The Line Upon Line Podcast

In this case God works through a helpless woman stuck in a loop of misery. He shows us how He prevails through her by humbling her greatly, and then giving the humble grace. Are you interested in this?

“Ready” means that you are found the way Jesus wants, and that you affect others around you as well.

He created the heavens and the earth to judge and destroy ungodly men.

Jesus has a simpler detector: look at their lives. If they are right, they will live right. If they are wrong, they will live wrong.

Peter wants his readers to be have abundant entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If you accept a counterfeit salvation you are in the greatest danger. You trust that you are being saved but in reality you are being deceived. A counterfeit salvation will destroy you forever.

But is this kingdom true? Or is it a fairytale? Peter testifies: I saw Jesus, I heard God, Jesus confirms the prophetic word to be more sure.

He’s making an effort so we make an effort. He’s giving us reasons to be excited about entering the eternal kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ right now.

Here’s something liberating, exciting, relieving: being a Christian does not depend on your ability, it depends on Jesus Himself living in you.

Christianity is God working in us with divine power to do what we don’t expect.

Peter is concerned that his readers be able to remember—to call to mind what they already know—so that they keep growing, they stay protected from lies, and be ready when Jesus returns.

In the real world real stuff happens. You’re lost and you run out of food and water. You’re a prisoner in a death camp. You’re in hundred-foot waves on a God- forsaken ocean. You face real problems and you need real solutions. Can God deal with real life?

The devil is going to do his very best to consume you. But you can resist the devil, because God has everything you need, that is, God Himself.

Jesus tells us that all authority is given to him. Daniel 7:9-14 is another example how God’s word is consistent and true foreseeing Jesus’ promise more than 500 years before it was spoken by Him, seamlessly running from the old to the New Testament.

Because we believe this we want to live in a way that pleases God,to be made like the Lord Jesus Christ so that we live like Him. It means submitting ourselves completely to His grace, His favour, His kindness to us in Jesus.

Now we look at how a pastor feeds people and how he watches out for them.

God has help for you, a person who takes Jesus extremely seriously, so as you watch him, you take Jesus seriously, and you inherit eternal life. God gives him to you as a gift. So you need him. He is a pastor.

Why follow Jesus? Because your Creator loves you.

You need church because it’s the end of all things, and you need to prepare for that.

How you become strong and secure is to put on Christ. Put on His death, put on His resurrection.

Jesus is the example of how to get safely through this fallen, wicked world. That is, it’s all humility now, glory comes later.

There’s a simple answer that we will look at today: it’s not possible to have a nice quiet life in this world. The better question is, Where do we want to be in 10,000 years?

In the beginning God made marriage to reveal Himself in this world. You have three people all submitting to one another and loving one another. That is, a husband, a wife, and God. Three in one. That is who God is.

Life is not about pleasing me but God. If God is happy then I am happy.

Peter commands us to silence the ignorance of foolish men. Not by clever arguments. Not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of God.

But you don’t fight in a fleshly way, you fight in a spiritual way.

So today we look at the supreme value of Christ, and at those who have got Christ totally wrong.

We began our lives in Christ by receiving the word of God. And we will grow and be perfected only by continuing to receive the word of God.

I had a neighbour that had just this problem with Jesus. We would have good conversations about what was happening in the world, particularly with the lockdown. Then it would always come around to Jesus. He would say, "Why Jesus? Why can't people love one another without Jesus.?" can't there be some other way? Can't there be some other philosophy, some other political way, some other religion? Why does it have to be Jesus?

Peter commands us to hope, to be holy, to fear God, in order to lay hold of life eternal.

By the evening time that had all turned around. In one day they became excited about the future. They had a clearer understanding. They saw everything that happened in the proper context in order to rightly understand what was going on. They had hope.

Because God is powerful, compassionate, and detail- oriented, He also cares about working out His salvation in our lives.

We think following Jesus is something that we do. Peter says we follow Jesus because of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

To do that I want to start in Proverbs 24:10

Here in Psalm 104 the psalmist meditates on Scripture and what he sees in nature, and he increases his grasp of God’s glory, wisdom, power, and judgment. The meaning is that you live in God’s world.

As disciples we are learning skills. The biggest skill we are learning is how to live for Jesus. That will lead us to living radically, because Jesus is not like us. He’s way beyond us, and in comparison we are backwards to Him.

We have a real problem in evaluating things today because we have such different points of view. The rich and powerful and maybe even some Christians would say that James is crazy. He’s got his values all mixed up.

And you know that discipline is painful at the start, and in the end it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.

What doesn’t help is that we are convinced we know where it is, and we are wrong. Instead what we pursue makes conflict, while we sincerely work for happiness.

We are going to look at a day in the life of a man who lived to see the fulfilment of God’s promise. God said to him, “Do you see? There is the fulfilment.”

Our hearts are desperately wicked and it comes out in the way we talk, to family, to friends, to people, to ourselves. If you don’t believe that, today James will make you a believer.

The faith that saves is not easy because it makes demands on your life to respond in a visible, useful, costly way. Anything less is invisible, powerless, insensitive, dead.

In contrast to a world full of treacherous dealers, Jesus makes the laws, and He keeps them, faithfully. Treacherous dealing brings death. Only Jesus gives life.

Church is different from any human institution on the planet, or should be. It is a direct, visible, testimony to the existence of God.

Just as we started with Jesus, we want to keep on going until we are perfected and glorified. We want to declare war on our natural laziness.

Rob Dingman teaches through James 1:12-21