Gregory Dickow - Sit With Me - Part 2
Everything works on the axis of the goodness of God, the nature of God, that God is love. You know, if we really get a hold of that, that God is love, you know, one of my favorite scriptures, if you look real quick in Jeremiah. Thirty one, I have never quit loving you and I never will expect love, love and more love. Boy, we could just live right there for a while, expect love, love and more love. You know, when you expect something bad to happen, you kind of brace yourself.
If you think God might, you know, hit you with a curse or hit you with some wrath or hit you with some judgment or just let life happen to you because, you know, he wants to teach you a lesson, then you're always bracing yourself. It's like a kid that's been abused. It's like a child that's been abused as they grow up. They're constantly in that mode of protection and in that mode of they're ready. They're just kind of braced for the hit, the impact. Somebody's going to hit them. Somebody's going to mistreat them. Somebody's going to hurt them. But when you know that this is God's nature and this is God's character, then you can really wake up every day expecting love, love and more love. Because as far as God's concerned, he's never quit loving you and he never will. You get a hold of that man and peace will flow like a river. And it really puts you in a position to live with expectation of good all the time. Really will affect your emotions, too.
I don't have time to get into this today. But Paul said or David said in Psalm twenty seven, verse thirteen, I would have despaired unless I believed that I would see the goodness of God in the land of the living I would have. You see, he says, my emotions would be completely down in the negative. I would have despaired, been depressed, fainted, quit. All the negative words associated with this word comes from your expectation. Unless I believed, he said, unless I believed I would see the goodness of God in the land of the living. It's not when we get to heaven. It's in the land of the living. While we're here on this earth, of course you don't. Heaven is a whole another level. But here on this earth we can see the goodness of God. We can expect to see the goodness of God.
And that's really what sets our emotions in the right direction, is what your expectations are based on your view of God. If you think God is like we talked about the other day, schizophrenic, sometimes he loves you, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he's good towards you, sometimes he's not. Then that shapes your expectations towards uncertainty. And there's nothing really worse than uncertainty. You know, I'd rather have certainty about something bad than uncertainty about something that might be good or might be might not be. The good news is we can have certainty that God is good all the time and you can expect to see it today. Tomorrow, every day is goodness and mercy. Follow you all the days of your life. They follow you. They don't stop like God's goodness and mercy.
Don't stop at the door. If you go into the wrong door, you enter the wrong door. God's mercy and grace and goodness are not like, Oh, we can't go in there with the holy. God's goodness and mercy are going to go right in there with you. I'm not saying to go there. I'm just saying if you end up there, you end up in through the wrong door, you end up on the wrong path. God's goodness and mercy are like abandoning you. He said, I'll never leave you or forsake you. His goodness and mercy follow you all the days of your life, not just the good days, not just the days you're good, not just the days your faithful, not just the days that you're on it, not just the days you pray, not just the days you look good, not just the days. Your hair's right. Come on, God's goodness and mercy follow you all the days of your life. The good, the bad and the often ugly. Nobody here but for your neighbor.
All right. So Revelation 3:20, let's look there, Revelation 3:20. And I'm going to continue to talk about Jesus invitation. Sit with me. Sit with me. Sit with me. I want this to really sink into your ears and sink into your heart. Sit with me. Jesus invitation is to sit with him. It really it's the invitation of Grace, the invitation of grace. Grace invites us to sit. Grace invites us to sit. Grace doesn't invite us to struggle. Grace doesn't invite us to fight. Grace doesn't invite us to strive. The grace of God invites us to sit and to sit. We learned yesterday to sit means to accomplish. It is accomplished. It is finished. We'll talk about that. But in Revelation Chapter three and you know all too well as I do this great verse where Jesus says behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him and he with and he with me. I will dine with him.
Now, this is like think about this going to dinner with Jesus, not only going to dinner with him, but he's not. He's standing at the door. This is how beautiful a savior we have. He's standing at the door. He's knocking, he's not kicking it in. I'm coming in, whether you like it or not. That's how we are sometimes. But he's a gentleman. He's standing at the door and knocking. When you get a hold of what it means to sit with Jesus, he delivers you from all your fears. When you realize where you're seated, when you realize you have the best seat in the House, you're delivered from fear. It delivers you from inferiority, it delivers you from your insecurities, and it will deliver you from comparing yourself to other people and to deliver you from having to measure up and to deliver you from when people leave you out and people don't accept you or they don't pick you for some reason, they don't like you for some reason.
You know what? It really you've got to get to the point where you just don't care, don't care what people think about you. Not in a rude way, because we walk and kindness. We walk in love, we walk in forgiveness, but we don't walk in the fear of what people think. And when you're seated with Jesus, which you are, but when you have an awareness of it, then you no longer weigh. People say no longer weighs so much. You know, the word honor honoring God, the word honor actually comes from a word which means a heavy weight to weigh heavily. So when you honor God, it means it literally means that his words carry more weight in your life. It's like a scale you know, the old scales that go like this is that if you got God's if you like, if you have God's word here and you have people's opinions here, then to honor God means that his his word, his words tip the scale completely.
