A Fresh Start (#969) Welcome! We’re going to have a fun time on a topic we touch every couple of years. And, always good to look into because we are always at different stages of our lives so it will hit us slightly differently. But this one is called A Fresh Start. So many people feel they are in a dead-end in life or their stuck somewhere and can’t move ahead and sometimes they feel it is because of something somebody else did, because of some circumstance; and those things can be very challenging to overcome, when you get used to your life going a certain way and all of the sudden there is some major change; you figure, how am I going to move forward. Well, God have lots of ways to move forward. And we’re going to read about a bunch of people who got a fresh start when it looked like they were totally going to be a mess. So let’s start in Deuteronomy chapter 23…
As taught by Bruce Mahone, 20190519 Verse Listing and Notes
Deuteronomy 23:5 God turned the curse (of Balaam) into a blessing, because He loved you
Judges 6:11-16 God called Gideon to deliver Israel
I Samuel 3:1-18 God called Samuel
I Kings 21:20-29 Ahab humbled himself
Isaiah 38:1-8 Hezekiah healed Teaching A Fresh Start (#969)
Ephesians 1 (#968) Good morning. We’re going to take a break on our series on where to focus,but you can focus on this information though. We’re going to read Ephesians today. Typically, I will teach a topic with verses from all over the Bible, but on occasions we just read one chapter at a time of a book in the Bible. So we’ll start on Ephesians now and see how far we get. I thought about Ephesians being such a great book declaring the great relationship we have with God and what we have through Christ and much of what is available in the mystery of the One Body. And it is just so different than you hear in modern society and in some of the history of the church. I recently ran across some TV documentary that talked about the crusades in the early Middle-Ages, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th century and how the church leaders at the time were promising eternal life if you went and fought in the Middle East. And I thought: how silly that is; we have eternal life though what Christ did. Whether you go fight in the Middle-East is a whole different story; it has nothing to do with your eternal life. And then there are other people you see on the news that say if you don’t live the way we live or follow the moral code we’ve decided, then you’re going to go the hell. And again, whether or not you follow someone else’s moral code or do what some group says, may or may not have a positive effect on your life, but it has nothing to do with your eternal life. Because that was paid for by Jesus Christ. So as we go through Ephesians, not only will we learn a great deal about what God has provided for us through the wonderful work of our Lord Jesus Christ, but it will be a great myth-busting situation; where so many of the common myths, the common perceptions, so much of Christianity, just are not based on the scriptures. They’re based on some group, or some minister trying to basically scare people into behaving the way he wants by making all kinds of vain threats: “do what I say or you’ll go to hell.” Or: “If you do what I say, then you won’t go to hell.” Or: “you’ll go to heaven.” And they have all of these threats and most of them are nothing but hot-air. Because the way we get eternal life, we know from Romans 10:9: ‘you confess with your mouth that Jesus is your lord and you believe that God raised him from the dead, and you have eternal life.’ Its that simple. It is like there is a train and I’m at the train station, in Washington and there is a train ready to go to New York, and they’re handing out free tickets that somebody decided to donate. Well, somebody else paid for the tickets; I simply have to accept the ticket and get on the train. Then, I’m going. Well, in the same way, because we have believed in Jesus Christ, we get the salvation he paid for with his blood. We simply accept it. And that is the only way to get eternal life. Picture there were this train going and they weren’t selling tickets, you couldn’t buy one; you either had to get a free one from this rich guy that bought a bunch of them and was handing them out or you couldn’t get on the train. Well, that is sort of the way we are: God is providing great eternal life to anybody who believes in Jesus Christ, and that is how you get it, you accept that or you don’t get it. It is very simple. So for people to put all these other conditions on what you might have to door not do in order to get eternal life is just hot air. And people have come to believe that if a big enough group or a big enough following believe it, it must be true. Well, it is not true if the scriptures don’t say it is. So let’s start in Ephesians chapter one…
As taught by Bruce Mahone, 20190505. All rights reserved. Verse Listing and Notes
Ephesians 1:1-23 Teaching Ephesians 1 (#968)