when you lose somebody, I remember losing my father. He was 53 years old. I'm now 58, 59, sorry. He was 53 years old when he passed away. And I remember sitting in the hospital with him and I looked at him and I said, "Dad, if you want to go home, I understand. But if you want to stay, I'll fight with you to the very end, whatever you want to do." And he looked at me with a strange look in his eye and just three days before he had accepted Christ. It was one of the hardest things ever had to do was to ask my dad because he had rejected him at every single turn before that. And I was so afraid that he wasn't going to accept him. And he looked at me in that moment and he said, "I want to go home." And he had a big smell on his face. And I said, "Okay, all right, we're going to miss you." And for three days, I would come in and read scripture to him. That's all he wanted. He just wanted to hear scripture. He wanted to know about where he was going. And the joy that came over him was beyond everything and anything. But he went through. And then we lost him and we went through what we had to go through. And in that, God got closer to us each and every moment of every day. The Kingdom of God is knowing that he is with us no matter what. The Kingdom of God is knowing that when our theology and theosophy is challenged, God is still there. We can put all that garbage aside. The Kingdom of God is not seeking the hidden things, the secret things, the things that are yet known, unknown. It's seeking his face in the midst of whatever we're going through, good or bad. And I think we forget that. We forget. When you're driving down the road and you see this glorious sunset, and you go, "Wow, God, you're so good." But do you ever stop and actually, instead of just saying the words, revel in the beauty that's in front of you? Truly absorb it for what it is. Realize who it is that made that sunset. Know that you're so special to him that he made it that day. And you're seeing it in a way that nobody else could run. He could be driving in a car right beside me. And we both see this sunset, but he would see it differently than I would. Because there's things in his life that he'd catch different colors, he'd catch different manifestations. It's the same sunset. But God made it specifically for each of us knowing he was going to be in the left lane and I was going to be in the right. That's life. That's the kingdom of God. That's the knowing and the serenity, the peace, and in all of that, that's the power of the kingdom. [silence] Talking about the scope field. It really doesn't matter which book you use. Most things we've got are wrong interpretation. Or we just haven't got the right one yet. But one of the scriptures I've reminded of and everybody likes to use is why I submit to your husband's. And if you study that out, the true meaning there, or the closer meaning is... I've had it all my time here a minute. I've lost it. [silence] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] I'll get you this meaning in a minute. Anytime you see someone in a Bible study group, if you don't have the Greek or Hebrewic understanding of that scripture in front of you, you're susceptible to getting it wrong. What do you think? It just is the way it comes out. I know that a good example of that is when Jesus was standing on the steps of the temple. He came in to preach at the steps of the temple and he was admonishing everybody to remember the works of David and how David had conquered Goliath. And what people don't know is that, and this is in Josephus' writings, is that on the steps of the temple was actually a casket, a large stone casket at the front of the temple on the one side. And it would have been the same side that Jesus was standing on as reference to in the scriptures. That casket, once a year, the lid was taken off of it and people go by and they could look inside this casket to see the bones of the 13-foot tall giant Goliath that David had slung. So when you take the admonishment of Christ, you know, to remember that the power of God is in you, that you have the authority over the giants in the land, that you have all the meanings that he was saying, well, it takes on a whole new meaning when you consider that as they were doing that, they were looking at the bones of a giant. It's just a practical little thing like that. I was watching, I think everybody here has watched it, the chosen, and it's series season four. And I was watching as they were going through the seven days of Pentecost, and Jesus was telling stories that traditionally would have been told by the Jewish people. And I'd heard that a hundred times, literally. I bet you I've heard it at least a hundred times that they would do that. Every night they would get together, they would tell a story, there would be a meal, there would be a celebration, there would be all these things. But when you actually watched it being done on this TV show and saw the reality of what was being carried across the power and the authority of it, completely changes what we know about that celebration, you know? So the scripture I was talking about, it actually means, or a better translation of it would be, why is it being tenderly devoted to your husbands? That's a big difference between being tenderly devoted and why I submit to your husbands. Big difference. But again, contextually, back in the day, submission meant to be tenderly devoted. Today submission means something completely different, so we're looking at it through different classes and a different interpretation. Well, the world has a view of, even you're talking about, tread and all that, in the end times. You get more, the TV has taught us more about it than we've gotten from our own understanding. If you hear something, and you don't ask God what He means, then you might not know exactly what was said. I mean, you'd know it, and you'd think you would know it. But you may not give what God meant for you to get. I can remember asking God where I was when I had that bad four-wheeler wreck, and it was two or three days after the fact that, you know, and I said, "God, I was interested. I wanted to know where I was during that period of time." It was just for a short period that I was out just a second or less. But I was knocked out. I did see the hands of God, and when I asked Him where I was, He told me that I was in the balance. Well, to me, that understanding was between heaven and hell. I was in the balance. That would be my normal thinking. But when I went and looked it up, it said one who has two years. But when I backed that up on you, I had on the way into town. I was praying, and I said, "Lord, when I was born, I had two years." And if it's possible, I'd like to have two years. For those who don't know, Jack lost his ear in that quad accident. I was just hanging by that right there. And I got two years. So in the balance, God gave me what I desired. And as you do, I had gone through some tribulation. I can tell you for sure. But probably if I had listened to God, all the doors for me, I was going to go hunting in Colorado. My oldest brother was going with me. And he had to back out. And I was determined to go. I was going to go by myself and did. I was getting ready to do that when I had the four-wheeler and that's happened. That stopped me. I don't know what it stopped me from. But I'm positive that God's hand was bonding and all of that. And seeing in that short period of time, like I said, it was just an instant of time, second, that I was knocked out. And I saw the hands of God. And I saw him push me back into reality. And I heard his voice say, "You are fearfully and wonderfully made." He put that ear back on. That's how I have an ear. I have two ears, one who has two ears in the balance. So be careful in how you handle the scripture. Don't make it mean what you want it to mean. Make it mean what God intended for it to mean. If we do that, or if you'll ask, I can assure you of that. And that is paramount. I come from a Lutheran background. There's a number of things that I believe to be true my whole life. But I found out it was just because my Lutheran background, they weren't actually true. Everybody here could say the same thing about our upbringing, our background, and the opposite is also true. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Because I tell you what, I'm not a denominational individual at all. But the more I delve into traditional Catholicism, the more I realize that although it's become dogmatic and it's become ritualistic, there was a lot of truth in a lot of things they did. A lot of the things that the priests do is scripturally based. It's just been turned into something dogmatic. So you're absolutely right to be able to just take and set aside what we know or we believe to be true and be able to say father. What really is this every time? It can't be, like you say, dogmatic. You cannot throw a blanket over everybody or everything that is said. You have to know what it meant to you at the time it was given to you. I grew up with a family, the only Catholic family in west of McAllister, as far as I know. And I was around our payload at 15 kids. The two girls at my age, they live up around Muskogee now, but both of them are Spirit Field. Spirit Field Catholic. Imagine that. So, anyway... Spirit Field Catholic. Spirit Field Catholic. Spirit Field Catholic. Spirit Field Catholic. Spirit Field Catholic. And how big talk is this man? Soak into the end. Spirit Field Catholic. See, I believe, I believe, I believe. Spirit Field Catholic. Oh, whom I have believed, amper sweet is amper sweet. Keep that which I commit. Whatever we'll give to God. Amen. Whatever we'll give. Spirit Field Catholic. [BLANK_AUDIO]