And you have you value what he says over what anybody else says. Where most people live is kind of like this is constantly going like this. Will people say this about me. But God said this about me and we're constantly in this battle. We have to be completely like this where it really is irrelevant what people say about me or what people think about me or what people write about me or what people's opinion of me is, because this is what God thinks about me. I have always loved you. I'm never going to stop loving you. Expect love more and more and more and more and more. Amen.
So Jesus invitation is to sit with him. And really, this is the cure. The seat where you've been given is the cure to emotional dysfunction. It's the cure to to your to what you grew up with the hang ups that you grew up with. Because I grew up with a ton of hang ups. I grew up with all I just told you, a few of them. But that that doesn't even scratch the surface of my addictions, my fears, my anxieties, my panic, my all my crap. And I tell you this is that. You if you want to have your dysfunctions rather than you having to cover them up all the time or or try to cope with them or try to just embrace them as your personality, what you need to do is you need to recognize where you're seated because it is the cure.
The equality with Jesus is the cure to all of your sense of inferiority, all of your fears, all the rejection that you've ever endured, all the self-hatred you've ever had for yourself, all the comparison trap that you've ever fallen into. This is the cure, is that you're seeded with Christ. You're not just seeded with you're not seeded in barely. You barely make it into heaven. You're seated with Christ in heavenly places. And and I want to get into more of that. How it affects our emotions tomorrow, perhaps. But where I want to go with this is last yesterday we talked about how being seeded really means it's accomplished, it's finished. And we talked about the cross and what it means that it's finished. The three things that it means when Jesus says it is finished and we know that it means the debt is paid. We know that it means in a criminal court that the sentence is served. And we know that from a military term, it means the battle has been won.
And therefore, we can sit, we can rest, we can have peace. We don't have to struggle. We have to struggle for God's approval. We don't have to struggle for God's love. We don't have to struggle for even to believe God for something doesn't need to be a struggle. The only struggle is the reasons in your mind that you're not believing like what is what are the mindsets that are in your head that are preventing you from believing God's promises? What is preventing you? Because the only thing that prevents most people from believing God's promises are the limitations they put on themselves. Like God needs me to check off a certain group of boxes so that I can then be worthy of the promise.
And really, there is nothing you can ever do to be worthy of God's promise. God, God, God's not watching over your behavior to see if he'll produce or or or if he'll fulfill his promise. The Bible says he's watching over his word. And he says to perform it, he's not watching your performance, he's watching his word and he will perform it. And so when we speak God's word, when we believe God's word, when we speak God's word, that's all God needs to work with. We just give him something to work with. We got to activate this stuff. We got to give Jesus did it all. But we got to we got to give him something to work with.
You know, when the Bible says in Hebrews Chapter 4:12 that the word of God is like a two edged sword, it's a double edged sword. It's literally translated as twice spoken, it's twice spoken. The word of God is twice spoken. That's what the scripture says. So the word of God is literally sharper than a two edged sword, twice spoken, two edged, two times spoken twice. It doesn't mean we have to keep saying God's word to get to work. What it means is, is that it's twice spoken once by God to make it living. The Bible says the word of God is living and active. So when it's spoken by God, that makes it living. When it's spoken by us, that's that makes it active. It is living and active. It's twice spoken once by God and then once by us.
What we're doing is when we speak God's word, we're simply coming into agreement with what God has already said. When we say we're not we're not making it happen. We're not we're not giving God an idea to bring something to pass. It was his idea. We're simply agreeing with it. When you said Jesus is Lord, when you confess Jesus is Lord believed in your heart, that God raised him from the dead, you were saved, but you didn't make Jesus Lord God made him Lord. The Father made him Lord in Christ. He already was Lord. You simply participated in the benefits of him being Lord when you came into agreement with what God had already done.
So that's where grace and faith worked together. God does it. And then we activate it by a Greek coming into agreement with him, which is what it really means. As soon as you are in agreement with God, you're in the spirit. When you're out of agreement with God, you're in the flesh. When you're in agreement with what God says, you're in the spirit. You're automatically in the spirit, which, by the way, is where all the blessings are. All the blessings of God are in the spirit realm. The Bible says all his blessings are spiritual. It doesn't mean that they're in heaven when we get there. That means they're in a spiritual realm. They're in the spirit. And when you're in the spirit, you have access to all those blessings. And being in the spirit simply means coming into agreement with Christ, coming into agreement with the cross, coming to agreement with grace, coming to agreement with what Jesus already did, coming to agreement with it is finished. That's walking in the spirit.
And that's when you're going to walk in the blessing. You have to strive for that struggle. For that, you just got to agree. That's what Holiness's to me Holiness's, to agree with God as soon as I agree with God now my my mind is in alignment with my spirit, is already in alignment with God. Now my mind comes into alignment with God. And guess what? My life, my behavior, my body begins to come into alignment to because you've got spirit and soul in agreement with God. You've got the three strand chord right there. You've got the spirit soul and you got the Holy Spirit all in agreement. Your body. He's got no choice now, man. Your body is going to submit your your money is going to submit your life is going to submit every air. Your emotions are going to submit, your relationships are going everything's going to submit from the power of this holy agreement between your soul and your spirit, your spirits already and agreeing with God. That's why we renew our mind, to get our soul in alignment with our spirit, which is already in complete agreement with Jesus. Amen.
All right. So let's keep going here. Romans ten seventeen, verse seventeen. So faith comes from hearing and hearing from the word of God. Now, the King James version is the only version and a few others that are mostly not understood or most nobody reads where it is, uses the word of God hear the actual word is the word of Christ. It's the word of Christ. We cannot get this wrong here today. Today, we're going out of here understanding what the word of Christ is and where faith comes from. Faith doesn't come just because you've quoted a bunch of scriptures or, you know, a bunch of Bible verses. This is specifically talking faith grows from faith, emerges from faith, is born from the word of Christ, from the word of what Jesus has done for you.
My God, if you can get all of this. That's why Paul said determined no, nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified this word of the cross, this word of Christ, this word of the gospel, this word of the gospel of God's grace. This word is what brings peace. This word is what brings faith and causes faith to arise. As soon as I put my faith in the finished work of Jesus, that's when healing flows. As soon as I put my faith in the finished work of Jesus, that's when salvation flows. As soon as I put my faith in the finished work of Jesus, prosperity flows. As soon as I put my faith in the finished work of Jesus, in Christ, in Christ, every other translation.
In fact, the Greek translation makes it most clear where it says. Relatos Cristo the word of Christ, the revelation of the grace that comes through the cross. That's what produces faith. That's where faith comes from and when it comes from just what Jesus said. Remember, John 5:39, you study the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and yet they testify of me. So all the scripture is points to Jesus so that all of our faith is in him. I think sometimes we we just start factoring in all of our mistakes, our lack of prayer. We didn't read enough. We didn't do enough. Hey, Galatians 3:5 says he, that works miracles among you. Does he do it by the works of the law or by hearing with faith?
And again, in the context, it's not just hearing a bunch of scriptures. Look, please don't take this wrong. I'm not saying that scripture all scriptures profitable, all scriptures inspired by God, profitable for teaching, correction, reproof, proof, instruction, righteousness that we may be equipped for every good work. I'm not disputing that. But the faith that you need in your life and your everyday life, the faith that you need to have miracles happen, the faith that you need to have your family restored, the faith that you need to have healing for the faith that you need to to walk in the will of God in the purpose of God. The faith that you need is emerges and comes from springs forth from the word of Christ, which is Jesus Christ and him crucified, and therefore it is finished and all grace and all things are available to you in him.
And that's what causes miracles to be worked among us. He works miracles among us, not by the works of the law, not by any works, but by hearing with faith. And where does faith come from? It comes from the word of Christ, the word about Jesus, the word about what he did for us. I don't think we get this all the way. Sometimes I don't want to just say it once and have it just go through and you got to get a hold of this. It's so we get we get in a situation. We're like, OK, I got a cold, I need some healing. So I got to get all of the healing scriptures and the healing scriptures are awesome. And you should quote the healing scriptures because they're beautiful verses and they're powerful promises.
And there's something you can always stand on. But the access to that promise, what activates that promise is not just you mouthing it and just you just you reading it. What activates is that your faith is in one thing, not even you saying it. Your faith is in that it is done because of the cross. And I can't tell you how many people they lose, they miss out on their healing or they it goes back to the way it was, or they miss out on something God has for them simply because they think what qualifies them to receive is that they make sure that they have crossed all the T's, dotted all the I's, check the boxes and there's one box to check folks, or there's one really t to cross. And it is the cross and it is him and him alone. And I am concerned that because I came out of legalism and I know what it's like to be in bondage and this is Live Your Life crossing every t's and dotting all your eyes and not living in joy and not living in peace and not really walking in healing miracles because we're thinking that we have to qualify or someone has to qualify.
And yet every person that Jesus healed, every one of them were sinners. This is Grace. The struggle is over immediately. I want you to stop thinking the struggle will soon be over. It's over. It's over. He's in the boat. He's with you. It's over. You've arrived. You've arrived. You've arrived, you've arrived. And our whole study this whole week and all our lives now, this whole study is what does it mean that we've arrived, not how do we arrive. It's we've arrived now. It's let's discover in this in the scriptures. What does that look like? What does that look like? Mirror mirror in the book. Tell me how I really look. That's your struggle is over. You've arrived. Amen!